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D&D Licensing Agreement
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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.
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@hellfrog Right off the fucking bat:
Second, we wanted to address those attempting to use D&D in web3, blockchain games, and NFTs by making clear that OGL content is limited to tabletop roleplaying content like campaigns, modules, and supplements.
Bullshit. Nobody cares about NFTs or blockchain. This is the lamest of excuses that comes off more as just making stuff up to sound like they were ‘looking out for the community’s best interests’.
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@lordbelh said in D&D Licensing Agreement:
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.
But 25% of proceeds is not generous - it’s highway robbery IMHO, even if it does only target the biggest game companies.
The perpetual license is a big deal for business decision-making though, you’re right. The biggest craziness for me was the content rights giving them “nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, sub-licensable, royalty-free license to use that content for any purpose.” You make a cool D20 game? Congrats, they can now make it and sell it out from under you. No sane business would agree to those terms, but businesses that have operated for years under the prior terms now have a gun to their head forcing them to agree or go out of business.
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Here’s another gem that I just noticed.
"“Second, you’re going to hear people say that they won, and we lost because making your voices heard forced us to change our plans. Those people will only be half right. They won—and so did we.”
Maximum cringe. They mad, they are coping and seething.
I don't know what I'm doing. Poke at Seven Nations sevennations.aresmush.com port 2021
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They can be mad, as long as they don’t ruin a bunch of peoples’ livelihoods to maximize profits on the backs of unpaid labor
fr fr
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@Testament said in D&D Licensing Agreement:
Maximum cringe. They mad, they are coping and seething.
Yeah, they were testing the waters but it got hot too fast, and too many frogs started jumping out of the pot.
They’re backtracking. Which is fine. They’re expected to try and do some damage control to their reputation. I expect their executives behind the previous iteration are not having a fun day behind closed doors though.
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@Warma-Sheen
The best d20 book everUnforseen Objectionable Material?
So I have not read the actual text, but some of the lawyery sorts on livestreams have brought up the 750k point… does it actually clarify ‘25% of anything in excess’, or is it really ‘you made 800k, 25% of that is 200k, so now you actually only made 600k’? Which would be ridiculous, but also might actually be worded so poorly that’s how it is?
… I do know that it isn’t 25% of profits, but total sales, which is insane.
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@hellfrog said in D&D Licensing Agreement:
They can be mad, as long as they don’t ruin a bunch of peoples’ livelihoods to maximize profits on the backs of unpaid labor
Exactly.
One of the arguments made in Hasbro’s defense has been that third-parties are using their work to piggyback theirs, and therefore they are essentially freeloading. Which in a way, but I think a flawed way, is true.
The cumulative effect in the work being done by active developers to support 5E is, IMHO, quite underrated. It’s not like 5E is inherently superior as a product compared to its competitors’; what it is is better supported, its appeal is wider since there are many more modules produced by all those different vendors which cater to a variety of playing styles, settings, etc.
Although yes, the profits made off those modules haven’t been going into WotC’s coffers it’s not like the company wasn’t benefiting from it - in multiple ways.
When I see a cool unique module using D20 and buy it, I am also buying into the DnD ecosystem. The company authoring, testing and promoting the module isn’t supporting a competing product line instead. The gaming store providing shelf space to D20-related products is similarly pushing those competitors to some darker, lower-place where their main line will get less exposure.
Those are pretty nifty business partners whose livelihoods were being messed with. I think it was a big mistake, but we’ll see.
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Yes, people have been making money off the back of D&D. But. That was actually the point of the OGL to start with. It’s how D&D managed to crowd out so many other systems, it’s why the Player’s Handbook is the best-selling TTRPG book of the lot, it’s why so many people have only ever played D&D and expect to mod D&D to what they want to play rather than going to find and learn another system.
D&D has become synonymous with tabletop, and WotC/Hasbro has both eliminated a chunk of their competition over the last two decades and change, and sold a copy of the Player’s Handbook to each and every person who got into it. Over the last couple of days I’ve mentioned on multiple Discords that other RPGs exist to heartbroken nerds who’d thought the entire hobby was dead. Many of them are now looking at other games with interest they never had before D&D’s shot its entire ecosystem in the foot. WotC/Hasbro just killed their golden goose, and the world of tabletop now has a lot of people who’d never looked outside a single system turning to see what else is out there.
The ‘freeloaders’ were serving WotC/Hasbro’s initial purpose by making D&D both ubiquitous and endemic, and that was the whole point from the start. After all, how many tabletop gamers do you know who don’t have a copy of the Player’s Handbook knocking around?
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@Evilgrayson said in D&D Licensing Agreement:
D&D has become synonymous with tabletop, and WotC/Hasbro has both eliminated a chunk of their competition over the last two decades and change, and sold a copy of the Player’s Handbook to each and every person who got into it. Over the last couple of days I’ve mentioned on multiple Discords that other RPGs exist to heartbroken nerds who’d thought the entire hobby was dead. Many of them are now looking at other games with interest they never had before D&D’s shot its entire ecosystem in the foot. WotC/Hasbro just killed their golden goose, and the world of tabletop now has a lot of people who’d never looked outside a single system turning to see what else is out there.
Since last night I’ve convinced double digits of people on various discords to buy this bundle that includes Mythras, the system I use for fantasy/historical games these days.
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Their apology wasn’t really an apology. I think this article coves it nicely.
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What they give you with the OGL is largely what can’t legally be copyrighted anyway, and in turn they saddle you with extra obligations.
The reason it seemed generous in the first place is that TSR’s prolific lawsuits poisoned the marketplace. The OGL was reassurance that Wizards won’t come for you if you make more content compatible with their game.
Most OGL gaming products could strip off the OGL label, reformat and change some names, and still be in the clear, per the EFF. The real question is if the chilling effect of the mere potential of lawsuits will stop people who would otherwise work in the field.
I imagine the answer is yes.
The author of that article appears to be the same lawyer who wrote the game Thirsty Sword Lesbians. They share the same name, at any rate.
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