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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheFindus" data-source="post: 5446806" data-attributes="member: 75791">Why should WotC care about Green Ronin or Monte Cook after he stopped working for WotC? "The game" is not a holy grail. I find the notion of "We are all friends here" amusing. Where is the support of Green Ronin for 4E? It is a business decision that needs to be made. "We are all one big community, group hug" has nothing to do with it.DnD worked fine without the OGL for a very long time. TSR failed because they did not produce products that people wanted to buy. But 3rd edition was a product that, after all these years of drought, people really really, I mean really, wanted to buy.I think you overestimate the benefits of the OGL for WotC. The market was flooded with, let's put it mildly, suboptimal material which gave customers and retailers a hard time, because nobody would buy the stuff (problem for retailers) and you did not know which stuff was good enough to be bought (customer's problem). You can still find the most outrageous nonsense at the game convention here in Essen for less than a buck. And still nobody will buy it. Now, why would they do that? Because they could not find enough 3rd party support for 3rd edition? I do not think this is realistic. 3rd edition was what WotC made it. As I have said before, the magazines were going strong, the campaign books were successful. Plenty of reasons to keep playing 3rd edition. As far as I can see, many of them are still playing it now BECAUSE of the good products that Paizo puts out.So did I. And it was good for the 3rd party publishers that we bought their stuff. But that does not mean that it was good for WotC. Again, would the situation have been soooo much different if they had worked with 3rd party publishers on a long term, but cancelable basis? I have many serious doubts. WotC either creates products strong enough to stand on their own. Or they fail trying. To hope for 3rd party support does not seem to be a reliable business strategy. And to give away their creation for free without ever being able to get it back is a very risky business decision.We all like things for free, sure. But I will not buy a mediocre product if I cannot use or like the content. And I do not think that there are a lot of people who buy the stuff just because it has WotC on the front cover. If people had that kind of money to throw around we would not see the abundance of threads complaining about the price of DDI and what WotC should do to reduce the price or increase the quality of it's content.Plus - but I have to do more research on that subject, because I am not a programmer or in the computer industry - I am very skeptical if you can really compare Open Source Software to a RPG OGL. I have to do more research on that to make up my mind.</blockquote>

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