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<blockquote data-quote="Delta" data-source="post: 4138857" data-attributes="member: 40269">Of course, Chris has his own religious axe to grind, too. In the past he's blogged about being aggrieved that the d20 System boom pushed some of his alternative game systems off store shelves.I'd be happy to concede most of the initial points, I don't think he's picked strong arguments to respond to, except for the last one. The Adkinson/Dancey philosophy that generated OGL was entirely about keeping gamers within the system, so new playgroups could form &amp; reform easily (plus watching all the network effects of GPL; plus, as I hear the rumor, explicitly preventing WOTC from closing it back up in the future). But there's a big logical gap here that WOTC would need to &quot;offset the money spent by D&amp;D fans on third party products&quot;. It's not a zero-sum game. 3rd-party purchases are not losses to WOTC -- as Dancey said from day 1, those were simply products that WOTC wasn't going to make anyway. In fact, the whole point was to offload products like adventures that a line needs to look &quot;supported&quot;, but which are intrinsically unprofitable to WOTC (per Dancey quotes in 2000). So if the Pramas assumption is that 3rd-party sales are losses to WOTC, Dancey was quoting sales figures in 2000 saying that they weren't.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Delta, post: 4138857, member: 40269"] Of course, Chris has his own religious axe to grind, too. In the past he's blogged about being aggrieved that the d20 System boom pushed some of his alternative game systems off store shelves. I'd be happy to concede most of the initial points, I don't think he's picked strong arguments to respond to, except for the last one. The Adkinson/Dancey philosophy that generated OGL was entirely about keeping gamers within the system, so new playgroups could form & reform easily (plus watching all the network effects of GPL; plus, as I hear the rumor, explicitly preventing WOTC from closing it back up in the future). But there's a big logical gap here that WOTC would need to "offset the money spent by D&D fans on third party products". It's not a zero-sum game. 3rd-party purchases are not losses to WOTC -- as Dancey said from day 1, those were simply products that WOTC wasn't going to make anyway. In fact, the whole point was to offload products like adventures that a line needs to look "supported", but which are intrinsically unprofitable to WOTC (per Dancey quotes in 2000). So if the Pramas assumption is that 3rd-party sales are losses to WOTC, Dancey was quoting sales figures in 2000 saying that they weren't. [/QUOTE]

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