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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mlund" data-source="post: 4747188" data-attributes="member: 50304">The outcome would be total crap, to put it mildly.The industry (such as it would be) would be a toxic waste-dump that only the truly obsessive would enjoy wading through to piece together their own home systems. Since there are no operating standards or technical requirements to participate, everyone's oafl would be tossed in the community well. It would be a text-book tragedy of the commons.It would take some form of for-profit business to step in and assume the burden of separating the wheat from the chaff for the general consumer. They would, essentially, be packaging retail "builds" of open-source gaming material and copyrighting the build combination. They might even restrict the content delivery to a proprietary platform of some sort. That might work to recover from the "nobody pays" dark-ages that would ensue. Market-wide innovation, however, would slow to a crawl because mass-adoption would be so slow. The lack of common reference points and interests would result in many smaller, more insular online communities based around small distributions. That would probably end any sort of advertising-revenue support for gaming blogs and forums. Also, with or without a new commercial distribution channel many people would still cling to a pre-dark-age standard system hear or there. We'd also probably see a lot less in-store RPG support and a general regression of D&D back to a "mom's basement" / "college dorm room" environment.- Marty Lund</blockquote>

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