Pramas on the OGL

[catsclaw]

In the 1970s-1990s, you got designers who first worked on other games. The OGL can't be proven to directly be the reason for some of these guys being hired. The first quality is being a good designer and having talent. The OGL is irrelevant in this case. If there wasn't an OGL, they would have been hired based on either their work in Dragon or Dungeon or else from other game design work.

I don't necessarily disagree. But this misses a broader point: if I'm a freelancer trying to decide if I should write another pitch for Dragon magazine or maybe start applying to law school, the less opportunities there are to freelance the more likely I am to give up on the industry. WotC probably had its pick of most of the highly talented game designers in the industry. They didn't have their pick of the highly talented game designers who left the industry.

You also can't discount the benefits of training. Mike Mearls would have been a great designer either way, but you can't argue a Mike Mearls with 5 years of industry experience isn't better than a Mike Mearls without that experience. Do you really think the market for third party freelancers would have been as large as it was without the OGL?

 

[SSquirrel]

The fact that they're considering dropping the OGL proves it wasn't as successful as you're suggesting, of else they wouldn't be considering it.

Speculation. "Vetting the GSL" sounds much more like shooting a few last scenarios at what they had written to make sure it was bulletproof than doing a 180 and deciding not to release it.

Go to the average gaming shop in the average middle American town, and tell me whether its easier to find a game for Dungeons and Dragons, or any other specific game (gurps, World of Darkness, etc). After so many years of successful branding, Dungeons and Dragons continues to do well partially on name alone. A reasonably well mannered player will always be able to find a Dungeons and Dragons campaign to play in, so Dungeons and Dragon campaigns can always be found relatively easily.

That had absolutely nothing to do with the quote of mine. I've never said it isn't easier to find a game of D&D. I said that people will be less likely to buy books that have crappy development and/or don't fit their gaming niche. I'm willing to bet that the niche books like Sandstorm has a lot less sales than a book like Complete Arcane. Sword and Fist wasn't the most balanced book ever and it had large sales, but it was also very close to launch. I'd be very curious to see sales figures on more recent products that are typically viewed as poorly designed.

EDIT:from dictionary.com, definition 3 is the one we're interested in

vet1 /vɛt/ Pronunciation Key - noun, verb, vet·ted, vet·ting. Informal.
–noun
1. veterinarian.
–verb (used with object)
2. to examine or treat in one's capacity as a veterinarian or as a doctor.
3. to appraise, verify, or check for accuracy, authenticity, validity, etc.: An expert vetted the manuscript before publication.
–verb (used without object)
4. to work as a veterinarian.

 

[Lizard]

Speculation. "Vetting the GSL" sounds much more like shooting a few last scenarios at what they had written to make sure it was bulletproof than doing a 180 and deciding not to release it.
.

Well, the exact quote was "vetting our policy on open gaming", which is a bit of a different thing. Perhaps she misspoke, but given an opportunity to clarify that, the only comment was "no comment". Simply saying "We are committed to open gaming; we're reviewing the GSL" doesn't sound like an NDA-breaker and would put a lot of people's minds at ease.

 

[Oldtimer]

I have a lot of criticism towards the attitude than anybody who disagrees with ones viewpoint is "out of touch". I heard a lot of that during the dot-com boom and their statements later turned out to be fatal.

I do agree that some blue-eyed analysts during the dot.com bubble were making inane statements that later lead to disaster for their companies. On the other hand, some companies did grow huge despite going against "conventional wisdom".

And there are many examples of people of power being out of touch with new factors in the market place. In my country, our minister of communication was quoted in 1996 saying that "Internet surfing is a fad, soon to go away". There was also this huge and dominating manufacturer of office machines (eg electro-mechanical calculators and typewriters) in this country that regarded the early electronical calculators of the seventies as "toys not worthy of their attention". They were not around ten years later.

So, not every new thing is just the ramblings of madmen. The trick, is of course, knowing what is useful and how. Sometimes company leaders play it safe and stick with the conventional... and sometimes that is bad.

 

[Delta]

You're suggesting that they're going to make a very obviously recognizable mistake, and lose large sums of money.

I'm saying "its probably more complicated then you realize".

Am I wrong?

Is WotC run by idiots?

You keep saying this and you keep ignoring the far more likely scenario. It's not a very obvious recognizable mistake. Open network effects are admittedly hard to grok. It takes an unusually smart executive to take advantage of them. In fact, open network effects are the opposite of how most executives are trained in top-down control structures. You don't get to run a control group experiment with open vs. non-open product in the same time frame.

Repeat after me: Making a mistake doesn't make you an idiot. Corporate executives are just people, they're not superhumans. You've admitted that you've never worked with executives in a big company, and this is putting really huge blinders on your assumptions here.

Executives make mistakes, too. Making a mistake does not make you an idiot.

 

[xechnao]

Open network effects are admittedly hard to grok. It takes an unusually smart executive to take advantage of them.

And it takes even more than an unusually smart executive for them to be the best choice.

 

[Henry]

And it takes even more than an unusually smart executive for them to be the best choice.

Wuld you argue that they were a bad choice for the Software arena? Has Open Sourcing hurt software producers? Or has it rather allowed them to not only survive but prosper in the same arena as the market leader (namely, Microsoft)?

 

[xechnao]

Wuld you argue that they were a bad choice for the Software arena? Has Open Sourcing hurt software producers? Or has it rather allowed them to not only survive but prosper in the same arena as the market leader (namely, Microsoft)?

No, I wouldn't because I don't clearly understand or know how this arena works. But it still seems to me that Microsoft is in a better position regarding profits. But I still don't clearly know how say Open Office is profitable to Sun. Perhaps by allowing Sun to use it as a train to reach other stations of the market? Software and technology development and brand value are much more complicated than what we are discussing here.

 

[catsclaw]

But it still seems to me that Microsoft is in a better position regarding profits.

That's completely irrelevant. It's utterly the wrong question to ask. The relevant questions, broadly speaking, are:

1) Would Sun be making more money if they didn't support open standards?
2) Would Microsoft be making less money if they did?

It seems reasonably clear that Sun thinks the answer to the first question is "no", while Microsoft thinks the answer to the second question is "yes". And there's an argument to be made that that's right for both of them--since Microsoft is in a dominant position in the market it can still try and muscle other companies to support it, while Sun relies on interoperability to move product. But even Microsoft felt threatened enough by Java and HTML to support them (and subsequently try to ruin the standard). They clearly feel there are some standards it would be a disaster to ignore.

Software and technology development and brand value are much more complicated than what we are discussing here.

Maybe you better explain what you think we're discussing here. Because to me, it seems like we're absolutely talking about network effects and Metcalfe's Law and inter-platform compatibility and brand dilution and switching barriers. Really, the only difference between the d20 system and a programming language is the hardware they're designed to run on.

 

[xechnao]

That's completely irrelevant. It's utterly the wrong question to ask. The relevant questions, broadly speaking, are:

1) Would Sun be making more money if they didn't support open standards?
2) Would Microsoft be making less money if they did?

It seems reasonably clear that Sun thinks the answer to the first question is "no", while Microsoft thinks the answer to the second question is "yes". And there's an argument to be made that that's right for both of them--since Microsoft is in a dominant position in the market it can still try and muscle other companies to support it, while Sun relies on interoperability to move product. But even Microsoft felt threatened enough by Java and HTML to support them (and subsequently try to ruin the standard). They clearly feel there are some standards it would be a disaster to ignore.

Maybe you better explain what you think we're discussing here. Because to me, it seems like we're absolutely talking about network effects and Metcalfe's Law and inter-platform compatibility and brand dilution and switching barriers. Really, the only difference between the d20 system and a programming language is the hardware they're designed to run on.

Well, it is as relevant as trying to have a discussion more about practical than theoretical. As you are saying right now Microsoft is the market leader and is not following an open policy -because right now, in the actual conditions, it is serving her better for her actual profits. Wotc has followed an open policy and now it seems it won't.
There is no definite answer to your theoretic questions as policy is relevant to conditions. And what I was saying above is that we should/could not discuss here the actual conditions of the software and technology affairs.