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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 5893539" data-attributes="member: 27160">At this stage, I think that would lead to disaster.You can fool all the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all the time - but the fooling on the edition treadmill and the venal, gollum-esque, grasping cleaving to "precious" IP at any cost to the paying customer has run its course.A constellation of zeitgeist, internet 'culture' and years of complacent, unashamed greed on the part of corporate senior management have worn the store of tolerance in the masses of people who constitute the market perilously thin. And I say this as a fiscal conservative; I think a minority among the corporate directorates have screwed it up very nearly enough to finally piss off the 'global customer' enough to shake them out of their own complacency.In terms purely of D&D, the results of the OGL compounded by the 'push' given by 4e to those who wanted something that 4e didn't give them, I think are close to tipping the balance. If WotC don't get it right in the next iteration, I think the role of "archetypal RPG", hitherto the sole preserve of whatever game bears the "D&D" logo, will be lost to WotC/Hasbro. "The customer" will wise up. Instead of going for the "default RPG", roleplayers will follow another course - maybe even thinking about what they actually want out of RPGs and finding a good fit among the myriad games out there. Or maybe just transferring the crown of "honorary D&D" to Pathfinder.This has nothing to do with the OGL; if it was not Pathfinder it would be some other system. The story is similar to that of Hoover. The very name "Hoover" used to be synonymous with 'vacuum cleaner', but the corporation were arrogant enough to think that they could control the market and keep selling the customers an inferior product because it was they, the mighty corporation, that decided what the customer would buy. Today, they seek desperately to compete with the new "cyclonic" cleaners by copying the designs as closely as they can and price cutting to the bone. And still they come up only 1 hit in six on a quick search...If you want a model of how roleplaying games can succeed as a business, look at a little Swedish computer games company called "Paradox Interactive". Here is a company that very deliberately puts no DRM on any of its in-house games because, despite the "pirates", they believe in giving the best product they can give to their paying customers - and that means no intrusive or inconvenient DRM. Here is a company that licenses its core game engines to minute, first-time developer groups to produce innovative games that they then market and publish (you'll find my name in the credits to one such game). This strategy has harmed them so badly that they have seen over 1000% growth over the last seven years, 75% growth in 2011 alone.The CEO of Paradox, Frederick Wester, puts it better than I could (and with far more authority) <a href="http://uk.pc.gamespy.com/pc/magicka/1216907p1.html" target="_blank">right here</a>.</blockquote>

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