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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mike Myler" data-source="post: 7733505" data-attributes="member: 6726030">DMsGuild has never been intended to promote people professionally publishing their own work (hint: if you can only sell it at DMsGuild, you cannot sell it at your friendly local game store, or anywhere else that sells things). It was made to encourage people to pool their homebrewed content into the D&D brand (which is why what you "publish" there becomes intellectual property of DMsGuild) and direct the customer base's attention for 5E content published by third parties (which they can't avoid the existence of; you can copyright game text and terminology but not mechanics, and the d20 3.0 & 3.5 System Reference Documents make it theoretically possible to transfer material between editions under the Open Gaming License) because when 4E bottomed out Paizo made Pathfinder and took away the market for a decade. And now look--there's like 3 Pathfinder video games, and comics, and novels, and a card game, and partnering with other good brands like Red Sonja and Vampire Hunter D. They really, really, really do not want another Golarion, so they made a marketplace as anti-publisher as they could and told everyone to go there because it's the "Official D&D Marketplace". What I find most frustrating about this is that it's a totally different environment (5E is booming, they did not just mass-fire a bunch of super-competent project teams) so it's unnecessary, and I genuinely worry that people who have contributed to it did so without fully realizing their rights (which their fault or not, isn't cool or encouraging for people that want be creative and produce something for others to enjoy). Extra-infuriating? Paizo kept the lights on. Pathfinder brought me (and I'm sure many other people) back into the fold, and the industry would be far weaker without their pro-stance on third party publishers, which itself has spurred on rising tides for games well beyond Pathfinder (N.O.W. not necessarily O.L.D. or N.E.W. because I bet Russ would've made those regardless, lots of content for S&W or Savage Worlds, etc.)Frankly I think it's good that people are realizing that they are not supposed to be there if they want to own their material, and I really hope DmsGuild offers folks some way out of this where they don't have to entirely abandon a ton of work for products that aren't interwoven with Faerun or Ravenloft and so on.</blockquote>

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