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What's All This About The OGL Going Away?
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<blockquote data-quote="EpicureanDM" data-source="post: 8866924" data-attributes="member: 6996003"><p>I don't think they're evil or greedy, but I do think they're twits with the typical swagger of MBA-types. Think about it. They agreed to take control over D&D (more Rawson, less Williams) at a time when most people who've been around D&D for a while recognize as the most fraught point in any edition of D&D. The current edition's been out a long time, all the easy money's been made. A new edition of the game is in the works, a situation that often creates massive uncertainty and anxiety for the fans. 5e's an exception to this rule, but this isn't a 4e-to-5e moment. It's a 3e-to-3.5e moment, which their diligence would have revealed was a Bad Time.</p><p></p><p>5e is the most popular and financially successful edition of D&D in history by a large margin and they accepted the job with a mandate to make it <em>more</em> popular and <em>more </em>financially successful. But no one, including WotC, thought that 5e was going to be <em>this </em>successful when it was first released. It was a fluke. But these folks took the job thinking they have the skills (and the design team underneath them) to do on purpose what previously happened mostly by accident. Do they have the design team that can achieve this task? How the F would they know? They're tech executives, not game designers or veterans of the TTRPG publishing business. On what basis would they evaluate the strength of the D&D design team to make good D&D products? Not on the merits, certainly.</p><p></p><p>So they must think they can do their jobs and grow D&D because of their skills as business managers. But all their business management skills were developed at tech companies, working on software and similar products. Will that work for D&D, a game publishing business? I don't think it will, at least not at the scale that Hasbro has asked for. But they're going to try, because they're twits with MBA swagger who will get another job with another Seattle tech company in a couple of years. That's what MBAs do. It's more banal than evil or greedy.</p><p></p><p>EDIT: Who did WotC replace Winniger with? A video game producer who's never published a single D&D product that I'm aware of. The executives chose <em>that guy</em> over Crawford and Perkins, veteran D&D designers who've been with the company for decades. That tells you everything you need to know about how the people in charge of D&D think about the D&D business.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="EpicureanDM, post: 8866924, member: 6996003"] I don't think they're evil or greedy, but I do think they're twits with the typical swagger of MBA-types. Think about it. They agreed to take control over D&D (more Rawson, less Williams) at a time when most people who've been around D&D for a while recognize as the most fraught point in any edition of D&D. The current edition's been out a long time, all the easy money's been made. A new edition of the game is in the works, a situation that often creates massive uncertainty and anxiety for the fans. 5e's an exception to this rule, but this isn't a 4e-to-5e moment. It's a 3e-to-3.5e moment, which their diligence would have revealed was a Bad Time. 5e is the most popular and financially successful edition of D&D in history by a large margin and they accepted the job with a mandate to make it [I]more[/I] popular and [I]more [/I]financially successful. But no one, including WotC, thought that 5e was going to be [I]this [/I]successful when it was first released. It was a fluke. But these folks took the job thinking they have the skills (and the design team underneath them) to do on purpose what previously happened mostly by accident. Do they have the design team that can achieve this task? How the F would they know? They're tech executives, not game designers or veterans of the TTRPG publishing business. On what basis would they evaluate the strength of the D&D design team to make good D&D products? Not on the merits, certainly. So they must think they can do their jobs and grow D&D because of their skills as business managers. But all their business management skills were developed at tech companies, working on software and similar products. Will that work for D&D, a game publishing business? I don't think it will, at least not at the scale that Hasbro has asked for. But they're going to try, because they're twits with MBA swagger who will get another job with another Seattle tech company in a couple of years. That's what MBAs do. It's more banal than evil or greedy. EDIT: Who did WotC replace Winniger with? A video game producer who's never published a single D&D product that I'm aware of. The executives chose [I]that guy[/I] over Crawford and Perkins, veteran D&D designers who've been with the company for decades. That tells you everything you need to know about how the people in charge of D&D think about the D&D business. [/QUOTE]
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