Yup.  WoTC's mistake wasn't the OGL; it was no longer using the OGL.  If they have any brains, they'll come back to it with 5e.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Daddy Warpig;683686What the OGL did (in effect) was to officially announce that WOTC wouldn't wrongfully sue anyone making a D&D clone, so long as you abided by it's restrictions. It was nice of them, but not legally necessary.

The OGL lets you republish the exact text of the game, not just recreate it's mechanics. That's a pretty big difference.

Quote from: hexgrid;684602The OGL lets you republish the exact text of the game, not just recreate it's mechanics. That's a pretty big difference.

More importantly I think, the D20 log is far more likely to make people think 'its for D&D' that putting 'compatible with the worlds most popular roleplaying game' in small type at the bottom of the back cover.

Quote from: jadrax;684606More importantly I think, the D20 log is far more likely to make people think 'its for D&D' that putting 'compatible with the worlds most popular roleplaying game' in small type at the bottom of the back cover.

True, but the D20 license was an entirely separate beast from the OGL. It had a lot more stringent requirements. (And, IIRC, the d20 License was permanently yanked during the transition to 4e. Hence the proliferation of replacement logos/licenses.)

Quote from: hexgrid;684602The OGL lets you republish the exact text of the game, not just recreate it's mechanics. That's a pretty big difference.

It is a difference, you're right. (Though, depending on the edition, would-be cloners would benefit from being forced to rewrite some of D&D's more abstruse passages.) But that difference isn't enough to turn the OGL into a brand-destroying juggernaut, especially considering the role of the d20 License and the explicit ban on mentioning compatibility with D&D.

I've never seen any evidence that the OGL (or even d20) licenses harmed the D&D brand. Quite the opposite.

I know several people got into 3e because the OGL/d20 piqued their interest. And, after the "we'll sue for hot-linking to our photos" policies of TSR, a fan-friendly approach went a long way towards salvaging the reputation of D&D. It enhanced the brand.

As a side note, I would argue that the most significant component of the OGL was WOTC adopting a legal obligation not to unjustly sue people. That's a big benefit for hobbyist publishers (as many of the d20 companies were in the beginning, such as Necromancer Games). It ensured that more than sccant handful of people were willing to publish d20 stuff (which wasn't a given, at least in the beginning).

The D&D brand was damaged by a host of bad decisions. The OGL (IMHO) wasn't one of them.

Quote from: RPGPundit;684578Yup.  WoTC's mistake wasn't the OGL; it was no longer using the OGL.  If they have any brains, they'll come back to it with 5e.

By OGL, I assume you mean third-party support. Explain to me how that helps WotC.

Pathfinder uses the OGL. There are companies which publish Pathfinder-compatible supplements. How much has this helped Pathfinder? As far as I can see, fuck all. A few very small publishers, with no reach beyond the hardcore forum-going hobbyist, produce shitty adventures and sourcebooks written and layed out by amateur outfits that last a year or two. How would this help D&D crawl out of the steamy quagmire of hardcore RPG enthusiasts? How does it grow the game with new players accustomed to professionally designed and produced games? How does have a bunch of vanity press books filled with artwork straight out of a 10th-graders binder doodling, with D&D Next stamped on the cover, really help WotC?

Pathfinder has shown that if you actually put the effort into making quality adventures and setting material yourself, you don't need third-party support for that content. And the RPG publishing industry is far weaker today than it was in 2002. I would expect even more third-party publishers to be fly-by-night hacks who go out of business in a year.

WotC is aiming to grow D&D outside the traditional (of the last 10 years anyway) RPG market. If it was content with simply publishing the most popular game in a small and sclerotic hobby, 4E would still be alive and well.

Let go of 2002 already. Forget about the halcyon days of the OGL. Forget about Ryan fucking Dancey and the geek fantasy of open-source RPGs. Frankly, it wasn't that great the first time around.

Quote from: Daddy Warpig;683686The presence of a wide variety of supplemental materials — modules, campaign settings, rules supplements — absolutely helped drive sales of D&D. WOTC themselves (and employees at the company) said so...

They exchanged short term extra $$$ for potential long term competition problems if they screwed the pooch on the next edition.

Which they promptly went and did...

Quote from: Daddy Warpig;683686Let's be clear here. According to my best understanding of the pertinent laws (IANAL), people could always "clone" D&D.

You can't copyright mechanics or systems. I could publish a clone of D&D, with the exact same mechanics (but all new text), and it'd be untouchable under US law.
...

Technically true, but as a practical matter no one did it because nobody could survive the potential frivolous lawsuit.

And there's a big difference between some fantasy heartbreaker 'clone', and Exactly The Same Rules.

Quote from: Daddy Warpig;683686Now, how does a promise not to wrongfully sue someone constitute either brand dilution or brand suicide?

Now people don't have to got to WotC for the 'D&D experience'. Because pathfinder is basically exactly the same as their favorite "edition".

And Pazio is able to do it because the potential "unspoken threat" of a lawsuit is no longer hanging over every ones head.

Before people would just not buy the new edition and keep playing the old one, or just drop out of the hobby.

But this was fixable in the long run if they came out with a good new edition - as 3.x proved.

But now, because of OGL, they don't have to wait for the next "official D&D" edition fix, they now have support from a direct competitor who is putting out "new" product for their favorite "edition".

Quote from: Daddy Warpig;683686WOTC hurt themselves with many decisions, the OGL not among them.

It was many different bad decisions that hurt them, the OGL was one of those, and the one that will have the farthest reaching consequences.

It's the mistake they can't take back or fix.

Quote from: Daddy Warpig;683686A healthy D&D is good for the hobby and industry. Conversely, a healthy hobby is good for D&D.

Sales wise D&D basically was the hobby. But with the Pathfinder split due to a combination of the OGL, and the 4e disaster, "official" D&D now has a legit competitor.

Pazio had a lot of help from WotC when they lost their damn minds with 4e. But without the OGL already out there they would not be a legit competitor to D&D right now.

From a pure market perspective this kind of competition is great for the consumer and the hobby.

And all this is possible because WotC basically did a trust bust on themselves with the OGL.

Which was stupid of WotC.

But good for everyone else.


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Quote from: Ladybird;683821I'd love to see a D&D movie about the actual creation of the game, and the legal battles that followed it's success. That's a far more interesting story.

I don't know why I suddenly think of Larry Hagman and Ken Kercheval... (and Joan Collins as Lorraine Williams?)

Quote from: Jaeger;684909They exchanged short term extra $$$ for potential long term competition problems if they screwed the pooch on the next edition.

The mistake wasn't embracing the OGL. The mistake was abandoning it.

The even bigger mistake was abandoning it in a particularly stupid way. They could have saved themselves massive headaches, for example, by extending Paizo's licenses to Dragon and Dungeon magazine.

Quote from: Haffrung;684822By OGL, I assume you mean third-party support. Explain to me how that helps WotC.

The same way it helps everyone else who embraces open movements: Wide and diverse support that increases the appeal of the core products to people who would otherwise not have their needs met by the product.

For example, 3E has made up roughly 80-90% of my RPG gaming in the last 14 years. While I like the system, the primary reason it's been the basis for so many of my campaigns is because support material from 3rd party has formed the backbone for most of those campaigns.

For example, in 2002 I was considering several different RPGs... but I really wanted to run the Freeport modules. In 2005 I considered several different RPGs... but Rappan Athuk had been burning a hole in my pocket. In 2007 I was once again looking at different options... but Monte Cook's Ptolus demanded my attention.

Without that 3rd party support, there's a pretty good chance that I would have been done with 3E somewhere around 2002 or 2003. Instead I've put thousands of more hours into it. And the net result of that was more book sales for WotC: Core rulebooks to every player I introduced. Additional supplements to both them and me. And so forth.

That's anecdotal, obviously, but it illustrates the key principle which countless studies have shown make open source and open standard projects work. And they tend to keep working... unless, of course, the guy at the apex of the support pyramid decides to abruptly vacate their position and leave a massive vacuum for somebody else to move into.

Which is what WotC did in 2008.

QuotePathfinder has shown that if you actually put the effort into making quality adventures and setting material yourself, you don't need third-party support for that content.

That's overly simplistic. Paizo produces great stuff. But there are plenty of gamers who don't like the prepackaged railroads of the Adventure Paths. 3rd party support still serves to broaden the game beyond what Paizo is capable of providing.

Paizo is also benefiting because they're doing a better job of leveraging the OGL than WotC did. In many ways, WotC had actually abandoned the OGL by 2002. If they had followed the original plan of releasing their rules material under the OGL and extending their trademark license so that 3rd party support could point directly to a broader range of WotC products and tell people to buy them they would have reaped even greater profits.

Paizo is, to some extent, forced to do what WotC didn't (because they have to release their support products under the OGL). But they don't have to release digital SRDs of every hardback supplement; but they do that because (I'm assuming) they understand how powerful the OGL is as a marketing tool for their core products.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;685005The mistake wasn't embracing the OGL. The mistake was abandoning it.

If they never released the OGL to begin with, all the headaches that went along with stupidly abandoning it would never have existed...

Quote from: Justin Alexander;685005The even bigger mistake was abandoning it in a particularly stupid way. They could have saved themselves massive headaches, for example, by extending Paizo's licenses to Dragon and Dungeon magazine.
...

And all those other stupid mistakes they made when they decided to go to 4e added to the pooch screwing even more.

Because the OGL Pandora's box was already open.

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Quote from: Jaeger;684909They exchanged short term extra $$$ for potential long term competition problems if they screwed the pooch on the next edition.

Which they promptly went and did... [snip]

And all this is possible because WotC basically did a trust bust on themselves with the OGL.

Which was stupid of WotC.

But good for everyone else.


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You're assuming that Wizards had the foresight to realize what a problem that would be in the long run.

How do we know they didn't possess such foresight?

Because obviously, they didn't have the foresight to realize that changing their entire strategy for the company in favor of a strictly proprietary system that quickly wore out its welcome would be even LESS successful in the long run.  

JG

Does anyone know who was calling the shots for the 4e changeover on the licensing side? Because they really shouldn't be working for a company. Any company.

As far as arguing that the OGL was a mistake, you'd have to argue that it did not increase revenue for WotC. Do we have any hard data on that?  I highly suspect that there isn't any.

You might be able to make an argument that the changeover from 3rd to 4th was motivated by distaste with the OGL. They certainly did everything in their power to reverse course, and in the process damaged their brand and customer goodwill.

Quote from: Jaeger;684909They exchanged short term extra $$$ for potential long term competition problems

4e was always going to be a disaster. The benefit of the OGL is that WOTC could see what gamers wanted in D&D — 3e went Pathfinder, 2e and earlier went OSR — and so, after their colossal fuckup, they would be able to learn from their lesson.

The OGL didn't create the 4e disaster, it created the opportunity to recover from it.

Yes, the OGL made competing with D&D easier, in many ways. It created opportunities for people outside WOTC to thrive. That doesn't mean WOTC would be better off with no competitors.

Monopolists have no motivation to improve. And without the OGL competitors, Wizards would have no motivation to acknowledge their failures and correct course.

The management at WOTC was delusional. It took years for them to see and admit the success of Pathfinder and the OSR (and many still deny both). Admitting the problem was the first step towards fixing it, and without the OGL people would never had to admit the problem.

"D&D sales falling?" grumble, grumble "It isn't because of flaws in 4e! No, the hobby's just dying. We don't need to change a thing!"

So, like TSR in the mid-1990's, they would have continued to push 4e as their sales slid and slid, and tried more of the same "get the MMO crowd" design tactics that were supposed to grow the hobby (but didn't). We'd have another long slide into obsolescence for D&D and the hobby.

There is no way that a lingering death would be good for WOTC. And, without the OGL and the competition it allowed, that's what we would have.

But the OGL was great for the hobby and good for WOTC, in a strictly Moment of Clarity kind of way.

"My God, I'm in a gutter with vomit all over me. And what's this... a D&D manual?" flip, flip "This isn't fucking D&D. I wrote this? Jesus Christ! What the hell have I been doing for the past 4 years? I need to get my shit together."

The OGL boosted WOTC sales and, when they went rabid and tried to strangle it, it allowed them to see the error of their ways.

I'm not saying it was an unalloyed good. Clearly, it made the consequences of WOTC's stupidity worse. (But it was the stupidity to blame, not the OGL.) But it also made recognizing and recovering from that stupidity easier.

I don't think the OGL was a mistake.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;685005The same way it helps everyone else who embraces open movements: Wide and diverse support that increases the appeal of the core products to people who would otherwise not have their needs met by the product.

For example, 3E has made up roughly 80-90% of my RPG gaming in the last 14 years. While I like the system, the primary reason it's been the basis for so many of my campaigns is because support material from 3rd party has formed the backbone for most of those campaigns.

Problem is, for every Necromancer Games, there were two or three smaller outfits filling the market with shit. Retailers got pissed off and stopped carrying all 3rd party material, because they didn't want to be left holding the bag with 400 cheap adventures churned out by the likes of Goodman Games.

And the RPG publishing market if far weaker today than it was in 2002. I just don't have any confidence that we'd see professional third-party publishers emerge that could publish genuinely high-quality books supporting Next.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;685005That's overly simplistic. Paizo produces great stuff. But there are plenty of gamers who don't like the prepackaged railroads of the Adventure Paths. 3rd party support still serves to broaden the game beyond what Paizo is capable of providing.

Who are the biggest third-party publishers for Pathfinder? Goodman? Frog God Games? Crack those books and they're fucking ugly. I don't see how a brand is enhanced by a bunch of amateur vanity products produced, it seems, by people who live above a dry-cleaners working between shifts at Staples. There simply isn't enough money to be made in micro-scale RPG publishing to attract professionals. And the lack of professionalism of the books they produce reflects on the game they're supporting. There's a reason that Paizo buries the web pages for its third-party 'partners'.

How many new players has the Slumbering Tsar really brought to Pathfinder? It's a prestige product that sits mouldering on the shelves of 950 of its 1,000 backers.

Hardcore geeks are fine with narrowly-targeted, amateur PDFs and POD books. But I don't have any confidence that they appeal to the casual and new gamers WotC is targeting Next at. And if WotC can't create varied and high-quality adventure support for Next, they're dead in the water anyway.

Quote from: James Gillen;685015You're assuming that Wizards had the foresight to realize what a problem that would be in the long run.

My posts assume no such thing. If anything I am trying to argue that what they did was stupid because they not think through the long term implications of the OGL on future D&D business...

Because if they had someone who could think more than a few years ahead they wouldn't have allowed the creation of OGL.

Maybe it's the lack of inflection with this medium - in 20/20 hindsight the OGL was a bad pure business move for WotC.

Which turned out to be good for everyone else.

Quote from: James Gillen;685015Because obviously, they didn't have the foresight to realize that changing their entire strategy for the company in favor of a strictly proprietary system that quickly wore out its welcome would be even LESS successful in the long run.  

JG

I 100% agree with everything in bold.

Quote from: Daddy Warpig;685091Yes, the OGL made competing with D&D easier, in many ways. It created opportunities for people outside WOTC to thrive. That doesn't mean WOTC would be better off with no competitors.

(in Bold) That's all I'm saying - which from a pure business perspective was stupid of WotC to allow.

In Business the whole point is to defeat or eliminate the competition in order to grab as much market share as you can to make money...

Business 101:

Do not give away your money making IP so that others can use it to compete against you in the long run.

Do not trust-bust your own market share monopoly.

These are basic things you just do not do to yourself if you have the kind of market position WotC had...

Their lack of foresight in creating their own competitors that use what used to be their own IP is epically stupid.

Quote from: Daddy Warpig;685091Monopolists have no motivation to improve. And without the OGL competitors, Wizards would have no motivation to acknowledge their failures and correct course. ... without the OGL people would never had to admit the problem.
 ...So, like TSR in the mid-1990's, they would have continued to push 4e as their sales slid and slid, and tried more of the same "get the MMO crowd" design tactics that were supposed to grow the hobby (but didn't). We'd have another long slide into obsolescence for D&D and the hobby.
... There is no way that a lingering death would be good for WOTC. And, without the OGL and the competition it allowed, that's what we would have.  

The lack of sales would eventually lead WotC to correct the 4e disaster. Just like 3e eventually replaced 2e.

Would it have taken Longer?  Yes.

But from WotC's point of view;  So what?

WotC would still have their quasi-monopoly. From a pure long term $$$ perspective that is still good for WotC.

Quote from: Daddy Warpig;685091But the OGL was great for the hobby ...
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Yes, absolutely! OGL was good for the hobby.  I'm not arguing against that...

I am just saying that from a pure mercenary, monopolist, business, evil empire perspective; OGL was not a smart move for WotC.

OGL allows competitors to pop up when/if WotC screws up an edition. Which they immediately went and did!

With OGL/pathfinder out there WotC now has to get their hustle on to try and get back lost market share as fast as possible, before the good folks at Pazio can really leverage their position...

And as I already posted before:

Quote from: Jaeger;685091From a pure market perspective this kind of competition is great for the consumer and the hobby.

And all this is possible because WotC basically did a trust bust on themselves with the OGL.

Which was stupid of WotC.

But good for everyone else.