It’s even worse than that. I’m morally certain that Paizo has long been considering a completely independent system that didn’t require being tied to the OGL but didn’t want to risk action legal against its current products or any customer backlash. Now with this flareup, WotC and Hasbro look like the venal machinates that they are, and Paizo has all of the reason they need to set up a totally independent license (or use Creative Commons, or whatever) not only for themselves but as an umbrella for other third party content creatures, making themselves look like benefactors. And Paizo doesn’t need to have special protections for their own system and material beyond normal copyright for settings and so forth because they produce high quality gaming and supplement products that customers want.
I’m not sure they really have to. First of all, although the draft OGL 1.1 might give ostensible legal grounds for Hasbro to go after third party content creators, what benefit does that actually give them? Paizo aside, the vast majority of third party content is produced by small teams of writers and artists, and is niche enough that it really isn’t worth enough to expand it. I’m sure some ‘wizard’ was thinking that a content creator using their license would come up with the next World of Darkness or whatever, and then they’d be able to snatch and expand upon it without paying any royalties or buying them out but setting aside what a long shot that is, it also mean that WotC would actually have to produce good complementary content of their own to expand it which is clearly not their business model; more than likely they would just squash such new content to prevent gamers from being diverted from their branded content. This is similar to car companies like GM and Daimler buying innovative upstarts to control the patents in order to squash the technology lest their competitors use it, which (sort of) makes sense in the context of big companies fighting with one another but would be totally inane for one big company to just try to destroy innovation that didn’t come from in-house work.
And a campaign of suing tiny publishers would not only be bad press but their is probably some boutique IP firm that would take the case on pro bono just for the publicity it would offer, especially as it doesn’t seem that Hasbro has a strong case to begin with. WotC and Hasbro wouldn’t just look greedy but actually be characterized as actively trying to destroy the very market they are selling to.
Setting all of that aside, attacking third party producers is just stupid in its own right. Even a large company like Wizards of the Coast can only publish so much quality content on its own, and third party publishers produce material for GMs and players who don’t want to make their own. In a zero sum market it takes away dollars that might go to Hasbro; in reality it maintains enthusiasm, particularly when those aftermarket products are related to a setting or other licensed IP that WotC owns. Unless another company is getting so large as to be an actual competitor it makes more sense to license them at some marginal royalty and give small makers creative freedom to produce content royalty-free as long as they conform to standards that don’t compromise brand integrity.
This is exactly what the ‘new’ (post-Krank) Chaosium has done with their Miskatonic Repository and Jonstown Compendium have done with Call of Cthulhu and RuneQuest: Adventures in Glorantha respectively; not only do creators have access to use the setting and own all original IP they produce, Chaosium also offers templates, artwork, and editorial resources. Most of these products aren’t at the same standard as what Chaosium (in its current iteration) publishes but they’re generally a big improvement over the Krank-era output and more importantly they help fill in the gap for Keepers and players between official releases of new settings and content, as well as serving as a ‘farm league’ for Chaosium to recruit writers, artists, and content promoters, many of whom are developing new settings and rules that could be integrated into the official product lines. In short, encouraging third party publishers, is a big net benefit because it promotes the game. Now, Call of Cthulhu has only a single digit percentage of the TTRPG market and RQ:AIG even less so it isn’t quite the same as a company that has dominated the market from inception, but nonetheless their is great wisdom in recognizing that making a healthy profit is more about promoting your game and setting and producing good content than squashing any perceived competition, especially when that competition is doing a lot of the work of sustaining interest.
WotC isn’t going out of business any time soon, and they’re going to keep making money hand over fist on collectable card games and so forth, but they really stabbed themselves in the foot repeatedly with this decision in terms of the TTPG market. Even if people keep making “5E compatible” products, the fact that Paizo is going to offer a competing open license without constraints undermines any attempt for WotC to attract new producers to support their product line, and if online content producers explicitly move away from D&D and into other systems (or just ‘go generic’ and don’t make any explicit references to the system they are using) it hurts their core brand even more.
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