I'll also just point out the obvious that Kyle Brinks is just a sacrificial lamb and the ultimate decisions about the OGL will be made by people above his Pay Grade and in a completely separate department. He isn't even invited to the meetings where decisions about the OGL are made.
The OGL and any licensing will be enforced by the Legal department - not by game development. So Kyle Brinks has no authority to say how the legal department will actually enforce any legal document that is finally issued. He also doesn't know the communications that might have already gone on between WOTC Legal and various third parties, or what contracts third parties were being coerced to sign.
We still haven't heard from anyone who actually has authority to say what will be in the OGL or who has authority to change what the OGL will say, or how it will be enforced. Just a guy in a completely different department who has been with the company only a few months, lol.
The OGL and any licensing will be enforced by the Legal department - not by game development. So Kyle Brinks has no authority to say how the legal department will actually enforce any legal document that is finally issued. He also doesn't know the communications that might have already gone on between WOTC Legal and various third parties, or what contracts third parties were being coerced to sign.
We still haven't heard from anyone who actually has authority to say what will be in the OGL or who has authority to change what the OGL will say, or how it will be enforced. Just a guy in a completely different department who has been with the company only a few months, lol.
Just because Kyle probably doesn't work in the department making Open Game License 1.1 doesn't mean he has "no authority" in this situation. He provided more details and insider information, so he has to be involved in the talks at least somewhat and know what's going on. Also, the fact that Wizards is taking feedback shows that the contract is not set in stone, and a legal team would not be able to provide business plans that are based off customer feedback and haven't been decided yet.
Anyways, maybe the next article on this will be by someone working on writing the document. That being said, I would rather have actual members of the D&D community like Kyle respond to our concerns over a bunch of lawyers who probably don't even play the game and appeal to the community's actual needs.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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No, this does not mean they should be cheered on for the attempt, but it does not mean they should be condemned for it either. Nor does it mean that, in practice, every aspect of it would mean what people are claiming it would mean.
They should absolutely be condemned for shady, quasi-legal monopolistic behavior that fails to provide value to their customers.
That's how capitalism and a free market works - they produce a good that people buy, so they're accountable to those people. It's on us to hold them accountable.
Exactly - this whole 'It's totally normal for corporations to be greedy and evil' thing is really getting out of hand. Like; you guys need to learn the history of Corporations and how they were even allowed to form in America.
Like did you know that corporations were illegal in America originally? They had to actually lobby to be able to form corporations, and they did it by PROMISING up and down that those corporations would be able to grow to such a scale and size that the benefit they could give back to their communities through charitable acts etc. would be so great that it would outweigh any of the detriments that allowing corporations to form would create. They PROMISED to provide us, the consumers, with value beyond what an average store could do.
Fastforward one and a half generations and there's been enough media about corporate greed that now everyone seems to think that it's A-OK for them to be as greedy and evil as they want, with no social aspect to it at all! That's a bunch of bull, and I hope you guys know it.
I get that you want to be jaded and know everything, but there's a point where you're basically just advocating for people to screw you over because you've been conditioned to be as cynical and jaded as possible and your brain has been warped into thinking you aren't entitled to even being treated reasonably well. None of that is true, that's just pessimism on crack.
Exactly - this whole 'It's totally normal for corporations to be greedy and evil' thing is really getting out of hand. Like; you guys need to learn the history of Corporations and how they were even allowed to form in America.
Like did you know that corporations were illegal in America originally? They had to actually lobby to be able to form corporations, and they did it by PROMISING up and down that those corporations would be able to grow to such a scale and size that the benefit they could give back to their communities through charitable acts etc. would be so great that it would outweigh any of the detriments that allowing corporations to form would create. They PROMISED to provide us, the consumers, with value beyond what an average store could do.
Fastforward one and a half generations and there's been enough media about corporate greed that now everyone seems to think that it's A-OK for them to be as greedy and evil as they want, with no social aspect to it at all! That's a bunch of bull, and I hope you guys know it.
I get that you want to be jaded and know everything, but there's a point where you're basically just advocating for people to screw you over because you've been conditioned to be as cynical and jaded as possible and your brain has been warped into thinking you aren't entitled to even being treated reasonably well. None of that is true, that's just pessimism on crack.
Let the people who want to huff copium do there thing. If they want to stick their heads in the sand and cry let them. I personally think the people who truly care should just ignore them and continue the good fight.
I just like to bring it up because I find a lot of people genuinely were never taught that part of history - I think it's really important for people to know, because if everyone thinks that something is totally normal then they won't think twice about it.
Corporations had to promise the American people that they would be so generous and so good for their communities that they should be allowed to exist at such a scale and size, becuase before, it was literally seen as such a bad thing that it should be illegal to form a corporation. That to me says something, and it says something big. I really hope other people (especially young folks) read that and really sit and think about it, and maybe one day we'll reach a generation where it's not okay for corporations to be royally forking us all over just because they legally can. Maybe we'll get our rights back.
It's almost as if deep deep down these people believe that Corporations have more of a right to their money than they do.
"Oh, I'm so lucky that I get to work for a corporation that pays me enough to starve to death slowly"
"Oh, golly gee - of course I'm going to pay a higher price for a lower quality product. Corporations need to make money and they deserve money more than me. That's capitalism, after all. Money is for rich people, not me."
Right? Like I understand people who are apathetic to all of this - they don't want to put the mental time or energy into 'figuring out who the bad guy is', they just want to consume what they like and go on their merry way. I get that. It's understandable.
What I -don't- get are the people who literally seem to go out of their way to allow their pockets to be picked by MegaCorp Billionaires and get mad at you if you point out that's what they're doing. Like the Elon Musk fanboys or the dudes who insist that every Billionaire 'earned' their money, because they've never actually sat and thought about how once you hit a certain level of wealth your money is making money on interest alone, and it becomes increasingly impossible to fail no matter how many bad choices or mistakes you make - a safety net that none of us average joes could ever dream of!
And somehow I'm the bad guy for pointing out that Jeff Bezos has the same 24 hours in the day as the rest of us, and there's no way what he does in a day is worth 50000000000 times what the average warehouse worker makes in a day working themselves [sometimes literally to death!] to the bone because there's a drone watching their every step. No matter how smart you are or what you do, there's nothing that is worth that much more than another person's efforts for the day, there has to be a reasonable limit of expectation on reward, and this whole 'it can be literally anything because he legally has rights to it' nonsense is just childish. We also legally once had rights to own PEOPLE, but that wasn't right, was it?
It's almost as if deep deep down these people believe that Corporations have more of a right to their money than they do.
"Oh, I'm so lucky that I get to work for a corporation that pays me enough to starve to death slowly"
"Oh, golly gee - of course I'm going to pay a higher price for a lower quality product. Corporations need to make money and they deserve money more than me. That's capitalism, after all. Money is for rich people, not me."
Don't forget, "The only thing keeping corporations from doing even more good for us is all these pesky laws and regulations that keep them from making even more money exploiting their customers!"
Comparing WOTC to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos is apples to oranges. I don't like either of them, but admit they did actually crate or innovate something - or at least made a team that did so.
WOTC just bought the rights to some of the stuff Gygax, Greenwood, Weiss and Hickman had already published - and didn't really add anything to those IP's or outright locked it down so no one could enjoy them. They even tried to steal Dragonlance - and lost in court. I wish someone had been able to make all three Dragonlance movies over the past 40 years - but WOTC just doesn't have the talent to pull it off so they lock it down so no one can. So now the D&D movie they will release isn't going to be epic - it will be more similar to the WOW movie. Probably OK, but D&D is capable of so much more.
Comparing WOTC to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos is apples to oranges. I don't like either of them, but admit they did actually crate or innovate something - or at least made a team that did so.
WOTC just bought the rights to some of the stuff Gygax, Greenwood, Weiss and Hickman had already published - and didn't really add anything to those IP's or outright locked it down so no one could enjoy them. They even tried to steal Dragonlance - and lost in court. I wish someone had been able to make all three Dragonlance movies over the past 40 years - but WOTC just doesn't have the talent to pull it off so they lock it down so no one can. So now the D&D movie they will release isn't going to be epic - it will be more similar to the WOW movie. Probably OK, but D&D is capable of so much more.
Elon Musk is an idiot that had a daddy who gave him lots of money, and he was able to use that money to buy actually smart people's ideas and pass them off as his own innovations because he owned the company, which he never actually innovated himself he just made it seem like he did. You can even find articles these days from old Tesla employees who were there at the beginning that say he never actually contributed anything, he was just in the room more or less or had ideas that he forced them to impliment despite them not actually being beneficial to the overall operation of the vehicle. The dude is not Tony Stark, he tried to pass himself off as one and his fanboys bought it hook line and sinker.
Second it's a comparison; the point of the comparison was that these entities all act as though they are entitled to the profits and intellectual rights that go well above and beyond what they are actually entitled to by any reasonable standards.
Jeff Bezos is making billions while the people working the hardest for his company are begging for bathroom breaks and minimum wage. And yet YOU would act like Jeff Bezos happening to luck out and make the right book selling app at the right time is somehow a miraculous feat of genius that no one else could have ever done and somehow it means that his working hours are now worth 50000000 times that of the average human. That's just not how this stuff works, and if that's how it works for you then I'm sorry but yikes, hard pass on that mentality.
Everyone is creative and is entitled to their creative endeavors, sure, but when you start acting like you own the rights to all goblins everywhere because you drew a goblin and that person's goblin is similar to yours, even though they drew theirs first, they're in the wrong - then guess what? You're not entitled to insist that they should destroy their goblin just because you want them to, or you feel that you are entitled to be the only person drawing goblins. That's nonsense, this is a society, we are all entitled to participate - and corporations trying to make it so that we cannot participate in something we've been doing for over 20 years is some absolute nonsense.
Being proactive is more effective than being reactive. Saying "ooo we won they're rethinking it gg" is shortsighted and assumes a skirmish was the entire war. This is why you lose at chess.
What does "winning" look like to you in this scenario?
Fair question.
#OpenD&D.. That is what winning looks like.
D&D is not a product, it's not even a game, it's the community itself. Wizards of the Coast does not own D&D, we, the community do. We will decide what the rules are, not them. If they don't accept that, the same community that created their success will create their failure.
The stewards of D&D have always been the community, not some corporation. We tolerate Wizards of the Coast, but if they test us, we will turn that multi-billion dollar company into a punch line. Don't underestimate the power the community has here, we can shut these guys down if we don't get what we want and we WILL get what we want.
D&D is for everyone and Wizards of the Coast does not get to dictate the terms in how that happens.
Being proactive is more effective than being reactive. Saying "ooo we won they're rethinking it gg" is shortsighted and assumes a skirmish was the entire war. This is why you lose at chess.
What does "winning" look like to you in this scenario?
Fair question.
#OpenD&D.. That is what winning looks like.
D&D is not a product, it's not even a game, it's the community itself. Wizards of the Coast does not own D&D, we, the community do. We will decide what the rules are, not them. If they don't accept that, the same community that created their success will create their failure.
The stewards of D&D have always been the community, not some corporation. We tolerate Wizards of the Coast, but if they test us, we will turn that multi-billion dollar company into a punch line. Don't underestimate the power the community has here, we can shut these guys down if we don't get what we want and we WILL get what we want.
D&D is for everyone and Wizards of the Coast does not get to dictate the terms.
yeah this is great "we the people..." stuff, but in reality, yeah they own D&D in every way that matters. Even if they lose 50% of their regular users the game would be more popular than it ever was prior to recently, and eventually more people will join from the wider market and things will return to normal. This isn't to say that we can't use this moment to pressure them to meet reasonal terms, but the point is "reasonable". This sort of grandiose "you don't own D&D, the people do" and "1.0a or death" stuff isn't going to get you any concessions from them.
WoTC is taking it too far. Take a look at what they did to MTG by trying to increase monitization (Im sure I misspelled that....and that). They are destroying everything in their path. Also, as consumers, we are our only voice. If we dont like something our only recourse is to be as loud as possible. Barring that we take our buissiness elsewhere. WoTC should be happy we complained instead of just leaving.
yeah this is great "we the people..." stuff, but in reality, yeah they own D&D in every way that matters. Even if they lose 50% of their regular users the game would be more popular than it ever was prior to recently, and eventually more people will join from the wider market and things will return to normal. This isn't to say that we can't use this moment to pressure them to meet reasonal terms, but the point is "reasonable". This sort of grandiose "you don't own D&D, the people do" and "1.0a or death" stuff isn't going to get you any concessions from them.
There needs to be a feature where we can keep upvoting something. Because I keep clicking the upvote here.
yeah this is great "we the people..." stuff, but in reality, yeah they own D&D in every way that matters. Even if they lose 50% of their regular users the game would be more popular than it ever was prior to recently, and eventually more people will join from the wider market and things will return to normal. This isn't to say that we can't use this moment to pressure them to meet reasonal terms, but the point is "reasonable". This sort of grandiose "you don't own D&D, the people do" and "1.0a or death" stuff isn't going to get you any concessions from them.
This "its pointless, give up!" stuff ignores the fact that they've already been forced to backpedal from secretly forcing out 1.1 to working out 1.2 with the community.
Its an attempt to suppress dissent and get people to despair and give up, and its hilariously contrary to the basic facts of the last two weeks.
Being proactive is more effective than being reactive. Saying "ooo we won they're rethinking it gg" is shortsighted and assumes a skirmish was the entire war. This is why you lose at chess.
What does "winning" look like to you in this scenario?
Fair question.
#OpenD&D.. That is what winning looks like.
D&D is not a product, it's not even a game, it's the community itself. Wizards of the Coast does not own D&D, we, the community do. We will decide what the rules are, not them. If they don't accept that, the same community that created their success will create their failure.
The stewards of D&D have always been the community, not some corporation. We tolerate Wizards of the Coast, but if they test us, we will turn that multi-billion dollar company into a punch line. Don't underestimate the power the community has here, we can shut these guys down if we don't get what we want and we WILL get what we want.
D&D is for everyone and Wizards of the Coast does not get to dictate the terms in how that happens.
You seem to be arguing that WotC should get nothing and like it. Do you treat everything else in existence the same? If so, why should any of these 3rd party producers everyone is claiming to be defending get anything? You seem to be arguing that everything should be provided free.
Would you call the last 20 years 'nothing'? Would you say their Billion dollars in profits are 'nothing'?
Because they got all of that under the original OGL - everything for the last two decades has been under the current OGL. We're not TAKING SOMETHING AWAY from Wizards by wanting the status quo that has been the status quo for 20 years to stay the status quo; you do get that right?
Wizards should have exactly what they had before; same with us. The right to participate in a game that is largely about communal fantasy and profit off of it as much as you are able if you so wish to profit off of it. The end. Your attempt to spin the community as the bad guy in this scenario is genuinely laughable. We didn't do this dude, WotC did.
Here's what's going to happen to WOTC - it won't get the subscribers back and it won't get the 3rd Party Publishers back, and it won't get the influencers or social media back.
So they are going to go into their Q1 shareholder meeting and their math isn't going to work.
Next, the masses of people who got interested in D&D because of COVID and VTT's are going to bail for the next popular thing. The vast majoirty of growth in D&D was due to it being a trend for casual people who had nothing better to do during shutdowns.
What will remain at WOTC will be a just a fragment of the population lower even than played 3rd edition. Numbers are going to drop to levels of the early 2000's.
And yes, WOTC will hobble along with a loyal following of fanbois who will pay ten times the price to play D&D while the rest of us will pay 10% of that and have better and more original products to play. You want Magic missile graphics in D&D - that's extra. You want a nonstandard token? that's extra. Oh - and it will be the same exact adventures you played in 5e because nobody's going to make original D&D content going forward. Meanwhile your local game store is going to face increasing pressure to replace Adventurers Leage nights with Pathfinder Society Nights - and they will be 100% on board because WOTC isn't going to publish physical books that your local game stores can sell.
It's just so hilariously sad from all directions that the people in charge of WOTC haven't even the first clue about the industry they are trying to run. They have no idea about how people get into the game or how we found other players and taught new players the game for 40 years before COVID. All in a year they are going to trash everything from your local gaming store to third party publishers to the DM's who buy the most products. This whole Zeitgeist they are completely oblivious to, lol.
And, just in time companies like Paizo are offering alternatives and they actually understand the market they are in.
The vast majoirty of growth in D&D was due to it being a trend for casual people who had nothing better to do during shutdowns.
I have to wholeheartedly disagree with at least the above statement. 5e D&D was already going very strong, way prior to the Pandemic. And the only reason I know that, for sure - is all three games I run, all started at least two years prior to the pandemic - and all of them were new people, who I blabbed about how much I enjoyed D&D - and would be willing to run games for them (one being for a group of friends who never played, another for people at my work, and the third - the brother of one of the first group). And all of this, as I said was pre-pandemic. I think people like the folks from True Blood (forgot the name of the actor and actress) who came forward talking about how they play, how Critical Role played a part in it, it all snowballed to a very popular form of media (even Steven Colbert talked about how he played D&D - discussing it with the actor from True Blood) on his show... all of this pre-pandemic which probably inspired curiosity in D&D.
Now, that's not to say, for sure, that D&D probably picked up a lot of new people during the pandemic ... but to say it was because of the pandemic... I have to say, that part just isn't true.
I don't have any sales numbers to back it up. Just my experience having seen D&D's popularity soar during 5th Edition early on, having been in the D&D world since... ugh.... like late 1978/79 to early 80/81 (it's all a blur at this time...)
I'll also just point out the obvious that Kyle Brinks is just a sacrificial lamb and the ultimate decisions about the OGL will be made by people above his Pay Grade and in a completely separate department. He isn't even invited to the meetings where decisions about the OGL are made.
The OGL and any licensing will be enforced by the Legal department - not by game development. So Kyle Brinks has no authority to say how the legal department will actually enforce any legal document that is finally issued. He also doesn't know the communications that might have already gone on between WOTC Legal and various third parties, or what contracts third parties were being coerced to sign.
We still haven't heard from anyone who actually has authority to say what will be in the OGL or who has authority to change what the OGL will say, or how it will be enforced. Just a guy in a completely different department who has been with the company only a few months, lol.
Just because Kyle probably doesn't work in the department making Open Game License 1.1 doesn't mean he has "no authority" in this situation. He provided more details and insider information, so he has to be involved in the talks at least somewhat and know what's going on. Also, the fact that Wizards is taking feedback shows that the contract is not set in stone, and a legal team would not be able to provide business plans that are based off customer feedback and haven't been decided yet.
Anyways, maybe the next article on this will be by someone working on writing the document. That being said, I would rather have actual members of the D&D community like Kyle respond to our concerns over a bunch of lawyers who probably don't even play the game and appeal to the community's actual needs.
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HERE.They should absolutely be condemned for shady, quasi-legal monopolistic behavior that fails to provide value to their customers.
That's how capitalism and a free market works - they produce a good that people buy, so they're accountable to those people. It's on us to hold them accountable.
Exactly - this whole 'It's totally normal for corporations to be greedy and evil' thing is really getting out of hand. Like; you guys need to learn the history of Corporations and how they were even allowed to form in America.
Like did you know that corporations were illegal in America originally? They had to actually lobby to be able to form corporations, and they did it by PROMISING up and down that those corporations would be able to grow to such a scale and size that the benefit they could give back to their communities through charitable acts etc. would be so great that it would outweigh any of the detriments that allowing corporations to form would create. They PROMISED to provide us, the consumers, with value beyond what an average store could do.
Fastforward one and a half generations and there's been enough media about corporate greed that now everyone seems to think that it's A-OK for them to be as greedy and evil as they want, with no social aspect to it at all! That's a bunch of bull, and I hope you guys know it.
I get that you want to be jaded and know everything, but there's a point where you're basically just advocating for people to screw you over because you've been conditioned to be as cynical and jaded as possible and your brain has been warped into thinking you aren't entitled to even being treated reasonably well. None of that is true, that's just pessimism on crack.
Let the people who want to huff copium do there thing. If they want to stick their heads in the sand and cry let them. I personally think the people who truly care should just ignore them and continue the good fight.
I just like to bring it up because I find a lot of people genuinely were never taught that part of history - I think it's really important for people to know, because if everyone thinks that something is totally normal then they won't think twice about it.
Corporations had to promise the American people that they would be so generous and so good for their communities that they should be allowed to exist at such a scale and size, becuase before, it was literally seen as such a bad thing that it should be illegal to form a corporation. That to me says something, and it says something big. I really hope other people (especially young folks) read that and really sit and think about it, and maybe one day we'll reach a generation where it's not okay for corporations to be royally forking us all over just because they legally can. Maybe we'll get our rights back.
It's almost as if deep deep down these people believe that Corporations have more of a right to their money than they do.
"Oh, I'm so lucky that I get to work for a corporation that pays me enough to starve to death slowly"
"Oh, golly gee - of course I'm going to pay a higher price for a lower quality product. Corporations need to make money and they deserve money more than me. That's capitalism, after all. Money is for rich people, not me."
Right? Like I understand people who are apathetic to all of this - they don't want to put the mental time or energy into 'figuring out who the bad guy is', they just want to consume what they like and go on their merry way. I get that. It's understandable.
What I -don't- get are the people who literally seem to go out of their way to allow their pockets to be picked by MegaCorp Billionaires and get mad at you if you point out that's what they're doing. Like the Elon Musk fanboys or the dudes who insist that every Billionaire 'earned' their money, because they've never actually sat and thought about how once you hit a certain level of wealth your money is making money on interest alone, and it becomes increasingly impossible to fail no matter how many bad choices or mistakes you make - a safety net that none of us average joes could ever dream of!
And somehow I'm the bad guy for pointing out that Jeff Bezos has the same 24 hours in the day as the rest of us, and there's no way what he does in a day is worth 50000000000 times what the average warehouse worker makes in a day working themselves [sometimes literally to death!] to the bone because there's a drone watching their every step. No matter how smart you are or what you do, there's nothing that is worth that much more than another person's efforts for the day, there has to be a reasonable limit of expectation on reward, and this whole 'it can be literally anything because he legally has rights to it' nonsense is just childish. We also legally once had rights to own PEOPLE, but that wasn't right, was it?
Don't forget, "The only thing keeping corporations from doing even more good for us is all these pesky laws and regulations that keep them from making even more money exploiting their customers!"
Comparing WOTC to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos is apples to oranges. I don't like either of them, but admit they did actually crate or innovate something - or at least made a team that did so.
WOTC just bought the rights to some of the stuff Gygax, Greenwood, Weiss and Hickman had already published - and didn't really add anything to those IP's or outright locked it down so no one could enjoy them. They even tried to steal Dragonlance - and lost in court. I wish someone had been able to make all three Dragonlance movies over the past 40 years - but WOTC just doesn't have the talent to pull it off so they lock it down so no one can. So now the D&D movie they will release isn't going to be epic - it will be more similar to the WOW movie. Probably OK, but D&D is capable of so much more.
Elon Musk is an idiot that had a daddy who gave him lots of money, and he was able to use that money to buy actually smart people's ideas and pass them off as his own innovations because he owned the company, which he never actually innovated himself he just made it seem like he did. You can even find articles these days from old Tesla employees who were there at the beginning that say he never actually contributed anything, he was just in the room more or less or had ideas that he forced them to impliment despite them not actually being beneficial to the overall operation of the vehicle. The dude is not Tony Stark, he tried to pass himself off as one and his fanboys bought it hook line and sinker.
Second it's a comparison; the point of the comparison was that these entities all act as though they are entitled to the profits and intellectual rights that go well above and beyond what they are actually entitled to by any reasonable standards.
Jeff Bezos is making billions while the people working the hardest for his company are begging for bathroom breaks and minimum wage. And yet YOU would act like Jeff Bezos happening to luck out and make the right book selling app at the right time is somehow a miraculous feat of genius that no one else could have ever done and somehow it means that his working hours are now worth 50000000 times that of the average human. That's just not how this stuff works, and if that's how it works for you then I'm sorry but yikes, hard pass on that mentality.
Everyone is creative and is entitled to their creative endeavors, sure, but when you start acting like you own the rights to all goblins everywhere because you drew a goblin and that person's goblin is similar to yours, even though they drew theirs first, they're in the wrong - then guess what? You're not entitled to insist that they should destroy their goblin just because you want them to, or you feel that you are entitled to be the only person drawing goblins. That's nonsense, this is a society, we are all entitled to participate - and corporations trying to make it so that we cannot participate in something we've been doing for over 20 years is some absolute nonsense.
100% agrred
Fair question.
#OpenD&D.. That is what winning looks like.
D&D is not a product, it's not even a game, it's the community itself. Wizards of the Coast does not own D&D, we, the community do. We will decide what the rules are, not them. If they don't accept that, the same community that created their success will create their failure.
The stewards of D&D have always been the community, not some corporation. We tolerate Wizards of the Coast, but if they test us, we will turn that multi-billion dollar company into a punch line. Don't underestimate the power the community has here, we can shut these guys down if we don't get what we want and we WILL get what we want.
D&D is for everyone and Wizards of the Coast does not get to dictate the terms in how that happens.
yeah this is great "we the people..." stuff, but in reality, yeah they own D&D in every way that matters. Even if they lose 50% of their regular users the game would be more popular than it ever was prior to recently, and eventually more people will join from the wider market and things will return to normal. This isn't to say that we can't use this moment to pressure them to meet reasonal terms, but the point is "reasonable". This sort of grandiose "you don't own D&D, the people do" and "1.0a or death" stuff isn't going to get you any concessions from them.
WoTC is taking it too far. Take a look at what they did to MTG by trying to increase monitization (Im sure I misspelled that....and that). They are destroying everything in their path. Also, as consumers, we are our only voice. If we dont like something our only recourse is to be as loud as possible. Barring that we take our buissiness elsewhere. WoTC should be happy we complained instead of just leaving.
There needs to be a feature where we can keep upvoting something. Because I keep clicking the upvote here.
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This "its pointless, give up!" stuff ignores the fact that they've already been forced to backpedal from secretly forcing out 1.1 to working out 1.2 with the community.
Its an attempt to suppress dissent and get people to despair and give up, and its hilariously contrary to the basic facts of the last two weeks.
Would you call the last 20 years 'nothing'? Would you say their Billion dollars in profits are 'nothing'?
Because they got all of that under the original OGL - everything for the last two decades has been under the current OGL. We're not TAKING SOMETHING AWAY from Wizards by wanting the status quo that has been the status quo for 20 years to stay the status quo; you do get that right?
Wizards should have exactly what they had before; same with us. The right to participate in a game that is largely about communal fantasy and profit off of it as much as you are able if you so wish to profit off of it. The end. Your attempt to spin the community as the bad guy in this scenario is genuinely laughable. We didn't do this dude, WotC did.
Here's what's going to happen to WOTC - it won't get the subscribers back and it won't get the 3rd Party Publishers back, and it won't get the influencers or social media back.
So they are going to go into their Q1 shareholder meeting and their math isn't going to work.
Next, the masses of people who got interested in D&D because of COVID and VTT's are going to bail for the next popular thing. The vast majoirty of growth in D&D was due to it being a trend for casual people who had nothing better to do during shutdowns.
What will remain at WOTC will be a just a fragment of the population lower even than played 3rd edition. Numbers are going to drop to levels of the early 2000's.
And yes, WOTC will hobble along with a loyal following of fanbois who will pay ten times the price to play D&D while the rest of us will pay 10% of that and have better and more original products to play. You want Magic missile graphics in D&D - that's extra. You want a nonstandard token? that's extra. Oh - and it will be the same exact adventures you played in 5e because nobody's going to make original D&D content going forward. Meanwhile your local game store is going to face increasing pressure to replace Adventurers Leage nights with Pathfinder Society Nights - and they will be 100% on board because WOTC isn't going to publish physical books that your local game stores can sell.
It's just so hilariously sad from all directions that the people in charge of WOTC haven't even the first clue about the industry they are trying to run. They have no idea about how people get into the game or how we found other players and taught new players the game for 40 years before COVID. All in a year they are going to trash everything from your local gaming store to third party publishers to the DM's who buy the most products. This whole Zeitgeist they are completely oblivious to, lol.
And, just in time companies like Paizo are offering alternatives and they actually understand the market they are in.
I have to wholeheartedly disagree with at least the above statement. 5e D&D was already going very strong, way prior to the Pandemic. And the only reason I know that, for sure - is all three games I run, all started at least two years prior to the pandemic - and all of them were new people, who I blabbed about how much I enjoyed D&D - and would be willing to run games for them (one being for a group of friends who never played, another for people at my work, and the third - the brother of one of the first group). And all of this, as I said was pre-pandemic. I think people like the folks from True Blood (forgot the name of the actor and actress) who came forward talking about how they play, how Critical Role played a part in it, it all snowballed to a very popular form of media (even Steven Colbert talked about how he played D&D - discussing it with the actor from True Blood) on his show... all of this pre-pandemic which probably inspired curiosity in D&D.
Now, that's not to say, for sure, that D&D probably picked up a lot of new people during the pandemic ... but to say it was because of the pandemic... I have to say, that part just isn't true.
I don't have any sales numbers to back it up. Just my experience having seen D&D's popularity soar during 5th Edition early on, having been in the D&D world since... ugh.... like late 1978/79 to early 80/81 (it's all a blur at this time...)
Check out my publication on DMs Guild: https://www.dmsguild.com/browse.php?author=Tawmis%20Logue
Check out my comedy web series - Neverending Nights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wr4-u9-zw0&list=PLbRG7dzFI-u3EJd0usasgDrrFO3mZ1lOZ
Need a character story/background written up? I do it for free (but also take donations!) - https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?591882-Need-a-character-background-written-up