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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zil" data-source="post: 5446868" data-attributes="member: 20004">Very few of the big companies from 3E are supporting 4E because (a) the license for 4E is bad and (b) a number of these folks didn't like the direction where 4E went, but I'd say (a) was the main reason.   The fact that 3rd party publishers have no way to add material to the DDI is another issue, but wasn't one of the initial reasons for potential 3rd party publishers staying away from 4E.   But that is beside the point.  These people did effectively raise the value of the 3E brand and the OGL allowed that to happen. I believe that as gamers, the game should be the holy grail.  It's about the game, not about the business entities that market the game to us.  Unless you're a shareholder of Hasbro, why are you so concerned about WoTC so much so that you put that concern ahead of your interest in the game?  That I don't understand.  If the companies producing the game(s) we love seems to put the interests of the game first, then fantastic!  We should be excited and happy.  That's why what WoTC did with the OGL SRD was so great!  And it's also why what Necromancer Games did with the Tome of Horrors, Green Ronin with the Advanced Bestiary, and Paizo with Pathfinder is so great.  The OGL helps build communities which is good for gamers, and I would argue, good for all the companies involved, WoTC included.  Wizard's problems only came about because of what they did in the transition to 4E.  And some of us really were interested in Freeport.  And Ptolus.  And the Scarred Lands.  We played in those settings but still purchased the crunch books from WoTC because we were playing the same game.Sure, there was sub-par 3rd party material, but there was also sub-par WoTC material.  If you look at previous versions of D&D under TSR's stewardship,  you can find a fair bit of sub-par material there as well.  It's probably inevitable whether you allow 3rd party participation or not.  The smart consumer learned to pick and choose.  And the smart retailers learned the same.  I remember one retailer in my town (the only FLGS at the time - now out of business) who went and ordered in more than a dozen of one WoTC book aimed at DMs (one of the fiendish codex books) even though there were only a handful of DMs that bought at his store - but many players.  If he was paying attention he would have ordered in fewer of the DM books, but more player oriented books.  Also, if your line of complete guide to salamanders is not selling, then you probably should not bring in so many of that line in the future or relegate it to special orders only.  The dealers need to pay attention to what they are bringing in.  The same is true in lots of retail stores.  You need to watch trends and understand your customers. What really caught the dealers was the change from 3E to 3.5.  As soon as 3.5 was unexpectedly released any product that was 3E dropped dramatically in value.  I'd say that was a much worse problem for the dealers than any glut of sub-par 3rd party material.  At the time of 3E it was stated that the TSR campaign settings were not successful and that they were partly what put TSR under.  So the 3E focus was on core rules and not the release of lots of settings.  What did they have in 3E?  Forgotten Realms and Eberron.  Gone was Planescape, Darksun, Birthright, Mystara, etc etc.  They licensed off Ravenloft and Dragonlance, but the rest of the them sat idle other than brief appearances in Dragon magazine.Do you have evidence that 3rd party publishers actually _hurt_ Wizards of the Coast profits in the 3.x era?  Post-3E it is a different story, but there are lots of factors there as Steel Wolf laid out a while back.   And WoTC could have taken better advantage of the OGL like Paizo does today.  They chose not to.  They could have handled the transition to 4E much better.  Heck, if they had released 4E under the OGL then we may have had a very different situation than we do now.  Do I think WoTC would have gotten some 3rd party publishers on-board with a restrictive 3E license?  Possibly.  You had people like Kenzer who were willing to negotiate a D&D license.  But the pool of 3rd party support would have been much smaller and I'm not sure that WoTC would have been able to step up and fill the void to keep everyone engaged and playing the game.  Those that drifted off to third party OGL settings may have instead drifted off to completely different game systems and been lost to WoTC completely.  Yea, well I did throw that kind of money around on WoTC books, minis, tiles, maps, etc.  I don't anymore, but I did.  I have even more TSR material - many thousands of dollars of stuff.  Some is quite good, some less so.   And I suspect there are more people out there like me who have been with this game for 30+ years, have good paying jobs and are willing to spend money on their hobby, sometimes a bit foolishly.  These days I direct most of my money at Paizo and the various 3rd party Pathfinder publishers and you know what, the quality of things has gone up dramatically from the old 3E days.  Hopefully that continues.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> It's definitely an analogous copyleft license.  You can find quite a bit on open source licenses online in Wikipedia and other places.</blockquote>

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