D&D 5E The Three Most Important Letters in 5th Edition

[Tony Vargas]

hat they are going to go OGL and flush a 6 million dollar a year product down the toilet by allowing other people to play in their pool. In an industry that is only worth about 30 million a year, that would be a very, very bad business decision.

Where do those numbers come from?


Personally, I think the OGL was a great idea, in a sense it saved D&D, putting it back in a position of leadership. The problem is, D&D needs to stay with the open source model to keep benefiting from that, so as soon as they turned their back on it, they were no longer a leader, just another competitor.

Perhaps d20 has even inherited (misappropriated?) D&D's cachet among gamers?

 

[Hussar]

70000 subscribers (which can be found at the WOTC site)x7 bucks a head x 12 months = pretty close to 6 million dollars per year.

And that's only for confirmed members. How many unconfirmed members there are is anyone's guess.

 

[Blackwarder]

I've said it before and I'll say it again, WotC should take a leaf from apple play book and open some sort of an "app" store for 5e, as long as you sell it through them you will be free to use the material, couple that with a digital distribution medium and apps and you are set to go.

Warder

 

[MatthewJHanson]

I think a completely open gaming license might be difficult, but I do think some kind of free license is possible. I'm still hoping for something a little less restrictive than the GSL (It would be nice to be able to print monster stats in adventures).

As a small third party publisher, here's my thoughts on how it might benefit Hasbaro:

I'd like to support 5e, but if I cannot, I'm not just going to pack up shop. I'm going to continue supporting Pathfinder and possibly create my own system.

There are going to be fans who are on the fence. They might initially pick up the core 5e books, but they're not sure if they want to continue. These fans might decide what to play based on what other resources are available (adventures, settings, etc). If they can't find these resources for 5e, they switch to another system (Pathfinder has plenty of those things).

Third party publisher can make the extra resources available, and can turn the "try it out" customer into a regular buyer.

 

[Scribble]

I've said this before but:

While the OGL might be great for the players, and for 3p publishers... I'm not so sure it was really all that beneficial to WoTC.

As an example- myself: I bought a few WoTC products durring the 3e era, however the vast majority of my money was spent on 3pp products. Does that benefit WoTC?

With 4e my D&D dollars went to WoTC. I only really bought a few 3pp products.

As a caveat though the unanswered questions:

1. Did the fact that I was playing D&D indirectly help WoTC? (IE more players even i not paying customers means more potential customers?)

2. Did I buy less 3pp material in 4e because the DDI was so useful, but also so hard to use with non "official" material?



I think WoTC could benefit from an OGL though if they made the DDI better able to handle 3pp. They could make a killing on subscriptions, while 3pp handled support.

Even if they didn't open the DDI up to houserule support... I wonder if again it would be so beneficial people might just not buy 3pp products?

 

[RedShirtNo5.1]

I hope that some day someone's NDA expires and we can find out the internal process that led to the GSL.

 

[Halivar]

Given Paizo's success at WotC' expense, you can safely consider the OGL to be a one-off terrible business idea, never to be repeated again. Not saying whether that's good or bad for gaming as a whole, but for WotC's bottom line, it was an experiment with disastrous results.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

I think this is where things fell down. People, as witnessed by the rise of Pathfinder, are apparently fairly resistant to (radical) change. The OGL created a sort of anchor point people didn't want to move away from, because they didn't have to (me included). If someone didn't continue to support "their game", someone else could. So instead of making things better, things sorta stagnated and only improved very, very slowly. I think what Dancey failed to account for was that, by basing this on the computer GPL, computer hardware tends to only last for a few years and you HAVE to get new hardware. Books, on the other hand, last for years and years. There's folks who still have their 1E books in good condition (again, like me).
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Good points.
Although I don't think radical changes were what the idea was for - a 3rd party came up with a cool feat, class, whathaveyou - that Wizards could polish up and make official. Paizo does this - I've seen d20 material end up in later Pathfinder books - that was the kind of improvement that the OGL was good for, and after 10 years, release the update with all the changes (including the base one) in.

 

[Stormonu]

I think in the end, the OGL was just TOO wide open; it went beyond being profitable for WotC. Yes, I certainly benefitted from it, but I think it allowed too much to be good for their business. The GSL went too far in the other direction.

I would hope that something between the OGL and the GSL could be hammered out. Something where you could freely make non-commercial additions - new races, classes, monsters or mechanics, an adventure or two, and share it in a not-for-profit venue freely. But, if you wanted to make money off it, you needed some sort of license/approval. A flat fee per year (or product) might be the easiest to monitor. The main restriction would be you can't attempt to repackage the core rules and resell. You could add new content - monsters, classes, campaigns, etc., but no game system like Mutants and Masterminds, Arcana Evolved, Iron Heroes, Pathfinder, Trailblazer or the "pocket reference" PHB and whatnot that started to po up.

I think Savage Worlds has something similar to this for its licensing.