D&D Licensing Agreement
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I canceled my dndbeyond subscription with a strongly worded note about the wotc move against the perpetual license. I’ve been a subscriber for five years and had spent hundreds of dollars through their service. One of me may not matter but if I am one among many maybe it’ll do something, I don’t know.
Bummed me out to do it though. I loved dndbeyond.
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I think that claiming a perpetual license on other people’s work to do whatever they want to with it, even if it is derivative, without giving royalties or credit back to the creators is absurd and is a dangerous path to go down that stomps all over the smaller creators who do things for the love of the game. It alienates their core groups of players who’ve been game designing and promoting the game over these last few decades; without them, D&D would not be so popular.
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I think the performative outrage over this is laughable. The grumbling about morals and ethics is so ridiculous. People have been making huge money, millions of dollars, off of D&D for decades without paying a cent and now because they want a cut of what companies make after $750,000 Hasbro are the greedy ones?
Not a cut of the $750k. A cut of what they make AFTER that initial $750k, all of which was generated based on D&D’s material IP and popularity. Free gaming remains free and you can be 3/4ths of a millionaire before having to shell out to the people who made it possible for you to be rich, but Hasbro are the evil greedy ones? Not the people that have built a substantial 7 figure business based on someone else’s ideas without ever having paid a cent to them before? Please. That’s a joke.
I think it is exceptionally generous considering all the legal rights and money being waived out of hand, especially compared to pretty much any other company and corporation, most of which hold their legal and financial rights in impenetrable vaults guarded by armies of lawyers who can and do sue people into the ground for even the slightest infringements, all of whom continue to enjoy robust business because moral and ethical outrage somehow doesn’t apply to them.
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@Warma-Sheen the issue for me is the revocation of the perpetual license - it is a terrible precedent to permit a perpetual license to be revocable at will. The whole point of a grant in perpetuity is that it is stable. The way the IP ownership transfers with the licensure is also the kind of adhesion contract anybody doing IP with third party creators tries to avoid their clients signing. I’m not fussed about the numbers particularly, it’s the rest of the bundle of sticks that bothers me.
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@Warma-Sheen said in D&D Licensing Agreement:
People have been making huge money, millions of dollars, off of D&D for decades without paying a cent
I imagine most of those entities would have separate contracts with Hasbro/Wizards anyway, so they wouldn’t be impacted by any OGL changes.
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Just gonna note that if the OGL 1.0a was as ironclad as people want to think it is, Lucasarts would not have needed them write up a bespoke, actually ironclad agreement when they licensed it for KoTOR 1 and 2.
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@sao I think it would be a horrible precedent to permit a perpetual license and not have it be revocable at will. That would be like inviting a guest to stay at your house, but you can never kick them out, regardless of what they do. If some company used the OGL to produce some unforeseen objectionable material and Hasbro threw up its hands and said “there’s nothing we can do” we’d all be talking about a how stupid and irresponsible they were for not being able to protect their IP.
I understand the necessity of stability, but also, things change. The world changes. Culture changes. D&D needs to be able to adjust to the changes around them. Does it favor Hasbro, of course. But that’s the danger of building your business on someone else’s idea. Come up with your own gaming idea and you don’t have to worry about Hasbro’s OGL. But the trade off is that you have to do all the hard work to build up your game, rather than using an existing customer base built off of not only someone else’s IP, but branding and marketing, etc… that’s been done over decades. At the end of the day it is still a really good, very generous deal.
The whole thing to me seems to be legalese precautions and not much more than that. I don’t think they’re out to screw anyone over or steal anyone’s work. I’ll save my objections if/when this new license is used unjustly. For a game system that as been as great to its fan base as it has over decades, I think it has earned the benefit of the doubt.
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Cancelled DnD Beyond last night. Wrote a letter stating while I’ve been a player since, god, 1996 I think, and long before WotC even owned that brand(I’ll take TSR back anytime), I can’t in good conscience go along with what they’re planning. And the ultimate irony about any of this is that WotC is just looking at the amount of subscriptions and cancellations that DnD Beyond even has. And since the servers yesterday were going down because people were cancelling their subscriptions en masse suggests to me that the damage has already been done. DnD isn’t going away, but it’ll no longer be the first choice for content creators, but rather a choice. They’ve shot themselves in the foot with this and now there’s no way they can really take any of it back.
What we know right now is due to the insider leak from yesterday:
- WotC is delaying the rollout of the OGL changes due to the backlash
- Their decision making is based entirely on the provable impact to their bottom line
- Specifically they are looking at the DnD Beyond subscriptions and cancellations as it is the quickest financial data they currently have.
- They are still hoping the community forgets, moves on, and they can push it through once the news cycle eventually moves onto something else
According to the insider at WotC, they have never heard management refer to their customers in a positive manner, their communication gives them the impression that they see customers as obstacles between them and their money, the DnD Beyond team was first told to prepare to support the new OGL changes and online portal when got back from the holiday break and leadership doesn’t take any responsibility for the pain and stress they’ve caused other on the team.
Also, yesterday was the first time that management even tried to communicate their intentions about the OGL to the employees and even in that meeting they blamed the community for over-reacting.
While I’m willing to take this insider email with a decent grain of salt, considering the first leak of the OGL 1.1 was not a draft and rather was the initial proposal, I’m willing to give a bit more creedance that this insider leak is pretty legit.
Regardless, after reading said email, I was just more incensed about the whole thing.
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@Warma-Sheen said in D&D Licensing Agreement:
People have been making huge money, millions of dollars, off of D&D for decades without paying a cent and now because they want a cut of what companies make after $750,000 Hasbro are the greedy ones?
Yes. I’d explain why but I’m not in the mood to be laughed at for performative outrage. That was a really shitty thing to say, by the way, and I hope you got pleasure out of doing it.
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@Warma-Sheen said in D&D Licensing Agreement:
I think it would be a horrible precedent to permit a perpetual license and not have it be revocable at will. That would be like inviting a guest to stay at your house, but you can never kick them out, regardless of what they do.
I’m no expert, but I’m reasonably confident that “at will” is not the same as “with cause.”
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People get the benefit of the doubt. Corporations do not.
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Also lol at “legalese precautions and not much more than that”
As a professional writer of “legalese precautions,” I canceled my subscription to a service I love and use on the regular with a strongly worded note explaining why.
You can do what you want, and also believe what you choose, but consider the possibility that not everyone who disagrees with you is stupid, maybe.
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There was evidently an insider leak from a WOTC employee. I’ll just paste the text here.
I’m an employee at WotC currently working on and with business leaders on the health of the product line. If you want I can provide proof of this.
I’m sending this message because I fear for the health of a community I love, and I know what the leaders at WOTC are looking at:
They are briefly delaying rollout of OGL changes due to the backlash.
Their decision making is based entirely on the provable impact to their bottom line
Specifically they are looking at DDB subscriptions and cancellations as it is the quickest financial data they currently have.
They are still hoping the community forgets, moves on, and they can still push this through
I have decided to reach out because at my time in WotC I have never once heard management refer to customers in a positive manner, their communication gives me the impression they see customers as obstacles between them and their money, the DDB team was first told to prepare to support the new OGL changes and online portal when they got back from the holidays, and leadership doesnt take any responsibility for the pain and stress they cause others. Leadership’s first communication to the rank and file on the OGL was 30 minutes on 1/11/23, This was the first time they even tried to communicate their intentions about the OGL to employees, and even in this meeting they blamed the community for over-reacting.
I will repeat, the main thing this leadership is looking at is DDB subscription cancellations.
Hope your day goes well,
PS will be copying and pasting this message to other community leaders*
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I cancelled my D&D Beyond subscription last night.
I don’t begrudge Hasbro making money off of D&D. There’s a lot of the merchandising and expansion of the IP that I love. I know it’s only there because it’s profitable, but as long as it’s fun, it’s good.
However, I don’t like the way this thing has been played, so I’m showing my displeasure the only way I know how, which is to withdraw financial support. There are other really good gaming systems out there; I’m not going to run out of gaming to support, and someone will continue to get my hobby dollars. It’s not a tragedy, I don’t think this will kill D&D. It MIGHT reduce D&D’s piece of the profit pie, and considering how many awesome other systems are out there, maybe that’s not a bad thing.
Things do change. Sometimes, that means that a giant in an industry puts a foot wrong, and people decide to support other options.
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@Pyrephox Frankly if their license was more transparent - meaning they didn’t allow themselves to modify it at any given time, retroactively - I wouldn’t be as concerned.
Right now it only impacts the high end third-party creators. But that can change. They’ve given themselves a whole lot of wiggling room. The threshold may be $750k today (and again, that’s revenue rather than profits, so it’s not as high as one might think at a glance) but they can make it $7.5k instead if they wanted to.
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25% to WotC before taxes are taken out is crazy. 750k when you’re running a team of people that create third party content isn’t all that high when costs are all tallied up.
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@Pyrephox said in D&D Licensing Agreement:
I don’t begrudge Hasbro making money off of D&D. There’s a lot of the merchandising and expansion of the IP that I love. I know it’s only there because it’s profitable, but as long as it’s fun, it’s good. However, I don’t like the way this thing has been played…
That’s where I land. D&D is their product and they’re entitled to stop letting other people make money off it without getting a cut. But their terms are utterly ridiculous.
It would be like me saying that not only was AresMUSH no longer free, but if you use it you have to send me all your game’s wiki/css/etc. that I can use for whatever I want without paying you a cent. That’s just absurd.
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I don’t see there being any issue with WotC taking a cut for what is their IP. The 50K and 750K tresholds are also pretty generous as far as I can tell. The part that’s actually bullshit and a real concern is the perpetual licence they’re giving themselves. If that hadn’t been part of it, I’d have called the outrage a nothing burger.
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Sounds like they got the message:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1423-an-update-on-the-open-game-license-ogl
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@lordbelh said in D&D Licensing Agreement:
I don’t see there being any issue with WotC taking a cut for what is their IP. The 50K and 750K tresholds are also pretty generous as far as I can tell. The part that’s actually bullshit and a real concern is the perpetual licence they’re giving themselves. If that hadn’t been part of it, I’d have called the outrage a nothing burger.
That part however was preeeetty important.
Like when you create a product (any product, for any industry) you perform a cost analysis. What are your expenses going to be, how many units you expect to sell before you are profitable, etc.
If you are at the whim of your own license agreement sinking you into the red at a moment’s notice that can’t work. More so when the profit margins in this case are pretty thin; not everyone is Critical Hit making a killing on social media.
