> Who are they referring to here? Paizo? Green Ronin? These are not major corporations. Video game companies, movies, tv producers, etc., aren't using the SRD mechanics, and they'd have to license the name and lore elements anyway, as they weren't covered under OGL. Who are these mysterious, sinister major corporations they were fighting against?
I have at least one theory on that.
- In the middle of all this OGL mess, WotC also cancelled a raft of unannounced video games. Their in-house D&D games this most recent cycle so far were either flops or revivals.
- At almost the same time, Hasbro and Wizard CEOs were hyping to investors the potential for "the kind of recurrent spending you see in digital games" in non-DM D&D players that comprise 80% of the market but a minority of spending.
What's the primary RPG merch for players today? Custom or specialized dice, customized minis, folios — stuff that's hard to manufacture at scale while keeping high profit margins. Wizards wants to move them into higher-margin, video-game-like digital spaces, especially virtual tabletops.
So Hasbro buys D&D Beyond outright in April and announces in August an Unreal-powered 3D VTT, and the D&D One next-edition rules set/marketplace, which OGL 1.1/2.0 was meant to support.
Whatever the hook in D&D One toward monetizing non-DM players is meant to be,* it'd attract competitors in the space beyond the current batch of VTTs and niche publishers.
An OGL 1.0a-licensed ruleset could facilitate well-backed companies to build their own D&D One-compatible clones using non-Wizards settings. Companies with experience putting out D&D-ruleset multiplayer games. Companies like Beamdog, acquired in April 2022 by a subsidiary of Embracer Group, who's rolling in settings and IPs that would be delightful to play.
Yeah, that door's already open with D&D Beyond/5E/OGL 1.0a, and Embracer doesn't need OGL hooks to enter the market. But from Hasbro's perspective, why on earth would they leave that door open?
* Wizards already has a long-running framework for systematically dispensing durable rewards to players that could easily go lootbox-a-like if moved to digital: the Adventurer's League, their organized play program (which ironically, like the OGL, also has roots in a Ryan Dancey invention). Paizo runs their own long-running organized play system, Pathfinder Society, which drives quite a lot of Paizo business. Scenarios are distributed almost exclusively online, and Society GMs have the popular option to run games entirely online via VTT or even play-by-post. Wouldn't it be neat if the new OGL also gave Wizards a way to legally challenge its existence by claiming that makes Pathfinder Society a digital product that requires a license? If Pathfinder Society isn't a digital product, then what's D&D One?