NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 6304997" data-attributes="member: 8461">It only does this by creating a "glut" for WotC, rather than for the market. Having to devote resources to negotiating an unending series of licenses with an increasingly backlogged (and, as a result, upset) queue of third-party publishers isn't good for WotC, and it isn't good for the market. Demanding that much control over the process is going to result in WotC crippling itself to try and keep up.Quite frankly, neither the (so-called) "glut" nor the BoEF was anything that WotC was concerned about in the first place - those were market problems that caused much more hand-wringing for gamers than they ever did for Wizards of the Coast. So why should they expend massive time and effort to worrying about them now?The idea doesn't work. The examples you cite were with specific companies, either for limited products (Gale Force 9 distributes these modules, but I don't believe they write them) or is with one company with a few products spread out over a few years (Judges Guild).The "negotiated print licenses" idea means that WotC is now having to work out deals with every company that wants to make a compatible print product. That is, quite simply, more than they can reasonably handle. It means that they'll be a squeeze on any company that wants to make print materials, since they'll need to wait in line with all of the other companies doing the same thing until WotC can deal with them - and that won't be fast, since WotC has to devote most of its resources to its own products. So what you'll have an incredibly slow process of some WotC exec reading a product, passing some notes along, some other execs having a discussion, having a meeting with the third-party publisher, and finally either approving it, or sending it back for revisions, and repeat. That's not just burdensome, it's incredibly burdensome. It means that the process will either become a rubber stamp, or a line so slow that it will be a de facto ban on compatible print products.That's without even getting into the issue of where Print on Demand products will fall.I get that gamers like the idea of some sort of "standards" or "quality control" mechanisms being implemented, but imposing those on an entire market for compatible materials is simply unrealistic, at least in terms of judging things on (a completely subjective) qualitative merit. The only way to do that is via a blanket set of terms and restrictions, ranging from loose (the OGL) to tight (the GSL), and we've seen which one worked better.</blockquote>

Verification