D&D Licensing Agreement
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In case anyone hasn’t heard about the recent major drama around Hasbro and the new Dungeons and Dragons licensing agreement, there is a synopsis here: https://www.gamesradar.com/dandds-licensing-controversy-explained-heres-why-you-should-care/ (and countless other articles, YouTube videos, etc).
In short, the new agreement will impact third party creators for the new product line and it can affect existing ones as well by forcing them to pay royalties to Wizards of the Coast. According to their own estimates (which might be conservative to avoid more bad press) it will involve around 20% of third party creators.
How do you feel about it? Would it affect your gaming or purchasing decisions?
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@Arkandel The only 5e stuff I have is Spelljammer, the core because I needed it for Spelljammer, and then a couple side things… Iron Kingdoms, Dingo Doodles… that’s all I’ve spent on it, as far as I remember.
And Spelljammer 5e is bad, Iron Kingdoms has its own proprietary system I prefer, and the Dingo Doodles is more for lore and STL files.
Since I’m on record hating level systems, like… I wasn’t the target demographic anyway.
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I am not surprised.
It took them a few years longer (and an extra edition) than I originally predicted, though; I was pretty sure this was going to happen with 4th, but it didn’t. There was no way Hasbro was going to allow other people to use their IP without getting a cut eternally, not when they’re Hasbro and there is money on the table to be made.
Bait and switch on the corp level. Get everyone invested, then let them know that they can’t keep on the same road without paying for it–people will pay. 25% of profits over $750,000 is far more generous than I would have anticipated – expect that number to come down in the future.
The OGL was a sweet deal while it lasted, but I don’t feel like there’s an ethical obligation on Hasbro’s part to subsidize other gaming companies. This change continues to allow the small-time creators to do what they’re doing (with somebody else’s IP, to be clear) within fairly reasonable rules; the moms and pops of the business don’t clear anywhere NEAR $750,000 profit. For the little businesses, providing an annual report regarding your financial activity? That’s not the onerous issue it’s being made out to be. It’s just not. Those financial reports are getting made anyway, just not to Hasbro.
And to be clear, “you may not use my IP to create blatantly racist, sexist, homophobic, trans-phobic, bigoted or otherwise discriminatory material” is a perfectly reasonable statement for an IP holder to make.
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@IoleRae said in D&D Licensing Agreement:
25% of profits over $750,000 is far more generous than I would have anticipated – expect that number to come down in the future.
The license actually allows them to alter that at will, so it’s probably the first, conservative figure. Also keep in mind the royalties are based on revenue and not profits which… is certainly a hell of a thing to require.
What I don’t understand is how WotC isn’t seeing that they don’t have a captive audience. There’s no lock-in. Their product isn’t unique; there are competing RPGs on the market, including Pathfinder, and switching to one of those is effortless for most parties.
I’d have expected them to create some niche, genre-defining feature (say, a really smooth and polished online platform that encompasses DDB, has an interface far above what everyone else does, etc) and then pull this.
Stranger Things and Critical Hit definitely gave them a boost but neither made them bulletproof.
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They also want to take 20% of Kickstarter funds.
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@Arkandel They have name recognition and casual players who don’t want to spend another $50 on a new system and have to learn new rules all over again.
Or they DID. There are plenty of people who are hearing the news and saying ‘hey, what was that other RPG system you wanted us to try three years ago?’
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@shit-piss-love said in D&D Licensing Agreement:
They also want to take 20% of Kickstarter funds.
20% of Kickstarter projects instead of 25%, because kickstarter wants their cut, too.
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I don’t think they need to be bulletproof or have a captive audience to pull this off. They’re pulling it off. It’ll be a done deal shortly.
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The best thing to come out of this is that a coalition has formed to create a truly open, system-agnostic license.
Paizo, Kobold Press, Chaosium, Green Ronin, Legendary Games, Rogue Genius Games and more.
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hard disagree that it won’t impact small creators. Requiring exhaustive reporting, while retaining rights to revoke or change for any reason at any time, AND gaining forever irrevocable rights to use and even LICENSE third party created content? Even content made under non-commercial use? Disgusting.
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@hellfrog said in D&D Licensing Agreement:
hard disagree that it won’t impact small creators. Requiring exhaustive reporting, while retaining rights to revoke or change for any reason at any time, AND gaining forever irrevocable rights to use and even LICENSE third party created content? Even content made under non-commercial use? Disgusting.
Big yup. Even the RUMORS of the OGL 1.1 text has put countless projects on hold, which means nobody is getting paid, including artists, proofreaders, sensitivity readers, editors, and a whole bunch of other roles I am forgetting but that get listed in all the books. Because nobody wants to move forward with the threat of a legal battle in their future (an understandable position to have).
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I am so irrationally angry about this utter bullshit that Hasbro and WotC is trying to pull. As someone who’s been a DM for going on 15 years and has enjoyed so much OGL content, I’ve been following this since it first broke.
And WotC backed out of making statement twice this week. Because they realizing that their community is utter revolt against them.
Welp, time to hitch my wagon up to Pazio and Pathfinder.
I don't know what I'm doing. Poke at Seven Nations sevennations.aresmush.com port 2021
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@Testament said in D&D Licensing Agreement:
Welp, time to hitch my wagon up to Pazio and Pathfinder.
There are a lot of other great games you might consider looking at as well. This bundle for instance has Mythras in it. https://bundleofholding.com/presents/NonOGLFantasy
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Oh, the other thing I didn’t include in ‘why 5e’
Word is that D&D Beyond is great in helping with accessibility issues, that other online platforms haven’t gotten around to working on? So any platform that can get on solving that, or even doing better than D&D Beyond, will probably have a huge influx once it’s proved viable.
(I’m including MUs here, actually. I’m sure we’ve all seen a few people have trouble because their screen reader has trouble turning the text on the MU into braile)
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@Arkandel said in D&D Licensing Agreement:
How do you feel about it? Would it affect your gaming or purchasing decisions?
I won’t be buying any D&D material for as long as this OGL remains the law of the land. As others have said, Hasbro is perfectly within their legal rights to do this; but it’s also greedy, disgusting, and predatory to demand that others’ work must belong to them simply because Hasbro wants so steal the fruit of others’ labor. I’ve been a D&D fan since 1990 but this has broken me of that. It’s offensive to my ethics.
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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.
