NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steve Conan Trustrum" data-source="post: 7733612" data-attributes="member: 1620">"Huge" is underselling it."THE" factor, is more like it.Independent DnD magazines don't exactly do well, which is what Paizo would have been doing if they were operating under the DnD brand.When the d20 STL was still around, and there were groups where publishers got together with WotC employees and former employees to discuss it, the fact that products like Pathfinder came out was a big problem. People were creating things with the OGL and d20 STL that WotC hadn't anticipated, including creating competition for their own brands. The reason they released the OGL as royalty-free in the first place was because WotC expected the 3pp market to elevate their own sales and branding. They figured the 3pp market would be free advertising for their own products. That wasn't happening once companies used the OGL to create independent products that didn't even need the d20 STL anymore. If you think WotC isn't concerned with the "Next Pathfinder" coming along, you've not been paying attention to the market since Pathfinder was released.Of course WotC is concerned about Pathfinder. It took massive bites out of WotC's core market, to the point where DnD was no longer the big seller in the market it had dominated for 30 years. You don't think that's a problem they keep an eye on?The entire DMs Guild mechanic is set up to prevent such a thing from happening. It not only requires all products be a monetization channel via royalties instead of being royalty free, but also limits how they can be presented to customers. And now it's preventing 3pp from adding their own branding to the product covers, which is the key selling visual, leaving only their own.But you still think WotC isn't interested in controlling and limiting the 3pp market to prevent competition with their own brands?</blockquote>

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