From the article:
D&D is about, for, and by the fans. That's the first fundamental point that we can never lose. I think, over the course of several years, we lost sight of what was important. We lost sight of who our audience was.
Dan has the "what" but I'm not sure he has the "why."
WHY is D&D about, for, and by the fans?
My feeling: Because the very nature of role-playing is essentially "collaborative storytelling" - it's why "railroading" is generally unpopular with players - and each group is a different set of individuals and their collaboration (colored by the randomness of die rolls) will of necessity create a story which WotC does not "own" - the result of an RPG session is "jointly owned" by all of the participants - WotC might own the "rules set" and the story framework for a published mega-campaign, but the details of each group's run through of the campaign will be uniquely their own and the players "jointly own" that experience along with WotC, whether WotC likes it or not.
WHY did WotC over the course of several years [lose] sight of what was important?
My feeling: Pressure from Hasbro to bring in money ("make line go up" if you will).
This is history repeating itself - reminds me of the end of the TSR era, when it was forgotten that ownership of the creative product the game produces is of necessity "shared" with the players and TSR (due to poor financial management) had inordinate pressure to bring in money.
So now the most important question is, "
how will WotC/Hasbro avoid making the same mistakes in the future?" When we saw this at the end of TSR, WotC's solution was to embrace the ownership sharing by way of introducing the OGL. When we saw this with the recent OGL scandal, WotC's solution was to embrace the ownership sharing by way of releasing the SRD via the Creative Commons license.
My hope is that WotC - and Hasbro - will realize D&D is a unique intellectual property that cannot be harnessed to drive profit by attempting to exert control over it... because it is the collaborative ownership of a story with each individual that plays the game which drives its appeal, and when you try to take that ownership away from the players (and DMs), you cut off the very reason they are playing the game in the first place. In other words, its very nature is to resist the sort of "enshittification" that drives most corporate decision-making today. It is better for WotC to consider D&D a "public trust" which they are responsible for "curating" than a "product" which they "own" and the D&D arm must be run more like a public benefit corporation than a traditional for-profit corporation.
My sense when Peter Adkinson acquired TSR, that was his approach - he wasn't acquiring D&D for the monetary value it would drive, he was acquiring it because it was a thing he liked and he was willing to have his company curate it for a while. Unfortunately, that attitude of being a "curator/steward" rather than an owner is generally limited to a single (rich) individual and the attitude rarely survives long when $LargeAmount is paid to acquire something. Either the individual tires of the curation duties and converts to "for profit" themselves or tires of the curation duties and resells to another entity for $AnotherLargeAmount and the new owner prefers "owning" to "curating."
