The Moral of the Story Is....Maybe there's such a thing as (D&D being) too big

[gamerprinter]

Yes, having the 800 lb gorilla has resulted in more people being up ship's creek without a paddle due to the potential removal of the OGL... but the only reason they are in the creek in the first place was because paddling in it was so easy and worked so well for so long.

Honestly, I've been discovering that the majority of content I create, while I published it as OGL, only some of it was really OGL, I never needed the license to sell most my wares, just particular ones. Most of what I do is custom not connected to the SRD in any way. I did it more as a marketing tool for meeting audience expectations. I'm about to release a major product on DM's Guild under One D&D, that's the license I'll be working under on any D&D content, not the OGL. So I'm becoming less and less concerned about it. And as I mentioned in an earlier post in this thread my RPG business is doing good, not under eminent threat, like so many others seem to be. It is still a dangerous market, so I have to maintain my market situational awareness, and put more trust into my intuition, which has kept me competitive all these years. Of course most of my products are maps/map symbol sets, which require no license at all (and has none).

 

[gamerprinter]

Look at it this way... there are hundreds of thousands of people who are making a living and have a full career right now due to social media platforms-- YouTube, Twitch, TikTok etc. And 99% of these people would most likely NOT be able to make their livings right now doing this kind of stuff in this sphere if these social media platforms didn't exist. Make money playing video games all day? Not unless you were one of the few working as a QA tester.

My one time experience contracting for Brady Games Publishing at Activision Video Game Studio, Santa Monica, CA. There were about 400 QA testers working on CoD:AW, all fresh out of college. But from my understanding, once the QA session was over, they were all fired (as standard operational procedure). I only met a handful of engineers on the job. So QA testing might not be the permanent video game job...

 

[Charlaquin]

Look at it this way... there are hundreds of thousands of people who are making a living and have a full career right now due to social media platforms-- YouTube, Twitch, TikTok etc. And 99% of these people would most likely NOT be able to make their livings right now doing this kind of stuff in this sphere if these social media platforms didn't exist. Make money playing video games all day? Not unless you were one of the few working as a QA tester.

Err… Streamers and lets players do not make money playing video games all day. That’s the most visible part of their job, sure, but there’s a ton of production work that goes on off-camera. You’re absolutely right that it wouldn’t be a viable career path without social media platforms like YouTube and Twitch, but I just wanted to clarify that as with any job in entertainment, there’s a lot more to the job than the audience sees.

So all these people have hitched their wagon to these social media sites, and all of them think that their ability to do so is seemingly irrevocable-- because they cannot foresee a reason why these social media outlets would stop doing what they are doing.

Uhh, no. Folks working in “new media” are intensely aware of how fragile their position is. They all remember what happened with Vine (in fact, many of the most successful are former Vine celebrities), and they are constantly under threat of their platforms changing their algorithms or ad revenue policies in a way that kills their livelihoods, or having their content demonetized.