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WotC Walks Back Some OGL Changes, But Not All
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<blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 8895115" data-attributes="member: 19857"><p>The problem for Wizards is that they cannot afford to change the rules for "OneD&D" (sigh) enough to make it incompatible with 5e. 5e is too popular, and released under the OGL.</p><p></p><p>For 3e->4e they thought they could get away with it. 3e sales were slumping, 4e was released to try to boost D&D sales back up again. The rules were different enough that you could cite enough vocabulary differences between the two to make it uncomfortable for someone to try to publish 4e-compatible material under the OGL. It didn't work, but you can see how they had a plan to make it work.</p><p></p><p>They can't do that here. 5e just sells too well to run the risk of dumping the existing player base with a game different enough that you can't make compatible products using the existing SRDs and OGL without having to bother with the new material. So if you want to lock people out you have to invalidate the old license.</p><p></p><p>(Of course the question of why they want to lock people out when the current model has been working fine for more than 20 years arises, especially given how they were so willing to quickly drop the idea of royalties while not clearly expressing that they're not planning on revoking the OGL 1.0a. So this feels a lot more like executives who don't like not being in control of everything rather than worries about actual revenue being missed. And that sucks, frankly, because execs who are playing that kind of game are the worst kind of people to be in charge IME. Makes me think that the so-called "activist investors" last year might have had a point about Wizards poor management, and frankly any time I'm on the same page as people the Wall Street Journal call "activist investors" I don't like it.)</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Jer, post: 8895115, member: 19857"] The problem for Wizards is that they cannot afford to change the rules for "OneD&D" (sigh) enough to make it incompatible with 5e. 5e is too popular, and released under the OGL. For 3e->4e they thought they could get away with it. 3e sales were slumping, 4e was released to try to boost D&D sales back up again. The rules were different enough that you could cite enough vocabulary differences between the two to make it uncomfortable for someone to try to publish 4e-compatible material under the OGL. It didn't work, but you can see how they had a plan to make it work. They can't do that here. 5e just sells too well to run the risk of dumping the existing player base with a game different enough that you can't make compatible products using the existing SRDs and OGL without having to bother with the new material. So if you want to lock people out you have to invalidate the old license. (Of course the question of why they want to lock people out when the current model has been working fine for more than 20 years arises, especially given how they were so willing to quickly drop the idea of royalties while not clearly expressing that they're not planning on revoking the OGL 1.0a. So this feels a lot more like executives who don't like not being in control of everything rather than worries about actual revenue being missed. And that sucks, frankly, because execs who are playing that kind of game are the worst kind of people to be in charge IME. Makes me think that the so-called "activist investors" last year might have had a point about Wizards poor management, and frankly any time I'm on the same page as people the Wall Street Journal call "activist investors" I don't like it.) [/QUOTE]
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