* Wizards of the Coast (WoTC) has been tasked by Hasbro (which owns WoTC) to drastically increase profits over a few years.
* WoTC has been aggressively increasing prices on Magic the Gathering (MTG) and drastically increased the diversity of products. This overwhelmed even people who follow and produce MTG news. Wallet fatique is rampant and people are disgruntled.
* WoTC releases the 30th aniversary edition for MTG, which is 60 random cards for 1000 $ which are officially marked as non-tournament legal. The MTG community is furious and for once people from all corners of the community come together to boycott this product. The rage is great and enduring.
* WoTC fails to meet expectations and the stock prices plummet
* To do damage control, WoTC/Hasbro annouces a "fireside chat" for their shareholders where they try to explain the situation but basically just say "we did nothing wrong and we are trying to extract a lot of money from Dungeons and Dragons next"
* Unlike the MTG community, the DnD community is very good at organizing a unified response and the shitstorm came swiftly and took WoTC by surprise. (Don't mess with Dungeon Masters who know how to call together a group of people)
The real problem is the managers at WoTC that don't really care about the games. They only care about money. I expect more bad things in the future.
> The real problem is the managers at WoTC that don't really care about the games. They only care about money. I expect more bad things in the future.
The same seems to be true with Games Workshop and I've never understood this. The products from both companies have huge markups (painted cards and pieces of plastic) and I'd assume that they could actually have a far larger market and profit by concentrating on scale rather than treating their products as luxury items. There's a clear reason that a lot of people are printing miniatures (pirating) from both franchises. I wouldn't be surprised if open sourced alternatives to these games soon spike in popularity as more people get fed up.
I think a lot of people have had the following conversation (in either direction)
Alice: Do you play Warhammer 40k?
Bob: No, I play MTG. I'd love to play 40k but I can only afford one addiction.
This just doesn't seem like it makes for a sustainable business practice. Even if we might consider that the total cost of entertainment isn't that extreme (there is low diversity for these games compared to a videogame or sports habit), people have a hard time justifying those prices for playing cards and plastic models because they intuitively understand that there is a huge markup.
> I'd assume that they could actually have a far larger market and profit by concentrating on scale rather than treating their products as luxury items
I'm not sure that's true. The actual bottleneck with these games is not money but time and interest: you have to have a group of people who all like the same game, and you have to be able to get the group together regularly to play it. There are plenty of people who are interested, but I suspect that the vast majority of them are already players of whatever game they favor (if they haven't switched to something like World of Warcraft--see below), so I don't know that there's a lot of untapped market share.
As for getting the group together to play, when all of the players are teenagers in school or college, that's relatively easy. It gets a lot harder when people are adults and have to work, pay mortgages, deal with various curve balls that adult life always throws at you, etc. And if you know you're not going to be able to devote the time to it that you used to as a kid when you learned the games (I started playing D&D in eighth grade, and spent far more hours playing it between then and graduating from high school than I have in all the years since--and my 40 year high school reunion is this year), it gets a lot harder to justify spending money on game materials.
Another factor is the availability of online games like World of Warcraft, which I mentioned above. These games solve the time and interest problem in a way that can't help scaling much better than in person tabletop play: you can play from your computer at home and there are always other people online playing. There are also limitations, of course: for example, you can't make up your own adventures and you can't have house rules, which were both features of every D&D campaign I have ever encountered. But it's another factor that I think tends to limit the size of the available market for games like D&D.
All of the above factors seem to me to indicate that there is a natural limit to the size of the market for games like the ones WoTC is producing, and the actual active market is close to that limiting size. If that's true, then the option of trying to make more money by scaling instead of markup simply isn't available to them.
I left the game as I got older. At the end of the day it just didn’t make sense to spend what magic cost if I could only play a few hours a week. It’s easy to spend over $3600/year on M:TG if you want to play competitively and that just doesn’t make sense to me if I’m getting roughly 100 hours of play in. I could do far better things with over $30/hour for hobbies.
I've always enjoyed the limited formats. I've periodically checked back in and played in prereleases or leagues or whatnot, without ever committing to building something preconstructed.
I think I may be done, though. The power and complexity creep has gotten to me in the past few years. I can understand that cards need to be rebalanced, or that new rules get introduced over time, but the complexity of the current version of the game has gotten out of hand. The cynic in me says that the power creep is there so that people playing formats like modern will pay for new sets, and since the new cards are more powerful and have more abilities, it drags down the game.
(will try be a bit verbose here so that people who are not MTG fans will still be able to follow sorry if it's a slog to get through!)
I was in a similar boat, though for a long time during university I shared a collection with a friend and we did a pretty good job at selling off stuff to keep the effective costs down.
Since 2016, I stopped playing heavily rotational formats like Standard [for those unfamiliar, there's many different formats of MTG which are played and 'Standard' is one of the most popular ones in which you can play "all the mainline cards released from the last X sets", normally ~2 years worth], and moved to Modern [all cards printed since mid-2003 are playable]. My hope was that because of the longer (and growing) availability of cards, Modern would be more affordable in the long term - since decks would remain viable for long periods of time (perhaps with small adjustments with new cards coming out) and would retain value as a result.
Then over ~20 months, that view changed a lot. First Wizards banned Oko & Mox Opal in January 2020. Firstly, these cards lost value directly - but they also caused quite a big shift in the metagame to the point where entire decks got awful, and hence less valuable. Then in mid-2021 they released the Modern Horizons 2 set, which had a massive impact on very many Modern decks (per MTGGoldfish, 8 of the 10 most commonly played creatures in the Modern metagame at the moment are from Modern Horizons 2). Once again, this totally decimated the value of many existing cards.
I hate the sort of "MTG Finance" approach to the MTG scene, but like you say - it's hard to justify $30/hr for a hobby, and its clear that Hasbro will print whatever it takes to maximize their profits (even if it has a significant negative impact on existing customers).
There are, such as pauper. I’ve also heard of playing with a total $ limit per deck, at time of construction.
The main limiting factor is what you can convince folks to play. Game stores have the main formats, and unknown amounts of money spent, but you can do whatever with your friends!
> I'm not sure that's true. The actual bottleneck with these games is not money but time and interest: you have to have a group of people who all like the same game, and you have to be able to get the group together regularly to play it.
For campaign based games like DND and other RPGs I'd agree, but with the specific examples of MTG and 40k I highly disagree. You do not need to meet regularly for MTG (card) or 40k (miniature) style games as they can easily be played as one-offs. While RPGs have one-shots they are far less common and the overhead is quite high compared to MTG/40k (just show up with your deck/army). In addition to this, games like MTG and 40k are often played 1v1 (though can expand) and this makes the scheduling problem easier since you only need to find compatible times for 2 people rather than 3-5 (or more).
Typical MTG and 40K players sing vast amounts of time into the hobby aside from the time actually playing. It's most obvious with 40K where you can spend weeks painting an army, but for both people also read the books, rules and supplements, spend time on forums, going to meetups and conventions. They're both massive time sinks. Says he that's been obsessed with 'tabletop' RPGs since the early 80s.
You absolutely will. I just got back into it after a 25 year hiatus, and playing with young people that weren't even born back then, and having a blast in the process.
There's a thriving comunity out there, and so far I've been welcome with open arms every time I've reached out.
You don’t need to wait. I run a group with a schedule specifically designed for parents of young children. (virtual, short sessions, immediately after bedtime). There are others!
look for “D&D Encounters” in your area. This is very common in game stores and they’re designed for drop-in players or first timers to try out D&D. This is how I got back into D&D 10 years back after not having played since the early ‘90s.
Most products start off fueled by passion and love, but once the original masterminds move on the people left are the beancounters who are more interested in the fruits of the product rather than the product itself.
We see this happen basically everywhere with almost no exceptions.
I play chess and also follow it as a professional sport. I suck at it but it's fun anyway, it costs nothing unless you play in money tournaments, costs very little unless you play in BIG money tournaments, and as far as I can tell it seems to offer everything that video games do in terms of skill challenge, social connection, and all of that. I'm sure these expensive video games have a reason to exist but I haven't figured out what it is.
I played D&D in high school when it consisted of a few (often xeroxed) rulebooks, some funny looking dice, some graph paper, and the players' own imaginations. The current version sounds awful by comparison.
Videogames are expensive when you are young. It might be more expensive than chess, but it quickly becomes one of the cheapest hobbies of most adults. It's sure cheaper than going out drinking an extra night each week.
Fair enough about the cost, but the thing is, chess isn't under any company's control and it has history and traditions going back for centuries. There is a sense of grandeur when you move a pawn even as the lowliest patzer, that no amount of GPU-enhanced videogame graphics can replicate. You almost feel the blood of Lasker and Capablanca running through your veins.
One of my favorite movies is a biodoc about a Soviet-era player from Kazakhstan, on youtube (1st of 3 parts, around 15 minutes each: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_Io7jbHsYs ). I can't imagine someone making a movie like that about a Warhammer player. But, that's just me.
There's plenty of reasons not to like abstract games.
Abstract games are highly, highly dependent on memorization and repetition. In lower tiers a Go or Chess player that's played more games or memorized more positions will handily beat a player who hasn't. The sheer hours needed to get to high level chess play, where memorization doesn't matter as much anymore, is insane. There's a reason most great chess players start out young.
Abstracts are also perfect information games. I like games that simulate aspects of real life, and anything with perfect information immediately breaks my immersion.
Exactly this. As an avid board game player this is one of the things that has always frustrated me about chess. Those that like to play have been playing for a long time and there is a steep learning curve. Even the parent was throwing off vernacular. This is not just intimidating to many newcomers but will likely put them off because it is difficult to see yourself make progress. On the other hand, most board games have luck elements in them and have a wide range of luck-skill balances. You'll find that how people are introduced to board games (and videogames) depends on what game they try first. If that game requires a high skill level (or worse, high skill and high dependence on opening actions, like Catan (unfortunately is a common "intro game")) then people tend to not like "board games" in a general sense. But once people are comfortable with the space and patterns (there's only so many concepts in gaming) then they are far more open to more complex rule sets and more skill based games. Chess and Go's killer problem is that it is difficult to get started. Ironically we're on a form of mostly programmers and this is analogous to the "Python before C++" argument, but with less benefits to the C++ side.
If you are new to chess you will probably be a bad player, but it is still fun. I've been at it for decades and I'm still a bad player. I don't mind. I don't memorize much of anything. It's more like math puzzles. I suppose if I studied the right way and had more chess ambition, I'd be stronger than I am, but I don't try to be competitive, so it's fine. It's easy for me to find opponents at about the same level and have enjoyable games. That made a good way to relax after a busy week of work or school, meet other nerds, etc. That was all I wanted from it. I had no dream of becoming a grandmaster or anything like that, so I was happy. YMMV.
Added: Look at some of the PogChamps tournaments on youtube. The players are youtube streamers who are chess beginners and they play horribly, but they are still a blast.
I prefer playing games with my friends in real life than with strangers over the internet. That’s the biggest reason I don’t play abstract strategy games much.
Chess is not a great shared game for a group of friends. You all need to be somewhat close in skill to each other (or else the outliers will get bored of playing chess with the group). That also means that you all need to progress at relatively similar rates.
The board games I like to play are thematic, introduce a bit of luck, and are engaging for players of all skill levels. They don’t allow for nearly the same level of mastery that chess does, but that’s exactly what makes them so fun to play as a group.
I've never played chess on the internet. I went to chess clubs, played in cafes, and that sort of thing. There were players of every level from beginner to master. I got to know several people there and became housemates with one for a while. I stay away from such things these days because of the pandemic, but maybe I'll get to take it up again someday.
Besides playing, watching chess videos is interesting too. I like the youtube PowerplayChess channel for updates on top level events and historical games. There are lots of other channels too.
For all their faults, Games Workshop is really a miniatures company that has a ruleset, rather than games company that sells plastic models. I recall seeing a statistic that the majority of their customers don’t regularly play, and a shocking number have never played a game. Those customers are buying models because they think the models are neat, and are deriving fun from the act of assembling and painting.
From that perspective, the business is as sustainable as Star Wars or Marvel: as long as this Thor offers a better fantasy than generic Thors, the brand will last (and accumulate the advantages of a deep, lasting history), and therefore will outlast competitors.
It's interesting to see that particular segment of the "build and paint models" universe survive and thrive when you see contraction in a lot of other areas.
I'm fond of model railways, and it's discarded lots of that heritage. You look in a '70s or 80s magazine, and the projects are "here's a new (inflation-adjusted) $50 kit" or "assemble bits and bobs from three different $20 kits following a detailed article". Today, the equivalent model is only sold fully assembled and painted at $200.
Mantic Games Deadzone... it's not open source but they don't require you to use official models, the box comes with all the army lists, they don't change the rules every 10 minutes and the factions are all suspiciously... familiar (without breaking copyright) and you can just drop in most of your existing 40k miniatures
Getting more money now rather than later allows you to reinvest it sooner, amplifying the compond interests of all your investments. It's about rate of return of investment.
The problem occurs when a business is successful because it moves slow, a critical aspect of modular products. Squeezing blood out of a modular product by manufacturing an inferior run may return investments faster, but it also kills the company.
In keeping with the wizard theme, it's definitely Moloch :)
"What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch!"
"Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!"
>The real problem is the managers at WoTC that don't really care about the games. They only care about money. I expect more bad things in the future.
WOTC is notorious for paying around 50% of the market rate and giving a bunch of free product to employees and generally convincing them that working for poor wages is worth it because of the games. I think senior management doesn't give a shit but middle management and below definitely cares about the games, they just lack the power/ ability to make major decisions.
WoTC (and really, Magic The Gathering specifically) is actually the profitable bit of Hasbro. They were hoping to get similar levels out of Dungeons and Dragons.
Unrelated to DnD, but I still have a 2002 email from Alan Hassenfeld the former CEO of Hasbro (HASsenfeld BROthers) in reply to my sending my protest of them moving factories to China. (I know, kind of quaint/futile in hindsight)
It's not at all quaint and futile; don't believe that crap, meant to shut you up. It's awesome you sent that email.
It's futile if your standard is that, as just one person, you will achieve 100% success. Then everything in the world is futile, because nobody ever accomplishes anything significant alone (really - name anyone doing anything) or 100%. (Let's realize also that it would be wrong if one person had that much power. There are others with legitimate, conflicting interests, who should have a 'vote' too.)
But you are part of a larger community, and I promise Hasbro listens to the signals. If they switched manufacturing to China and there was silence, that would be a powerful signal. If all they heard was their shareholders or Wall Street analysts, that would be a powerful signal.
It's not all or nothing, the same goes for most other issues (such as elections). People shift positions based on the response. Maybe less work was shifted to China, then or on a future date; maybe they decided to keep customer service in the US or make the investment more flexible or short term. Maybe they mentioned at Davos, 'wow, we sure heard a lot of complaints about moving the manufacturing', and others heard it and shifted their positions.
Keep talking; the people who say it's futile are the people who want you to shut up.
WoTC is a fairly stable evergreen business. So are most of Hasbros. In fact, WOTC tends to be one of their more dependable units (prior to this fiasco).
Hasbro itself is just a stable stead business. It shouldn't be trying to get hockey stick growth on games.
For context, selling toys to kids is no longer profitable, so Hasbro is going all in on making and selling toys for adults. This is a massive pivot for the company, and lots of the existing staff will ultimately be laid off. That’s why everyone there is behaving erratically.
Since much of your market is actually parents, you're in a more secure place than a lot of other businesses: people are going to be more willing to pay for a trusted brand. There's always going to be various FUD of "off-brand toys might be unsafe".
There's probably a risk factor-- you may not have THIS YEAR'S HOT TOY,--but I'd think the exact same problem applies to an adult audience, who is probably even more fickle because they don't have to get Mom and Dad to gatekeep their purchase decisions.
There's only so much water in the well, though, and they might well be close to that limit. It's not an infinitely growable market, it's a niche product. True, the niche has gotten quite large in recent years, but at this point it's at least as likely to shrink as to grow.
One would think that it would be true of pretty much _any _ market. I know it's not being meant literally, but even so, there are only so many people in the world, and people only have so much money. Even something that's essential for everyone like food is going to be limited by that; eventually you'd need to wait for there to be more people if you want to be able to sell more.
Myself I have never been a fan of D&D, particularly I can't stand running a D&D game, character progress so far that it gets in the way of meaningful storytelling. I much prefer the next generation of games such as Paranoia or Call of Cthulhu because you really can kill players off. Either that or games that are very simple to run like Toon. In D&D I think the game dynamics get in the way of the improvisational acting aspect that Gygax encouraged.
That only works if other players accept that you play with proxies. I personally am completely fine with proxies, but I know that not everyone is. And game shops that allow people to play with proxies can get in trouble with WoTC.
> Don't mess with Dungeon Masters who know how to call together a group of people
Don't mess with Dungeon Masters who have converted their campaign into 2 seasons on Amazon Prime. Just sit back and collect the checks for the free advertising.
Critical Role is a bunch of voice actors who are geeks (said affectionally and consider that these are the people who were in the acting club and comedy sports back in high school... they're still geeks today) and get together and play D&D.
> In March, the folks behind the “Dungeons and Dragons” webseries launched a Kickstarter campaign to create an animated special based on its first campaign. Within an hour of its launch, it raised more than $1 million in funding.
And you can see that there is a lot of money there... but there's also a "these people have a sizable following and even those who are second hand consumers of D&D and don't sit down at a table are now aware of what is trying to be done to it."
Critical Role, a web D&D show that has had its stories turned into animations. The one that has been released is named The Legend of Vox Machina, after their first campaign's troupe.
There speculation that the godkiller in the third campaign is there because Matt was privy to the new OGL under NDA and the main thing that ties the world he built to D&D is the pantheon. He makes his own monsters all the time, but he still has Vecna, the Raven Queen, the Wildmother, even though he gives them different names in some regions.
Sure would be a shame if something happened to that copyrighted material…
Cleverer still, in C2 and EXU he established that there is forbidden knowledge of ways that a mortal can become a god by replacing one. And when you kill a god, memory of your predecessor fades amongst mortals. Nobody human remembers the dead gods (I think it’s implied the other gods remember).
So if you can rewrite history such that only the gods remember the real story, but all of the gods are dead, you either have no pantheon or a new pantheon.
CR also still has modified versions of Sarenrae (Rae) and Taldor (Taldor'ei) from Pathfinder, so it's also possible they just do nothing or only use the non-copyrighted alternate names from now on.
That’s just bad accountants. CR sells a book through WotC’s publisher. That’s bank. CR is sponsored by D&D Beyond. THEY USE IT ON THE SHOW. That’s subscriptions. Every book or miniature that people buy because they were inspired to want to play is money Hasbro earns off of their success. It’s all advertising.
Promo codes usually give money to the person shilling the code as a fraction of the promo derived sales. If the company is paying you for advertising, like on YouTube channels, that’s how it’s usually done. But people with established advertising channels can run that the other direction: we’ll promote your stuff and you give us 5% of the gross.
I think WotC could be promoting Dwarven Forge without cannibalizing their own sales, for instance. They make different kinds of miniatures.
>WoTC releases the 30th aniversary edition for MTG, which is 60 random cards for 1000 $ which are officially marked as non-tournament legal. The MTG community is furious and for once people from all corners of the community come together to boycott this product. The rage is great and enduring.
Yet somehow the product completely sold out in under an hour. I really don't understand the outrage on that decision, would you prefer that everyone can buy their useless commutative coins?
It's honestly not so much that set. It's the sheer amount of new supplemental sets that they're throwing out, many of which are cards that you basically _have_ to but to remain competitive.
Formats like legacy and vintage are no longer things you can buy into and play a similar deck for a long period of time. Instead, they're things where you have to buy new cards once every two to four weeks to remain competitive. That's a big change from a few years back when those formats tended to be relative stable for 1-2 year periods.
That's the real thing that folks are frustrated with. The 30th anniversary packs are just something that's easy to point at and go "this is a money grab". If it were just those, it would really be a "to each their own".
Having the creator of the game say "..keep focused on this idea that this is a game first. As if you treat it as a collectible first then you are not doing your game players any favors" during the same event before they announced $300 for 60 proxies threw gas on it.
> It's the sheer amount of new supplemental sets that they're throwing out, many of which are cards that you basically _have_ to but to remain competitive.
That’s literally been going since around Mirrodin. It’s why I gave up on the game.
Now I just have a massive set of only commons that everyone can build their decks with and I don’t have to deal with the insane power inflation.
I think the problem has always existed, but to a much lesser extent than it has in the last 3-4 years. Vintage has always had the bulk of deck's value in Power 9 and lands, and the only recent changes there have been things like Mystic Sanctuary ($1 card), Cavern of Souls ($10 when it came out in 2012, now $50), Urza's Saga ($40), etc. Legacy & Modern also rely on an expensive but versatile land base, but in terms of staples they've both been hit hard by stuff like Modern Horizons 2 where stuff like Ragavan, Urza's Saga, and the elementals (Fury, Endurance, Subtlety, etc) are so pushed that they warp the metagame drastically. I can't think of a time when that was case in a way which impacted so many different decks. Some cards were problematic (Oko!) and made specific decks that included it much better for a time, but I've never seen a single set impact modern in such a big way.
Neither the GP nor the parent to my original comment were correct. Nobody said anything sold out, they ended the sale - which is very different. In fact, there is a lot of evidence that it didn't.
> I really don't understand the outrage on that decision
What decision are you claiming people were outraged?
Because the actual reason people where outraged is the very existence of the magic 30th edition in the first place. It is one of the clearest and starkest examples of a company disrespecting it's customer, ever.
>. It is one of the clearest and starkest examples of a company disrespecting it's customer, ever.
Why?
Compare it to some other fanbases. With music, printing a super pricy limited edition of an album with extra non-music content is a normal decision. With sneakers, that's like the entire market. With comic books limited edition posters and figures are commonplace.
So many fandoms have outlets for the rich megafans that the average fan can just ignore without any real issue. Why is it disrespecting the customer? I can understand disliking the side sets having chase cards that are necessary for some formats, and could see those as disrespecting the customer, but not these.
"We had to create an experience for fans new and old that would be worthy of three decades of the original trading card game." doesn't fit a 250 dollar pack of non-cards.
If it was real very rare cards, there would be upset but they could have made it work.
If it was non-cardlike collectibles, it would have been fine.
But to sell non-legal cards at such a high price is so much the opposite of the community celebration they were pushing for overall.
And the last time they sold something like this, it was the entire set and it wasn't expensive. Even if that was a long time ago.
And wizards constantly pretends that all their pieces of cardboard have similar value, so it's extra obnoxious whenever they price something like this. But this one in particular is an order of magnitude worse even if we forget for a second they aren't legal cards.
And various ways of playing the game are actively dying because it's so hard to get cards like this, which just adds salt.
Also - why are people upset over a product (that doesn't affect the game) being sold to people others? I feel like important context is missing here over why anyone would be upset by this.
My guess is the feeling that if the product is successful, then the corporation might create similar products that are less optional. Or they may neglect or discontinue their less customer hostile products.
It's also probably reasonable to be upset that they are pricing a significant portion of their community out of a product that ostensibly celebrates the success of the community.
Imagine a game with 30 years of history, genre defining, that has die hard fans and then take some cards, make effectively "fake" versions (not tournament legal) and charge $1000 for 60 of them.
They could have done a LOT more cooler things and passionate lovers of the game wish that they did.
Why not make them tournament legal? It’d cut down on some of the insane prices for these things (like house prices, sad for those who just bought at a huge premium, but ultimately good for the rest).
Long story but there is a list of cards called the "reserved list" and WoTC promised to never reprint them. So they got cheeky and said "well, we didn't really reprint them because they aren't legal, see?" Oh, and pay us $1000 for these cards.
I think that there was a sense that WotC was going to do something special for Magic's 30th anniversary - something for the community at large. Instead, they released a mediocre, $1000 product.
This is a segment of geek culture that has all sorts of ego/identity stuff tied up with these brands. So when they don't "act properly" it feels like it reflects on them and they take it personally.
That's the downside to having that market segment as your customers, the upside is that they are fanatically loyal and are not remotely picky or discerning as customers/consumers.
You don't understand why people who own what was supposed to be a limited edition collectible/in game power up got upset when more were released? Cards that they bought for large amounts on the secondary market because WOTC promised they would never be reprinted.
The community WOTC built over decades shouldn't have to give feedback that 85%+ identify with in order to achieve results that are desirable. If community sentiment is so lopsided then what was the rationale to make the decision in the first place and how was the communities' desire not implicitly understood?
There is no doubt in my mind that WOTC (let's be real, Hasbro) has enough self-awareness to have realized they were encroaching significantly on their core demographic. They chose to do so anyway and are backtracking out of an interest of self-preservation rather than a customer-first mindset.
I find this shameful enough behavior to warrant a legitimate, heartfelt apology. Instead, they present themselves as benevolent caretakers listening to their communities' response. This comes across as tone-deaf because they've already lost the trust of the community and don't seem to have learned how to take ownership of that fact.
Still, this is a better result than if they'd stayed their advertised course. So, for that, I am thankful.
> how was the communities' desire not implicitly understood?
IMO it's common for people at the top of a hierarchy to be out of touch with those on the bottom. It takes dedication to stay in touch, but even with effort a bigwig can't experience the community exactly as a peon does. Usually, they have to do market research (like this poll) to find out what people really think.
I'm not saying this as a defense or anything, but I find it helpful to think about.
> IMO it's common for people at the top of a hierarchy to be out of touch with those on the bottom.
The issue is that if you're in charge of a product/community/team/country and are out of touch with the needs/wants of that group then you are clearly mismanaging. You are effectively not performing one of the most essential parts of your job. Bad managers and politicians may be quite common but that does not excuse the actions nor the complaints and frustrations of those operating under the conditions that these leaders have set in place. I do think market research is important and needed but when a community's opinions are near unanimous (3 are ~90%!) it should serve as a huge red flag that you're so far out of touch with your core market that it is highly unlikely that you will be able to return given that you've probably gotten here through years of bad practice and not being involved with your community.
The least they could do is sit down once a month with the game designers for a session of dungeon crawling. The main two in charge have both said they don't play
The only thing worse than obstaining is half-assing it.
Do you really want a bunch of detached people paying just enough attention to something you like that they feel like they can 'contribute' by changing it?
Meeting once a month would be within the normal range for a group playing for fun. On the low side, I think, but it's not "so little attention that it's worse than nothing".
Well, there were two attempts at more minor climbdowns before this capitulation, so it seems more likely that the immediate financial impact from mass unsubscriptions was a motivating factor than prior understanding from the execs who were largely pushing this strategy if leaks are to be believed.
I think if they actually understood the community then they would not have needed this poll, which demonstrated near unanimous opinions. I would not blame anyone for believing that this retraction is simply a means to avoid larger problems and that there will be similar future attempts to make the same unpopular changes. It isn't just a misunderstanding of the community's opinions, but that they just demonstrated that they have almost no clue what those opinions actually are.
Yup, trust once broken cannot be rebuilt easily. Too many companies make these kinds of bad PR moves, backtrack temporarily, and then quietly deploy their plans after the initial furor dies down. I wager that the winds here will shift back to blow against their customers soon enough. Want us to believe otherwise? An apology would only be the start; they need to swallow a legally enforceable poison pill that prevents such from happening.
Software is an expression of something (an algorithm, layout, etc.). So yes, you can copyright it. What you can't copyright is the underlying principles; e.g., the implementation of Google's search engine is protected by copyright, but the notion of a search engine or page rank is not. If someone wants IP restrictions for that, they need a patent, which has its own set of constraints on what is and is not allowed.
Edit to add: this is also why implementations of software from reverse engineering, like ReactOS, are perfectly legal, so long as they don't copy the actual implementation.
Isn't SRD 5.1 essentially just 5e? Unless they start releasing all the 5.5e/One stuff under the same license I can see them just not releasing that under a permissive license. Of course I could be wrong.
Sure, but the outrage from this change came about revoking the license for past works. By putting SRD 5.1 under CC, the situation for many indie creators of working with the SRD becomes clean and clear. Hasbro can do whatever they want going forward with D&D.
Game rules/mechanics usually can't be copyrighted other than just the literal text of descriptions of them. Does this give anything you couldn't have by cloning the rules with different wording flair?
The thing is, compatibility with D&D wasn't necessarily about mechanics. Fundamentally TTRPG mechanics are really just about simulating probability distributions with dice. There's the broader question of how to use a given probability distribution where.
What D&D editions do is develop a set of base mechanics, basic probability distributions, and then create a framework on how to apply them. This includes monsters, races, and classes which have particular attributes or play feel. This includes common roleplaying conflicts and guidance on how to adjudicate them. What a lot of indie RPGs that used OGL 1.0/a did is they made references to things from D&D and used them in ways inspired by D&D. Think "elves" or "faeries" being associated with the mechanics and tropes you'd expect. Now with the new CC-BY-SA 5.1 SRD, you can make explicit references to Elves in derivative works and also license it under CC-BY-SA.
There were always completely separate systems that borrowed nothing from the play feel/world of D&D. Those communities/creators had nothing to fear.
"can't be copyrighted" may be true in the ideal, but there's plenty of haziness around the edges. The particular coloring of each type of dragon is mechanically unimportant, but is a nice mnemonic for the type of breath weapon damage they do. Is dragon coloring function or flavor? If you're a small publisher, you don't have the lawyers to compete with Hasbro in court long enough to find out.
SRD 5.1 doesn't include character creation rules or feats, so it's not even enough from just the PHB/DMG to play. But it's most of what you need, and the what's left can be easily replaced.
The CC grant from the draft OGL 1.2 announcement was much less - it didn't include classes, spells, or creatures. Opening the entire SRD under CC BY makes cloning 5E trivial.
I genuinely think this is WotC giving up on 5.5/One being open. They're going to double down on the Dungeon Master's Guild and its IP-friendly, Hasbro-owned license as the way to create and distribute fan content.
Paizo's seen the target on their back now, I doubt they're going to halt their plans to produce the ORC. I suspect the only way WoTC will be able to get any trust back in the community is to sign on with that
In this case, such a measure actually might help insure continued shareholder profits, by preventing a mass exodus of gamers from their ecosystem. In fact, I would say failing to take such measures might present an existential threat to WoTC, due to the trust that has already been lost.
> has enough self-awareness to have realized they were encroaching significantly on their core demographic.
At least where I am in the US, the behavior of many corporations seems to indicate they... just don't give a shit. People will take what they can get, by and large, and as long as it makes the corporation money, they're willing to risk it.
Who actually _likes_ not having a single register open at Wal Mart, Home Depot, and the like? Who is for having products be a little bit more expensive, but reducing the quanity 10%-20% (eg: shrinkflation)? Plenty more examples.
A minor point, but I am grateful for the self checkout lanes — they have greatly speeded up my checkout, and w/ covid spiking I just want to leave asap.
I don't mind the OPTION of self checkout, but not having the choice is a big fuck-you to the customers purely to make more millions of profit. At our local Wal Mart, they have registers for humans, but no humans are ever there. 100% do it yourself, with someone wanting to check your receipt. I never stop, if they want to see it's done right, hire someone to do it right.
Home Depot is getting to be that way, though you can go to the "professionals" checkout if you need human interaction, and they don't seem to mind us plebs doing so if there aren't contractors waiting. And they have the cust. svc. desk too.
Recently, our local grocery store has started a "no humans" checkout after some arbitrary time of day; I think ~17:00. This is 10x worse since there we tend to buy things that require human input; notably produce that isn't pre-wrapped and pre-priced and goes by the # for cost.
Not the US, but no manned registers happens often enough across various store chains here in Dublin at least. To the point where you might have to wave down a staff member restocking a shelf because the self-service needs someone to authorise your alchohol purchase or whatever.
Are you implying that there are major jurisdictions in the US where WotC wouldn't have been able to fully enforce compliance with their (originally) overly restrictive license?
Presumably michaelcampbell means "There might be ethical corporations elsewhere, US equivalents of Mondragon Corporation for example, I don't claim to have proven the complete nonexistence of corporations that give a shit"
I doubt that you are, honestly, and knew exactly that I meant "where I am, I am seeing evidence of corporations pushing profit to limits we haven't seen before".
I disagree because the fundamental core of this argument is "everyone in a community should think alike". That isn't realistic, and using that as a principle leads to bad results - we have to be used to having robust communities with questionable leadership. The natural state of leadership is to be a bit shabby and not quite up to the task. We have the internet now, we have great visibility on what leaders actually do and they can't meet impossible standards. Although that is why decentralisation is so powerful - WOTC doesn't run your games night and doesn't send out a goon squad to police that people aren't using house rules.
WOTC don't have the same incentives as their community. A company producing a game almost never has the same incentives as their community. As long as their incentives align with folding in the face of solid negative feedback, that is enough.
They made a mistake, they appear to have recognised the mistake and course corrected. Asking for more than that is going to get less - it encourages lies and bad, blandness.
I think they've completely misunderstood their product. The execs in charge of running the show come from video games, and watching what they're trying to do with DnD beyond makes it pretty obvious they're trying to introduce micro transaction hell and loot boxes into the product.
Matt Colville whacked the nail on the head when he said D&D isn't really a game, it's a folk tradition and storytelling. Those are two very difficult things to monetize.
Yes, that is a critical part. They want to make DnD Beyond the core of the product. The main channel, where "ideally" both, DMs and players, have to buy each little piece of content and an expensive subscription to create their own scenarios instead of books, which are expensive to produce, ship etc. and then are shared in a group (or kept for DM's eyes only) And they "have to" extract as much revenue from third parties like Paizo and get consumers of their platform.
If they get rid of story telling etc. they even can look at AI DMs leading a Dungeon Crawl to increase time of their consumers on their platform, even without fixed groups etc. Extract as much value as possible (and destroy the game)
Ah yes, and then if you try to tell even the slightest bit controversial story about say, adventuring in an ancient Egyptian city with slaves, that will be flagged as hateful content and you’ll be banned from D&D forever.
It might be that they are out of touch but there is another very sensible reason for all this.
They view D&D as extremely under-monetized (pretty reasonable, they don't make much off each player on average) and they have a huge influx of new fans and interest.
So why does everyone assume they care about the existing fans, who don't give them money, so much? Maybe they just decided they don't care, they'll get new fans who actually spend money and want to play their combined digital VTT/new D&D edition/microtransactions and lootboxes thing?
That was certainly their gamble... and it clearly didn't work.
The problem for WotC is that Dungeon Masters (DMs) are the decision-makers for the playerbase.
DMs are higher information consumers than players. They are the ones looking up obscure 3rd party homebrew fixes for issues inherent in 5e's design. They are the ones memorizing hundreds of pages of rules _for fun_.
And if your DM says, "I'm going to switch us over to run Pathfinder 2e because Paizo is supporting the community," then you as the player probably just go along with it.
There's still a lot to see about what D&D One actually is in terms of product and not system. But these moves really make me suspect that they're going to try to make it a walled garden of player-driven transactional rewards, and to minimize the DM role as much as possible.
If their theoretical, non-existent One VTT does all the mechanical work for the DM and dresses up lots of cheap player customization options that players actually want, the DM's power to decide the system is diminished. If anyone can DM without memorizing hundreds of rules and looking up obscure 3rd-party homebrew fixes, Hasbro bets the DM can yell all they want, the players will go to One.
I don't know or think it'll succeed - there's zero track record from anyone involved in this specific kind of venture - but I think this is Hasbro giving up on the tabletop community and going all in on VTTs and casuals who don't know (or know but don't like or care) about any existing community. If Hasbro already aren't making money off DMs, and they couldn't bend the existing DMs creating content into their new system, then they'll take their cultural cachet and do something on their own that doesn't require that kind of DM.
Yeah. Why not? Monetizing only 20% of the player base in DMs isn't making them enough money to justify the investment otherwise, and casual DMs don't care about any of this.
> The problem for WotC is that Dungeon Masters (DMs) are the decision-makers for the playerbase.
DMs are higher information consumers than players.
I think this is a very important point to recognize. The proper market unit for a game like D&D is the play group, led by the DM, not the individual player.
I don't think a DM will go entirely against their players' wishes, but I could easily see a DM and 2 players deciding they can 'work on' the rest of the group. So you could lose 100% of your users by pissing off the wrong 33%. Or 50% for pissing off 1/6th of your users. Which still supports the road trip etiquette of "don't piss off the driver."
Even that understates the situation, I think. Most players I know just aren't that particular about what system they play. (Sometimes they are particular about what system they don't play.) So if the DM says "I'm going to run the next campaign in Pathfinder", their players will shrug and look up Pathfinder character options. The more invested players might have more of a "cool, I've been meaning to give that a try" response. I don't know anyone personally who would fight against such a thing or quit the group because they only want to play D&D 5e.
As a DM, I'm partial to 5e because I already know it inside and out, so I can forget about the mechanics and just focus on the story. But aside from the sheer volume of official and "D&D compatible" material, I don't think it has anything going for it that other systems lack.
I'm not sure these are the same market segments. Generally though, I agree. DMs are also the people buying most of the merchandise (books, supplements, etc) so they're going to drive more of the conversation around systems.
This is the thing that makes me realize the small amount of roleplaying I did growing up wasn't really indicative of "the community", such as it is. For my family and friends group who played, the sourcebooks served as inspiration, something to read to get the ball rolling. Dice were just an arbitrary mechanic to fall back on as a way to add gambling-style tension to encounters or prompt players to come up with a more creative solution. Nobody ever wants to "lose" an interactive storytelling session so getting caught up in rules feels against the spirit of the thing. And yet, here we are. I guess a lot of players take the rules and the lore a lot more seriously than we ever did.
Depends on when you played. Earlier editions of D&D were much more like this, offering guidelines with dice and otherwise just leaving it up to DM or group discretion. This usually demands more of the group and also makes it harder to stitch a wide, cohesive story together. Later editions responded to this and added more mechanics and rules to D&D.
Yeah, there's a form of D&D which is "I want to tell an interactive story and see where it goes" where the dice are basically just a way to keeping things a bit sane, and then there's "let's simulate a computer program using sheets of paper and a bunch of random number generators" which I kind of feel is where D&D went.
Us too. Though in the end we settled on the Fighting Fantasy RPG rules as they were simple enough to play in the school playground whilst also providing just a little bit of authority to decisions.
Why didn't it work? Paizo had a big jump in sales ... for Paizo, the numbers are a rounding error for WotC.
Same with the DnDBeyond boycott drive, did that actually make a dent? To me there is basically no evidence for this supposed level of consumer power that the fandom is claiming they have. WotC's response was the most half-assed, who-gives-a-shit, PR statement I've ever seen. They did not treat it like a real PR issue at all.
> They are the ones looking up obscure 3rd party homebrew fixes for issues inherent in 5e's design.
Well yes, they will definitely be losing those people. However it's a small percentage of DMs who are even aware of 3rd party stuff in the first place. Single digit percentage and on the lower end, at best.
I think it's hard for lots of old players to realize that post Critical Role/Stranger Things, they are a tiny minority of the market now, and they kinda suck as consumers if you are trying to extract video game level profits from your players.
My friend, WotC tried to make this change, was hit with backlash, and backed down. That’s a fact. Their statement of backing down is literally the article that you’re commenting on.
Saying “but you didn’t make a dent” is clearly not correct in WotC’s judgement. If they felt they could have made this change and made more money, then they absolutely would have. That’s why they tried. And it didn’t work, per WotC’s own reversal.
The point is they tried to make a money grab from their most influential users. If those users go they take a lot of people with them.
CR started out on Pathfinder. Matt Mercer has been building his own world for 10 years as a full time job. If you convince CR to switch rulebooks a lot of people will follow. If you goad him into making his own rulebook, then you haven't just helped your competition, you just invented new competition.
Real people have disagreements and work through them. Lets not be mad for the sake of being mad. It was completely within the rights of WOTC to do whatever they wanted. People complained and they decided not to do and guarantee they will never do it in the future. Be happy.
I understand what you’re saying, but attempting to revoke a widely-used open source license is not just something completely within their rights.
Their sudden claim to have ability to “deauthorize” the 20+ year old OGL and destroy the partners and competitors who built businesses on the promises of a perpetual license - this was an egregious move that was almost certainly not within their rights.
Legal analysts were quite consistent in that it’s impossible to be certain but this process wouldn’t have withstood a solid legal test.
WotC, in trying to pull this, was attempting to leverage their expensive legal team to bully people into giving away their legal rights under the open license. That’s shady and deeply unethical, and shouldn’t be considered to be within their rights.
Now for the future content they make, they can release that under a closed license if they want and that is within their rights even if I don’t like that license.
Corporations are not "real people" and "they were acting in their rights" is not a defense against criticism for shitty behavior.
Companies that can only be coerced into doing the right things by threatening their bottom line are terrible companies and we SHOULD continue to take action as consumers to dismantle them once we have evidence that they are going to be driven like this.
I’d bet they anticipated the backlash, but thought it could be managed - some short term anger followed by long term profits. It so far hasn’t worked out that way, but these are still recent events; they may just wait to roll out changes more quietly.
They might be right long term, but that's 1) pretty cynical and 2) I think they might have just created the origin story for their competitors. So good news, they're making $1 billion, bad news they are now making $1 billion of a $1.7 billion market instead of $800 million of a $1 billion market.
If anything, this shows the power of a product that is driven by subscriptions. Cancelling subscriptions sent a strong signal to how the player base felt and it was felt high enough that execs pivoted directions.
agreed. a substantial amount of the playerbase and 3rd party creators are looking for non-DnD games moving forward, and Hasbro finally realized they handed the opportunity to take all those players and creators to their competition.
I think people should still switch. Hasbro has shown who they are. Is there a DnD transformers crossover yet, like in MtG?
My TTRPG group has been playing together for several years - on and off. We'd been mostly playing D&D 5e, even though we had members clamoring for other systems. After the WotC fiasco started blowing up, we finally bought a couple of Pathfinder 2e books, ran a few trial characters and one-shots. We are now in process of starting a new campaign entirely based on Pathfinder that we expect could take a couple of months to play out.
It really only took us one session to figure out the major mechanical systems in the gameplay, and a few we are still learning about. The major component remains the role playing experience which is the same, no matter which dice you throw to decide outcomes of situations.
I think Hasbro will soon realize that while the social impact of the name D&D is deep, the stickiness of the system is much lower than they gambled on. It's unlikely that any of my member group will soon buy anything new from them.
They spent enough time with this license issue a lot of people have had time to jump over to Pathfinder 2E and settle into a campaign. Its not particularly difficult to do so and when the ORC arrives with 150 independent companies releasing content they likely will never leave. Some of the exodus is going to be permanent especially since in many ways Pathfinder solves a lot of the rules issues people have in DnD.
My group is finishing up a multi-year 5e campaign. None of us had ever played a TTRPG before this, so we've never experienced anything outside of 5e. We were all super excited for OneDND...
But when the OGL changes hit, we canceled our DNDBeyond subscription and are switching to Starfinder as soon as our campaign is done. This announcement from WotC is too little, too late.
The fun is getting together with friends. I don't need WotC or microtransactions for that.
I always recommend people try systems outside of DnD. I've been playing RPGs for almost 2 decades now, and I always liken it to being a fan of movies, and always watching the same movie every week on movie night. DnD is the most popular RPG, and that is really it's strongest point. There are tens of thousands of other games out there, and in my opinion most of them are better than DnD, a lot of them are better at being DnD than DnD is at being DnD.
I'm getting ready to do this with my group as well. So far I'm really enjoying Pathfinder 2e's mechanics. I feel that the three-action system is much more straightforward than 5e's action/bonus action system, and the "Sustain a Spell" action much better than concentration.
The big thing I don't like is the organization of the core rulebook. Considering how heavily conditions are used, would be nice if features and spells that apply conditions mentioned what those conditions did directly in their description, rather than requiring the reader to repeatedly flip to the conditions section. And there's also the unfortunate tendency for some important details to only be explained in the glossary or other unexpected sections[1].
SA would be worse for WotC; as they move to OneD&D, they would rather have the 5.1 derived third party products to be separate silos that draw on the 5.1 base rather than cross-pollinating. So third parties not sharing-alike is what they want.
Great news. I notice they don't say anything about the licensing of "D&D One", and I'm guessing there's a good reason for that, but there's a huge difference between using a different license for your new product and trying to change the license of your existing one.
At least the SRD5 is now irrevocably in the creative commons. So the situation now is somewhat better, they can't simply revoke the license anymore for that document.
As applied to open source licenses, that is a legal theory, not settled law, and there are many people, including lawyers who professionally deal with F/OSS, who disagree with you.
You've asserted something like this a few times on HN, and your responses are undetailed enough (or flavored with fake astonishment, like this one) that you seem to think it's obvious.
Isn't the requirement of attribution the consideration in cases like this? Which would make it not gratuitous? Here's open source lawyer and HN user 'DannyBee saying so, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14557737
Well, this whole thing started with them playing silly games to revoke an irrevocable license.
So... well, I'm not going to be buying anything new from WotC any time soon. I'd say anything from Hasbro, but that's such a big umbrella I'm not sure I could consistently figure out all the subsidiaries.
>>> For the fewer than 20 creators worldwide who make more than $750,000 in income in a year, we will add a royalty starting in 2024. So, even for the creators making significant money selling D&D supplements and games, no royalties will be due for 2023 and all revenue below $750,000 in future years will be royalty-free.
WOTC (Hasbro) was trying to revoke a license the authors intended to be irrevocable. Everything else was a red herring. I'm guessing their legal team had more to do with this change of heart than consumer/publisher feedback.
So the discussions from previous is that having consideration in return for a license makes it a contract rather than a gratuitous license. In this case the OGL specifies that licensing your work as OGL and including the OGL text in your work counts as consideration.
If you think the claim for that being consideration is too frail, the Artistic License from old Perl versions is a similarly permissive license, and Jacobsen vs Katzer held up that it counted as a contract with all that implies for revocability and (in particular for that case), whether failure to uphold your end is copyright infringement or breach of contract.
Some more context (and in particular how it applies to open source - if you use MIT licensed software, the idea that permissive licenses are gratuitous licenses is not a precedent you want set): https://lwn.net/Articles/747563/
The original author is on record stating that it was intended to be irrevocable. There was also a quote on the official WOTC website stating the license couldn't be revoked. IANAL but I wouldn't take that case to court.
The original author was an executive at WotC, with access to professional legal advice. If they wanted the license to be irrevocable, they would have put it in the license.
If we look at other contemporary licenses reviewed by professional legal advice, like the GPLv2, Creative Commons v1-3, MIT, Apache v1, they all have the same omission of irrevocable, and it was about another ten years before they released newer iterations with that magic language (or didn't, in the case of MIT).
It's also not speculation that that was the intent of the original author, they're on record from both the time of license publication as a wizards employee and recently in light of the controversy and both 20 years ago and today were consistent they meant it to be irrevocable
> It's also not speculation that that was the intent of the original author, they're on record
Yes, a corporate executive is on record making a claim like that. Do you take it a face value?
This person is a sophisticated actor in a company that runs on IP. It doesn't matter what FOSS licenses said, and I don't have time to look into that. If Wizards wanted "irrevocable", it would say that. Did you see Wizards' attempt to redefine 'irrevocable' in the first revised draft? Same company.
> Yes, a corporate executive is on record making a claim like that. Do you take it a face value?
When there's twenty years of track record and a prior occasion (D&D 4e's GSL) where it would have been advantageous for them to try this, sure. You can't have a legal contract say an ambiguous statement then spend a literal decade promoting one interpretation then switch to another. This is why US laws about detrimental reliance or EU standards like promissory estoppel exist.
It does, that's why when, when they wanted to revoke it without also. casting doubt on their next “irrevocable” license, they relied on the “any authorized version” language, and moved to deauthorize the original version.
>> Wizards wanted "irrevocable", it would say that
> It does
I'm almost certain that it does not. I've read the license, and many attorneys have commented on the word's absence. Can you quote where the license sasys that?
So from a little bit of digging around for context (as a non-DnD player):
* SRD = System Reference Document [1], is a kind of specification of the DnD rules, that people use to create add-on DnD-related content.
* OGL = Open Game License [2], which the SRD is licensed under.
* There was a(n apparently very unpopular) proposal to move to OGL 1.2 (which I guess is more restrictive).
* Now it seems like SRD 5.1 will be dual-licensed under both OGL 1.0a and Creative Commons.
(I can feel a rabbit hole awaiting me if I dig further, and I've gotten enough of a gist to satisfy myself, so I didn't look into what a VTT policy is.)
Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast (the company that has owned D&D for the last 20 years) released the rules text and some basic creative content like classes, some monsters, etc. for D&D 3.5 under a custom open source inspired license called the OGL. It's sort of a weird blend of GPL-esque virality clauses but the actual restrictions it places are much more akin to a permissive license like Apache. This led to an explosion of third party content.
When D&D 4e came around, Wizards felt they didn't want to compete with that so they released D&D 4e under a new license called the GSL which was much more restrictive to allow them to shut down competitors, which caused third parties to shun 4e and continue publishing 3.5e content.
Partly because of the continued existence of the 3.5e ecosystem (along with some controversial video game inspired gameplay changes), 4e largely failed and alienated the fanbase. So they released 5e with a number of peace offerings to the community, one of which was that 5e would use the OGL again.
Now Wizards are on the cusp of releasing OneD&D (6e). Part of their strategy for 6e is their own virtual tabletop (VTT) product. A virtual tabletop is effectively a software product which gives players a chatroom + shared map and drawing tools so they can effectively play tabletop games which are designed around more props online. Wizards plan for their own VTT includes a very video game inspired monetisation model where they would sell skins, spells, subclasses etc.
The problem they have is this: they are a very late comer to the VTT market, since they haven't launched their product yet, while their competitors (especially roll20) have been going for near a decade now. And these competitors were perfectly in their right under the OGL 1.0a license to use enough content to enable their players to play D&D on it. Wizards did not feel having more content and a higher fidelity product was going to be sufficient to drive players to their microtransaction filled product, so they did not want to release 6e under OGL.
But they remembered the 3.5e/4e problem. They didn't want to release their new, more locked down 6e and have everyone just keep playing 5e and 5e derived content under the OGL. So they decided they would try exploit some of the wording of OGL 1.0a to de-authorize it and replace it with a new OGL 1.1 which was a very draconian license given Wizards royalty-free unlimited licenses to other 1.1 content, yet imposing royalties, attribution, registration and field of use restrictions on third parties. That way nobody could keep making 5e VTT plugins, 5e addons, etc. and everyone would have to go to 6e and the competitor VTTs would die from not being able to support the most popular game.
This leaked when they asked third parties to sign it, to much bad press, so Wizards announced OGL 1.2. It did roll back many of the more egregious restrictions from the 1.1 version, but it still kept veto power with wizards (wrapped up in an anti-hateful content clause, but one that was so broad and required waiving a right to contest to the extent wizards could define competing too closely with them as hateful behaviour), and it still put limits on what VTTs could do and allowed them to change the rights of VTTs at any moment.
Players still felt this was not enough and did largely vote with their wallet by cancelling subscriptions to D&D beyond, D&D's online content distribution and character builder service that was to be the baseline of the new planned VTT, to such a level that Wizards have now had to capitulate and roll back their planned changes to existing and older editions at least.
All of the tumult of the past few weeks has been fun, and, just what D&D needed. If Wizards had been savvier (or more malicious) they would have pulled back on the OGL little by little.
I’ve been following the OGL since its release back when I was a a broke HS kid obsessed with the idea of Free Software. I even had a (very) short conversation with Richard Stallman about it “it’s good enough for a game.” I didn’t agree.
This is great, and, completely expected if you know anything about the people involved.
Being able to publish anything you want and still make use of the SRD is a great thing for D&D.. But I still kinda hoped they’d blow it up so we’d get a bloom of new systems. Whatever, at least publishers are more likely to move away from OGL-like licenses and over to CC now.
The silver lining in this shitstorm is that a lot of D&D-like games are going to be getting lots of attention. There's better systems out there. IMO, D&D proper died out at 4e, when it tried to copy WoW.
If you like horror, check out Kult: Divinity Lost. And for a tight game-system, check out Blades in the Dark, which is like...steampunk Peaky Blinders.
Wizards tried to change their license so that all third party material (books, virtual table tops, anything using the srd) was treated the way videogame mods are, and charge 30% of revenue (this was ogl 1.1). Players unsubscribed from the subscription based en mass, and their largest competitor (paizo, who owns pathfinder, and came about because of the last time they tried this) created an equivalent of the Linux foundation for srd licenses, and sold 8 months of product in 2 weeks.
Paizo basically exists to take advantage of bad moves made by WoTC. The cancellation of their license to print Dungeon and Dragon magazines being the inciting event for the company to release its own product, and the disaster that was 4th edition being the rocket fuel that launched it. Pathfinder, a derivative product, was more popular than its parent for a couple years!
This is oversimplified but hopefully close enough.
A couple of versions ago, Wizards of the Coast released a subset of the D&D rules for free with a pretty open license. That free subset was called the SRD and the license was the OGL 1.0a. It allowed third-parties to publish D&D-compatible adventures and such without royalties. And, crucially, the OGL had a clause that seemed to make it irrevocable in the future.
Essentially, "if you build on our system, we won't come after you for money or with lawyers, forever, we promise."
The result was an explosion in third-party content and overall an explosion in the popularity of D&D as a whole.
Recently, WotC released a draft of a new license that a lot of people interpreted as going back on this promise. The community was up in arms, then WotC released several waffling non-apologies.
This, at least, sounds like they realized they can't put the genie back in the bottle and have given up trying.
It wasn't even a released draft. It was a leak of what was essentially a shakedown that WoTC tried to bully independents into signing earlier in January.
That they even now keep referring to it as a draft is pretty indicative that they're not acting in good faith
Wow, I missed that they were still going with the "Draft" lie on first read. Welp, ship had already sailed, but I'm just going to guess the horror-show will be back in 6 to 12 months.
Basically WotC wanted to not only change their future content to a more restrictive license, they also wanted to retroactively switch older content to that license. It seemed like an obvious legal land-grab. Fans objected, and (at least to my surprise, others here seem to be more cynical) WotC did a 180 on the license and adopted CC-4.0-BY.
After an earlier history of legal action against 3rd party publishers (TSR essentially bullying competitors to bankruptcy)[0], D&D's core rules were released under a license called the "Open Gaming License", which includes a license update provision reading "Wizards or its designated Agents may publish updated versions of this License. You may use any authorized version of this License to copy, modify and distribute any Open Game Content originally distributed under any version of this License."
The promise of that license built an ecosystem of people making and publishing their own content compatible with the official D&D rules.
WotC recently declared that they were switching to an updated version of the license, and that they were deauthorizing the previous version.
The new license included rules such as revenue sharing, limitations on how the rules can be implemented in software tools, and giving WotC the ability to revoke your license to the content. People are largely not happy about this change, especially with WotC's plan to retroactively cancel the current license and replace it with this worse one.
This has led to Paizo announcing their own open license with many other publishers on board [1], and a lot of D&D's vocal fanbase talking about moving their games to other systems with more favorable licensing.
Pathfinder 2, Paizo's competing system, apparently sold out what should have been an 8-month supply of their printed books in the last two weeks [2], and that's a system that puts all the official rules content online for free.
This announcement today of the SRD being released under CC-BY-4.0 is means WotC is canceling their plans to only license their system under the proposed OGL revision, since the CC-BY license more definitely can't be revoked once you've licensed content under it.
I should add, they're currently working on a new rules edition (playtest titled "One D&D", as 5E was "D&D Next"). Remains to be seen if this will be called "5.5E" or "6E" or what, and we don't know what they'll do with its licensing. Maybe it will be under a newer more restrictive license, maybe it won't be.
That's fine by me, they can do what they want with One D&D licensing and people can make their own decisions on how they react to it going forward.
But trying to pull the rug out from the existing OGL for current and previous editions was a real dick move.
WotC licenses some of their content using the Open Gaming License. It ostensibly covers both the rules* of D&D as well as key elements of the setting -- particular monsters, characters, place names, spells, etc.
That license has allowed products and content creators to build on top of a shared platform -- using and reprinting portions of D&D's content to build their own worlds, stories, systems, etc. Note: not everything D&D publishes is covered by the OGL, just a set of core items they call the SRD -- Systems Reference Document.
WotC/Hasbro leaked that they were working on OGL 1.1 which had a bunch of ambiguous (and many argued harmful) language that required creators to do things like license their content back to WotC, pay fees to license content, control what and what was not appropriate to build on top of OGL, etc.
The OGL 1.1 was met with huge community backlash, and wotc has been fumbling for some time to figure out the next steps. It looks like they are taking those steps now.
* Aside, it's not clear that the rules of D&D are even something that can be licensed in this way, as game mechanics are not protected the same way as copyrightable characters are.
D&D 5th Edition (and some earlier editions) was released in a way that allowed third parties to create their own compatible content by referencing a document called the "SRD", licensed under the so-called Open Game License. This document contained the basic rules and content necessary to play D&D. If you wanted to include a zombie in your published adventure you could use the stat block from the SRD. The license also had some rules to make sure you didn't pass off your content as official, that kind of thing. There is a substantial market for third-party D&D content, and there are numerous companies that make it a core part of their business.
The OGL was written before VTTs (virtual tabletops) were really a thing, so it doesn't explicitly authorize them. Instead, VTT developers arrange their own deal with Wizards directly.
Wizards has also been in a conflict recently with a company affiliated with one of the children of Gary Gygax, co-creator of D&D. As I understand it, this company is promoting itself as a throwback to the good old days when tabletop gaming wasn't "woke", and are using OGL content in provocative ways as part of this campaign.
Finally, Wizards is preparing a new version of D&D, "D&D One". All of this was the backdrop to a leaked plan to update the OGL. The new license explicitly said it only applied to printed content, not software like VTTs or games. It also had language allowing them to revoke the license if applied to offensive material. It included a royalty schedule for larger companies to pay on sales of licensed content. Most significantly, the plan was to declare the previous versions of the OGL no longer "authorized", retroactively forcing new terms on existing content published under OGL.
This resulted in a massive backlash. Wizards had an initial response where they tried to clarify the VTT issue and promised to get rid of the royalties, but that didn't really help. They announced a "playtest" where existing users could review the new license and provide feedback. As this announcement says, the response was resoundingly negative. So they are pretty much going back on the entire plan. And since the OGL has now lost the trust of the community, they're also licensing that content under a Creative Commons attribution license they don't control.
Worth noting that this post doesn't mention D&D One at all. It seems likely that they are still considering an updated license for the new version of the game, which means there's likely to be more conflict. But I don't think anyone could argue that they don't have the right to release their new game under whatever license they want -- the big deal here was the attempt to retroactively relicense the existing content.
> The OGL was written before VTTs (virtual tabletops) were really a thing, so it doesn't explicitly authorize them. Instead, VTT developers arrange their own deal with Wizards directly.
To expand on this about this, nothing around the existing v1.0a actually had field of use restrictions that would prevent its use in a VTT, and the accompanying contemporaneous FAQ indicated that using it for software was permissible. While VTTs as they exist today didn't exist when they wrote the license, character builders and video game adaptations did, so it's not like some VTTs are some totally unforeseen and therefore not plausibly covered.
So most VTTs are relying on the OGL where they just implement D&D and basic classes etc., the ones with deals are the ones that use additional non-OGL content which is why you can e.g. buy Curse of Strahd for roll20 or fantasy grounds despite Strahd not being OGL.
A reminder that the old OGL (the one they say they will now continue with) is still nonsense: According to at least some IP attorneys, it restricts your existing legal rights for little benefit, and in most cases you're better off without it.
> Before today if you wanted to use the SRD, a work protected by copyright, you needed to do so under the terms of the OGL.
According to the IP attorneys I read, the SRD entirely/mostly contains uncopyrightable content. Wizards said you needed the OGL to use it, but that is not true. You could use it without a license.
WotC does not own the concept of elves, dwarves, or dragons. Nor the concept of dice.
D&D is a strong franchise, but the merchandise and rulesets are hardly necessary to play the game.
To play RPGs, even practically-D&D-in-all-but-name, all you need is dice and paper.
Nerds are wont to roll their own.
I may not be a regular guest feature in the HBR, but it seems like common sense even to me that this is a strategically, financially dangerous path to take given their customer base.
Yep - not only is there no catch right now, but they literally can never add one. The SRD is released under CC-BY-4.0.
The only point of contention is what happens to their new product, One D&D, which will probably retain some nasty payment structure, and almost certainly not be OGL'd. That's fine though - if they build a walled garden around One D&D, they simply won't be able to compete against the open community of 5e.
> not only is there no catch right now, but they literally can never add one. The SRD is released under CC-BY-4.0.
They can't change that particular SRD, but material not in the SRD can be changed as can new material. Also, as they leave the old OGL intact, it is a catch in itself: 1) It's generally restricts rights much more than grants them [0], and 2) WotC believes they can revoke it at any time.
Yep, everything not CC is still under the sword of Damocles. The good news is that the vast majority of players and third-party publishers are using 5e, so this announcement protects them forever. It would not be unexpected for them to use this as a way to dwindle support for OGL1.0a, but either way the state of affairs today is far, far better than a few days ago.
It takes a lot of chutzpah to think you're going to get a 3 or 4 page license past a customer base that enjoys reading hundreds of pages of rules (and exploiting said rules) as a hobby.
I'd say this is 99% of a win. The one thing it does still leave is the claim they can de-authorize 1.0a at will later. For active products this is not a problem, as CC BY is a strictly more permissive license and they just move to claiming they're using the CC license.
However, for second-order derivatives there is still one problem.
1. Third Party A uses OGL 1.0a content from Wizards, licenses its own work as OGL 1.0a as a result
2. Later Third Party A goes out of business
3. Third Party B reused Third Party A's content under OGL 1.0a.
4. There's no one left to relicense Third Party A's content under CC BY.
But "don't make second order derivatives of abandonware content" is a lot easier to work around than "don't make stuff compatible with the large existing ecosystem"
It's as if nothing happened, afaict. As I understand from IP attorneys who have discussed the issue publicly,
1) The SRD is all/mostly material that is non-copyrightable anyway; it doesn't matter how it's 'licensed'.
2) Partly as a consequence of that, the old OGL 1.0a - the license that they say they agree to continue to use - takes away rights that people legally have and offers very little in return (e.g., it offers rights to the SRD, which the licensee already has by law). You are better off publishing without it, in most cases.
3) For those who for some reason care about OGL 1.0a: Wizards of the Coast began by saying they were revoking the OGL 1.0a. Publicly commenting IP attorneys said that, because OGL 1.0a doesn't say it's irrevokable, that Wizards could probably do that. Now Wizards is leaving it in place, but presumably they could revoke it at any point.
IOW, nothing has changed and the licensing was a scam to start with. The SRD license is worthless and the license for which people were clamoring actually hurts their interests.
For a legal analysis that supports the above, from a credible source:
* Wizards of the Coast (WoTC) has been tasked by Hasbro (which owns WoTC) to drastically increase profits over a few years.
* WoTC has been aggressively increasing prices on Magic the Gathering (MTG) and drastically increased the diversity of products. This overwhelmed even people who follow and produce MTG news. Wallet fatique is rampant and people are disgruntled.
* WoTC releases the 30th aniversary edition for MTG, which is 60 random cards for 1000 $ which are officially marked as non-tournament legal. The MTG community is furious and for once people from all corners of the community come together to boycott this product. The rage is great and enduring.
* WoTC fails to meet expectations and the stock prices plummet
* To do damage control, WoTC/Hasbro annouces a "fireside chat" for their shareholders where they try to explain the situation but basically just say "we did nothing wrong and we are trying to extract a lot of money from Dungeons and Dragons next"
* Unlike the MTG community, the DnD community is very good at organizing a unified response and the shitstorm came swiftly and took WoTC by surprise. (Don't mess with Dungeon Masters who know how to call together a group of people)
The real problem is the managers at WoTC that don't really care about the games. They only care about money. I expect more bad things in the future.