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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Justice and Rule" data-source="post: 8896182" data-attributes="member: 6778210">I mean, I also assume that their intention was to nuke the competition from orbit as well. Absolutely agree there. The not-smart thing was not predicting the response:I don't have a hard time, because I think they critically misjudged the audience. I suspect their idea of how this was going to go was something like this:[ATTACH=full]272470[/ATTACH]I think their big expectation here was that most of the publishers would either get out of their way or fall in line because they are the big dog and they felt they had to because Hasbro would simply bury them in litigation otherwise. Maybe they would give a few special carveouts to some of publishers to try and split the opposition, but I think they figured they would look like a legal juggernaut that could not be stopped without a serious loss of time and revenue. Similarly, some fans might care, but this would be so "inside baseball" that it could be obfuscated enough to avoid creating a big rift in the community that could sustain any sort of long-standing resistance. Plenty of companies do big stupid things and they blow over (Games Workshop is a sterling example of doing this over and over).This obviously failed for multiple reasons, not the least of which that people really don't like bullies and that there are plenty of alternatives to D&D. Dennis Detwiller really nails it here:[MEDIA=twitter]1612949012273037312[/MEDIA]With GW, the IP is very clear and important, with the merchandise and continuing fiction being a massive part of the appeal. This makes it difficult to replace because while there are alternatives to 40K, it's still not quite 40K. You just can't replace it easily. On the other hand. D&D is more of a vibe or experience or even state of mind. God knows how many people I've seen say how they don't want to play in the Forgotten Realms, or others who just go off and make their own world. D&D is not really about the rules as much as being around friends and creating fiction, and you don't really need D&D for that. People stick with D&D because it's the easiest, most mainstream version of that idea out there. A lot of people will stick with what's kind of a mediocre game as long as it's just really accessible and the company doesn't f*** up too badly too often.And here we are, a case where they f$#%ed up way too badly. People will put up with a whole lot, and certainly WotC probably has enough legal power to stifle a lot of s#!✚ internally that might leak with a smaller company. But this sort of thing is just too "mask off" to be mistaken for anything else other than a giant corporate power grab, and that's basically enough for the portion of the population plugged into these sorts of matters... which also happens to be the people who are the biggest influencers as well are most likely to buy stuff: Dungeon Masters. Most of my group does not know about this going on, but the ones who do are all the people who run games and buy expansion books or adventures or other stuff. Couple that with the fact that there's pretty much been a united front against them from their competitors, and it's just the worst-case scenario... which should have been the obvious one, but corporations generally act much more recklessly when the smell of a bigger bottom line is waved in front of their noses.So I totally get why they thought they could get away from this. They mistook D&D for an IP that it really isn't, didn't realize that while many in the community might not notice the most important ones would be viscerally against it, and that they wouldn't be able to split up and cow their competitors into compliance or exodus.</blockquote>

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