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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 8880266" data-attributes="member: 907">Hasbro bought Wizards in 1999, the year before 3e and the OGL was released (and I'm not sure, but I think the OGL/SRD wasn't finalized until 2001, and previous stuff was done under a draft version and a "gentleman's agreement" that as long as 3PP fixed things up when finalized, the stuff done under the draft version was safe). However, Hasbro initially had a very "live and let live" attitude to Wizards: "You keep the money coming in, you can keep doing whatever it is you're doing."Also, I'm pretty sure Peter Adkison never owned Wizards of the Coast – certainly never all of it and likely never even a majority. See, Peter wasn't very good at business when Wizards was formed, and his legal advisors were... questionable. So when Wizards was formed and could assign shares as seen fit, Peter wasn't assigned any shares at all. Instead, what ownership he eventually had came from "sweat equity" – basically, being paid shares as part of his compensation for his job.Edit: I figure some people might want <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160304015212/http://www.peteradkison.com/blog-entry-2-wizards-of-the-coast-equity-distributions-part-1/" target="_blank">a source on that</a>.The idea was basically two-fold. The main idea was that core books are much, much more profitable than sourcebooks and particularly adventures. But sourcebooks and adventures have a secondary effect: they support the core books, essentially serving as marketing (IIRC, Ryan Dancey once described the entirety of the D&D product line as self-sustaining advertisements for the PHB). So if you can get other people to publish those sourcebooks, you can rake in the core book dough without spending as much on support material.The second idea was that it was OK if people used d20 derivatives for their own games, because doing so would make the d20 system kind of a lingua franca. That would make it easier for people who had played, say, the d20-based Farscape RPG to move to D&D. A related issue is that if many people know d20, that means many people likely play d20, so it's easier to find a group playing d20, and once you're in that group you're more likely to buy d20 stuff which basically means the PHB.And then there was of course the semi-secret third purpose, of future-proofing access to D&D.</blockquote>

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