Mark Hulmes runs the popular YouTube channel, High Rollers D&D. He's also published a decent amount of third-party content, and he has an interesting video on the Open Game License situation. You can follow the link to hear his thoughts, or click on the spoiler tag below.

 For those who either don't have the time to watch the full 35 minute video, or are in a workspace that prohibits them from doing so, here is a brief summary.

• Mark talks about how this whole situation has been a tiring and stressful mess for everyone involved. He particularly objects to the line in Wizards of the Coasts' recent statement about how everybody won in this situation. From his point of view, no one won. He believes that this has been a disaster and unpleasant experience for the whole community, as well as Wizards.
• While the situation appears to be dying down, Mark still worries that it might not be over. Though Wizards may have made some recent concessions in their statement, Mark says that he personally has lost a decent amount of trust for them and still worries that they could mess it up.
• Mark also notes that a lot of employees for Wizards are getting a lot of unnecessary hate. According to him, most people in the company object to what Wizards is doing with the Open Game License. He believes that it is the higher ups in the company who are responsible for this, and many of Wizards' employees (including some he knows personally) are not responsible for this and should not be blamed or subject to hate over it.

I personally disagree with some of the things Mark said. I believe that he a slightly overly cynical view of Wizards of the Coast, and that Wizards' new modifications to what they want to do to the license make the situation a lot less worrying than it previously may have been. That being said, it is quite interesting to hear another reasonable perspective on the situation with different views than mine. Does anyone else have any thoughts on the video? Or did I mis-sumarize it or leave out any crucial details that you guys might deem important (this is totally possible)?

Ginni Di approves of this video. 

I watched it and it’s good. Sly Flourish put out a video today as well as a new one from The DM Lair. 

A bit of a heart-wrenching watch, but a very good one nonetheless.  I don't generally watch Mark, though not out of dislike but rather out of lack of time, but I enjoy what I've seen of him and I'm disappointed he had to make that video.  A message well worth taking in.  

One thing I will add to the summary: Mark believes that much of this OGL situation is Wizards' executive team, the Suits At The Top, potentially trying to position D&D as a Media Brand rather than a tabletop game.  They're chasing the movie money, the TV show money, the celebrity endorsements and big-ticket blockbusters - essentially chasing the Disney/Marvel business model that's proven so incredibly profitable.  He points out that core Wizards D&D socials has almost exclusively talked about the movie, the TV show, and other upcoming media debuts rather than D&D-the-TTRPG, with all the actual TTRPG communication shunted to DDB.  Mark is very much afraid that D&D the tabletop RPG is seen more as a distraction and an unwanted relic to the Suits, when they have the potential to make D&D into a rival for Disney's brands.  I believe the sentiment was "why do all the work on these expensive nichey books ourselves when we can just get third-party goons to do it for us while we focus our efforts on growing the media brand?"

Which is a message I'd expressed before, and one that doesn't make for good hearing...but **** if I think he's not right on the money.  Why sell a fifty dollar game book to a quarter of a million DMs when you can put a ten-dollar movie ticket in the hands of ten million people?  When you can put D&D on the screens of ten million TVs and get that lucrative advertising money?  Why bother with the game books when the Media Brand is so much more profitable as a business venture?

I hope Mark and I are wrong.  But I don't think we are.

1) I watched the video previously - I hadn't heard of this guy's channel before Ginny Di signal-boosted it, but what he's saying is more or less in line with other channels I follow. I'm a little less doom-and-gloom on things overall, though the new OGL 2.0 may change that.

2) I agree this was not a situation with a winner on any side (much less WotC's side.) I also agree nobody actually designing/working on the D&D game deserves hate for what happened.

3) I disagree that the suits want to ditch the game itself. Maintain their strategy of fewer 1st-party books, certainly, but not shutting off design and production entirely. Though I'm sure some of the higher-profile recent missteps like the Hadozee haven't done any favors.

Yeah, I haven't seen the video but the logic you're laying out, Yurei, is how I see Hasbro/WotC seeing "the business" of D&D too.  Execuives of the biz side (not execs on the creative side) see the property as having "origins" in tabletop gaming, but see it's "real value" far beyond, so to speak, TTRPG or even VTTRPG.

They'll always have a TTRPG attached to the property, yeah.  But I wouldn't at all be surprised if the Suits thought of the TTRPG as a necessary tax on their IP, something they have to do despite not really being keen on it.  D&D can't not be a tabletop game, but the Suits are really hoping the tabletop game stops being the main thing D&D is.

I don’t think he’s being “over cynical,” I think he’s right on the money.

Quote from Yurei1453 >>

Which is a message I'd expressed before, and one that doesn't make for good hearing...but **** if I think he's not right on the money.  Why sell a fifty dollar game book to a quarter of a million DMs when you can put a ten-dollar movie ticket in the hands of ten million people?  When you can put D&D on the screens of ten million TVs and get that lucrative advertising money?  Why bother with the game books when the Media Brand is so much more profitable as a business venture?

I hope Mark and I are wrong.  But I don't think we are.

Recent events undermine this thesis.  Less than two months ago, Hasbro put Entertainment One--its film/television division that produced the D&D movie--up for sale as part of corporate restructuring plan refocusing on product development rather than multimedia endeavors.  Movies are expensive and risky--between actually making the movie and advertising, you are putting hundreds of millions of cash on the line with the very high risk that it might flop spectacularly (seeSnake Eyes, which needed some $175 million to break even and only made $40.1 million).   Film is a really, really hard industry to be in, requiring higher up front expenses for much, much higher risk.  Which is why Hasbro doesn't want to be in the business of selling $10.00 tickets to ten million people and is explicitly getting out of that business.  

Instead, they are reverting to a plan they came up for in 1983, forty years ago--you make a successful product, focus on making your toys, then license that brand to someone else (Toei Animation for the GI Joe and Transformers TV shows, for example) to actually make the movies.  This is a triple win for Hasbro--(1) they get to be in the less risky, cheaper business of making toys and games, (2) they get paid for doing nothing by someone who wants to make things with their brand (and they get paid regardless of success--they'll make more if the movie does well, but that is just icing on top of the cake since they're not out anything because they did not contribute to the production budget), and (3) the movie/TV show someone else made and paid for serves as advertising, increasing sales of your product.

It's a pretty great business model, particularly if you are a company struggling with cash flow issues due to the collapse of retail toy stores and continued difficulties due to pandemic-related supply chain hitting your industry (which relied heavily on Chinese production) particularly hard.

So, while I might have been a bit more concerned in October, 2022 that this might be the case, I think Hasbro's actions and statements to investors which have some legally binding weight showing that they are moving away from producing themselves and returning to focusing on the products themselves all mitigate those fears substantially.  

I don't think this correction really changes the argument.  "Hasbro/WotC would rather concentrate on making TVs and movies, etc. over actually making D&D TTRPG content" can comport to the facts you presented by switching to "Hasbro/WotC would rather concentrate on managing the license brining in revenue from TV and movies, etc over actually making D&D TTRPG content" still supports the conclusion Mark and Yurei are coming to.  The "brand management" people get the bigger offices and money, and the creatives responsible for making the TTRPG or VTTRPG are in a more marginal position to the folks representing Hasbro/WotC to the licensees.  The TTRPG VTTRPG basically becomes a sort of legacy obligation than the real focus of the D&D brand.    

Quote from Yurei1453 >>

They'll always have a TTRPG attached to the property, yeah.  But I wouldn't at all be surprised if the Suits thought of the TTRPG as a necessary tax on their IP, something they have to do despite not really being keen on it.  D&D can't not be a tabletop game, but the Suits are really hoping the tabletop game stops being the main thing D&D is.

Just because it's not the main thing in terms of revenue doesn't mean that's not where the most creative effort goes, or that it's any less valuable to the brand overall. Marvel's main thing is comics, but the comics are practically a loss-leader compared to everything else. Yet the comics are where they are at their most experimental with things like AXE, Krakoa, Savage Avengers, Deaths of Wolverine etc.

Quote from MidnightPlat >>

I don't think this correction really changes the argument.  "Hasbro/WotC would rather concentrate on making TVs and movies, etc. over actually making D&D TTRPG content" can comport to the facts you presented by switching to "Hasbro/WotC would rather concentrate on managing the license brining in revenue from TV and movies, etc over actually making D&D TTRPG content" still supports the conclusion Mark and Yurei are coming to.  The "brand management" people get the bigger offices and money, and the creatives responsible for making the TTRPG or VTTRPG are in a more marginal position to the folks representing Hasbro/WotC to the licensees.  The TTRPG VTTRPG basically becomes a sort of legacy obligation than the real focus of the D&D brand.    

That is a substantial change, and one that does not really comport with Hasbro's forty-years worth of history in this kind of arrangement.  As I noted above, it behooves Hasbro's interests not just to sit on the license, but to capitalize on it through corporeal product.  When someone else is spending a hundred million or two making your toys a feature-length advertisement, you do not just say "nice, let's just rack in the dough"--you hit the ground running with product releases.  This is going to be particularly true of D&D--it is a lot easier to keep a customer buying books and D&D Beyond subscriptions than get folks to shell out money for collector's items or keep a kid interested in a certain type of toy (which are the underlying products for Transformers, MLP, and GI Joe).

Your post assumes a zero sum game, where, if the licensing folks get more, the game development folks get less.  But that assumption is not exactly accurate--if all goes according to plan, both the licensing group (which is going to be much smaller since it does not need that big of a staff) and the product development group both will make more money and both will receive greater investment from the company.  And, if it does not, both of them are going to sink together--after all, that licensing becomes a lot less lucrative if no one is interested in the underlying product. 

It probably should also be noted that Hasbro is also drastically ending production on numerous less successful products they are making explicitly so they can pour more money into product development for things that are successful (such as D&D).

I just want to say, I'm not really sure how much you could really phase the tabletop game out of D&D's larger identity; without that at or near the forefront you really only have basic fantasy elements with no defining/unique feature. The settings and characters don't seem to have the kind of broad recognition needed to market any kind of media project. Honestly, high fantasy adventure movies/shows seems like a difficult field to break into; I can only think of a handful of them that I've seen, and most of them were sketchy adaptations of a book series that ultimately didn't go far (the adaptations, that is).

Ironically I think one of the things that has driven DnD is what is now indirectly killing it. 
Streamers and the popularity of watching “live play” must have piqued the suits interest. Seeing how many people will sit and watch a 3-4 hour stream. How much money Amazon will pay for an animated series and how many eyes people like Matt Colville etc bring, alongside the fact that more and more famous people are “outing themselves” as DnD players must have seemed like a golden goose. 

So the execs look at all that revenue sloshing around in the entertainment space and figure “we can get that ourselves directly”. 

They fail to understand that DnD is not the reason that money is available, it is the personalities involved, the stories told. They could be playing any system at this point. 

The multi media increase has made the executives think it isn’t actually about the game anymore. 

I think it's a little overly simplistic to assume executives are only going to see theoretical big gains and charge blindly towards them. Like I said, there really isn't that much high fantasy out there in the film/TV realm, and most of it is an adaptation of existing stories. So while entertainment in general generates revenue, the high fantasy segment represents only a small proportion of that, and it's a chancy field. Lotta up front costs and you're then dependent on the very subjective and finicky nature of public opinion to carry you into returns. I'm sure it's being considered, but much less sure it's their primary target, let alone that they'll attempt to stick as many eggs as possible in that basket. If anything, I think they'll try and sell more services to players.