Ladies and gentlemen, here we are, two weeks into 2023 - and holy shit! We do live in interesting times, RPG wise.
RPG business wise, I suppose. This is about the OGL of course; I alluded to it in my yearly post, but that was before the actual document was leaked. What WOTC was actually trying to do was worse than even most of the pessimists feared. It was bad.
This has been in the news for more than a week (and WOTC has done nothing but issue a mealy mouthed statement about a revised version of the new license), and has been widely reported and discussed, so I won't go too deep here. But:
What's wrong with this "OGL" 1.1? Basically -
1) It claims to deauthorize the OGL 1.0 OGL 1.0 has been around since 2000, released with third edition; it uses the word "perpetual" - though not "irrevocable", a choice that will feed a lot of lawyers. There is another clause that says that though the OGL can be changed by WOTC, you can use any "authorized" version fo thew license to publish material. Clearly, when this was written, no one imagined that any published version could somehow become unauthorized. We can guess that from the language used, though we also know it because the writers of the OGL 1.0 have said so explicitly. But WOTC apparently thinks otherwise, in 2023. This is, in any case, the biggest cause of wrath about this new license.
2) Later in the document, there is a clause allowing them to change the license as they see fit, with 30 days notice. This is another clause that is utter anathema. This lets them change all the other terms in the license - which we will get to - without any clarity about what happens to material published under this license after they change it. Not good.
The other objectionable parts are more specific to the contract itself. That is, I think you can split resistance to the new license into two parts: those above, that wreck the very framework of licensing; and the contents of the license, its terms - which are more bad or good in themselves, but don't really affect the rest of the world.
3) OGL 1.1 adds royalties on revenue about 750,000 - this is a change that might not seem all that terrible, except - the royalties are 25% of revenues - gross, not profits. That is onerous.
4) There are requirements to register works made under the license, and report income over 50,000. Again - good or bad - though coupled with WOTC's ability to change the license at any time, to lower the royalty threshold, for instance - it's not reassuring.
5) There is a clause that grants WOTC a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty free, world wide license to anything anyone publishes under the new license. This, needless to say, is another non-starter.
There's more, but that's enough. As it is, there's no reason at all to agree to it, and most rumors go that the purpose of distributing it was to get large entities to cut their own separate deals. That doesn't seem to have happened. The backlash has been close to universal. The companies using the OGL have been scrambling to get away from it. Paizo is sponsoring a new license, the Open RPG Creative License (ORC) which they hope to replace the OGL with. It will be system and company neutral (hosted by a neutral third party), with buy in across the industry. Meanwhile, Kobold Press is planning to issue their own game system - Project Black Flag. I mention those two because they are among the most prominent OGL-based publishers, but pretty much everyone is reacting similarly.
It is, in short, a complete disaster for WOTC and Hasbro (and D&D). No one is defending this new license, not even WOTC. They have issued one statement - a gutless and dishonest deflection, claiming the leaked OGL was a "draft" to elicit feedback, and claiming they will back off the royalties and the license-back clause (my #5), adding some weasel words about 1.0 being "unaffected" - but not addressing the big issues, the ongoing authorization of 1.0 and their ability to modify the license at will. Of course this came without an actual OGL, draft or final or anything else, so let's not get too excited.
Everyone else is hammering it. Youtube and Twitter are awash is complains and analysis and speculation and what should I start playing now posts. WOTC's competitors are running sales and promising new systems to compete with D&D and so on. And since it came out that what WOTC and Hasbro care about most are D&D Beyond subscriptions (no surprise - all of this seems to be tied to an effort to turn D&D into an online subscription model), people have been cancelling their D&D Beyond subs in droves.
It's all - amazing to see. What on earth possessed them to think this was a good idea? Sure they want to get more money out of D&D - but they could do that by offering the services they are clearly trying to offer! Get that VTT up and running! make it better than all the rest! keep your stuff closer to hand! None of this required getting a cut of Pathfinder's income or pissing off every gamer with a webcam on earth. All of this seems to me to add up to WOTC deciding that the D&D brand is more valuable to them than the D&D game - they want to sell the experience, they want to sell it to other markets - they want movies and TV shows and everything else, they want people playing it online and paying for everything on there - that's what they want. And they can look at the brand that way because it is the dominant brand in the TTRPG world. And it is the dominant brand in the TTRPG world because of the OGL.
All that third party content supports the D&D brand. It has made D&D the definitive RPG, made it almost synonymous with RPGs. It pushes everyone - all those new people, getting into games because of stranger things or whatever it is, to D&D. Last year, before all this nonsense hit, there was controversy about the way people kept trying to port other games into D&D. Someone was making a 5E compatible version of Dr. Who. Paizo was looking into publishing their material for 5E. People would watch Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and ask how to make edgerunners for D&D 5E! despite the actual game it was based on being right there in the title! All this created a massive body of material that WOTC could tap into to sell their brand. They did not need to shut it down - they just needed to take their cut as all of it fed into their system.
What can I say. Now, people will look at other games, think twice about buying any WOTC products, and think three times about doing anything on D&D Beyond, and might even skip their movie, and stop buying tee shirts and everything else. They are going to lose millions of dollars on this and run the risk of letting someone else reap all those benefits. I don't know.
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