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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DMZ2112" data-source="post: 6307346" data-attributes="member: 78752">...I'm not even sure why anyone is still entertaining the idea of an OGL after this statement.  This statement says, "We're not going to have an OGL."  There may be degrees of "openness," Basic D&D may itself be open source, but at the very least Wizards is planning to be the gatekeeper for retail Standard-through-Advanced-D&D5-compatible material to a greater or lesser degree.  If you want to publish D&D5-compatible stuff, you are going to be dealing with Wizards.  Whether that will entail a set of hard rules upfront in the license or a department responsible for issuing Wizards Seals of Approval remains to be seen, but my money is on the former -- the latter sounds a lot like work.For what it's worth I continue to expect that Wizards will be doing a lot of direct, closed licensing to a small number of third-party publishers, particularly for their setting-specific material, and they will invite amateurs to publish supporting material through Wizards as they always have.  The form that publishing takes may expand somewhat but I will gasp in shock if they roll out a D&D "app store."  They don't want that kind of headache. I'm with Hussar, here.  Quality -- at least quality of content -- is immensely subjective, which is precisely why Wizards wants to be the subject.  And that's their prerogative as the owner of the IP.  They can be the one authority on quality if they desire.  The end result will still be more open than if they insisted on publishing everything themselves, or introduced a license so restrictive that the end result was the same.I think what you are arguing, KM, is that Wizards should not do this, which is an entirely different animal and subject to discussion.  But it absolutely can be up to Wizards what is high quality and what isn't.  All they have to do is say that it is.  Poof.The "innovation" that can spring from an open market itself does a pretty good job of eroding the value others place in the goods available on that market.  Counterpoint: an open market exists to part fools and their money.  Everyone benefits from regulation and oversight. History has shown that this is not true.  In its day TSR crushed a number of pretenders to the throne with overwhelming legal and fiscal force.  They were very rarely actually successful in court, and they still stopped the production of infringing (if not actually competing) products in many cases.Your sense of entitlement is both vast and baffling.If this were true we would not be here slavering at the gate for every scrap of information about D&D5 that slips from Wizards' fingers, and the preorder for a $20 single-use boxed set of D&D5 rules wouldn't be kicking the everloving crap out of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook on Amazon right now.Like it or not, the Wizards Seal of Approval is still a license to print money in this industry.</blockquote>

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