"WotC/Hasbro caves! Abandons all plans to alter OGL." Topic

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So all the fuss of the last month over D&D is done. The OGL 1.0a which many third party creators and publishers like Paizo and Kobold Press relied on for producing products remains intact and unchanged. WotC is backing off their attempt to prohibit third party development of Virtual TableTop products. And they have officially placed their SRD generic rules text under the Creative Commons license— an apparently irreversible move.

The fans and third party creators are sticking their heads out and saying, "Wait— did we just win?"

I'm not quite ready to say the dragon has been slain, but…maybe?

15,000 survey responses is pretty incredible.

That's good news. Who will they fire over this debacle?

Or will they wait six months and do it again?

Mike Bunkermeister Creek

Who will they fire over this debacle?

Hasbro just laid off 1000 employees.

And yes, they will lie low and be back.

From what I've read, legally the release of the SRD— a document which contains the rules in plain language, including charts, monster stats, magic spells, etc.— under the Creative Commons license is irrevocable. (Of course, under actual copyright law this is like announcing that public domain game mechanics and processes do not belong you, but that may not really be relevant at this point.) So, according to law, they won't be able to stop that.

Also, there was already considerable commentary among intellectual property attorneys that the original OGL could not be terminated or altered by WotC anyway— that it was a contract which could not be changed, revoked or broken by WotC, no matter what they had just tried to say.

Plus, there was growing buzz about letting the whole thing go to court, where the precedents do not actually favor WotC's position at all.

And they were already out millions of dollars in just one month from the loss of D&D Beyond subscriptions.

Finally, the stock just dropped significantly on rumors of a bad quarterly report.

I don't think they're gonna "lie low and be back."

I expect that at least one executive's head is gonna roll. (There are already rumors that the current guy in charge of all this is greatly disliked by employees and has a lot of negative baggage, making it possible he could be dismissed for "other" reasons as a fall guy to appease customers, employees and angry shareholders… but that's rumor, so I'm not naming him, and execs tend to protect their own…)

The problem is this: The damage has already been done. As someone on another forum said: "Nobody in their right mind will trust WOTC again and sign a licensing agreement."

They could come up with another licensing agreement for D&D Next or whatever the NEW D&D is going to be called. Paizo and Kobold Press have their own projects in the works, spurred on by the WOTC debacle. It's going to cost them market share, even more then it already has. Rumor has it that Paizo has already sold 8 months worth of Pathfinder 2E books in a week or so, people are jumping ship and I suspect will continue to do so. Me, I'll continue playing D&D until my group finds something that suits their needs better, I have more material then I can run in two lifetimes as it is. :)