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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4747231" data-attributes="member: 2067">It will be different, but not "better" or "worse."There are a lot of truly amazing volunteer efforts out there. Creative Commons is great. Wikipedia is a better resource than normal encyclopedias. The Open Source Software community builds things that, if it came pre-installed on your Dell, you'd wonder why you ever liked Windows or OSX to begin with, and that will probably be changing the TV world in the near future (Hulu/Boxee/Netflix, I'm starin' at you!). In our own little circle, whatever virtual table top WotC pumps out will have a long way to go to rival MapTool for versatility and awesomesauce. Indeed, the OGL is built kind of along that pattern, forcing people to share their works, and, by all measures, the d20 industry as a whole did pretty nice for themselves in the last 8 years (and may continue to do well even without WotC leading the pack). Some of the quality, especially at the beginning, WAS sucktastic, but there were also some amazing supplements that rival anything put out by WotC (compare, say, From Stone to Steel to The Arms and Equipment Guide, and tell me with a straight face that WotC's was better). So you'll get some good, solid stuff, even in sold books, under that model.You might get people doing it more as a desktop publishing deal, or as a side-project, as opposed to a full publishing house, though. Say, selling books compiled from a wiki of rules. You probably won't get people who do it as a job, since it doesn't directly pay: it might end up something like webcomics or blogs, where particular authors (or teams of authors) put up information, settings, rules, etc., in one central location, and then sell products branded with it (in this case, rather than T-shirts, Print-on-Demand folios of rules, or VTTs for playing). Maybe a few of the "top earners" in the industry can become the Penny Arcade of game design, holding cons and driving links to other sites and selling enough to live comfortably (but not fantastically well). I don't think it'll be particularly hard to recruit new people. The best recruitment tool any TTRPG has is "other people who play the game." Plugging into an existing group is the way most people start playing, so unless people in existing groups stop playing, the industry will continue to fill out its little niche nicely.</blockquote>

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