13 January 2023

Wizards of the Coast finally speak

It looks like the “Silence” spell finally has worn off and WotC has issued a statement about the storm that has raged over the past two weeks regarding their proposed changes to the OGL.

 

Overall, I think that the statement is a ridiculous bit of gaslighting and ego-soothing ("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." WTF?!? How childish can you be?)

 

So long as OGL 1.0a isn't secure for future products, whatever WotC does to tinker or improve OGL 2.0 is going to be wholly inadequate. But I predict that they won't back down on trying to "de-authorize" 1.0a because it's part of their "master plan" to consolidate everything on Dungeons & Dragons Beyond in the future.

 

At least the statement confirms that existing products that used the OGL 1.0a will continue to be available. (I see no grounds for thinking that they would’ve had to stop being sold, but I worried that people might pull their products out of fear. That doesn’t look like it will happen now.)

5 comments:

  1. "but I worried that people might pull their products out of fear"

    Honestly, I've seen a lot of overreaction to the point that some people have already done that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Same... I've seen a lot of people saying "you better buy X RPG now, because it might not be around in a few weeks". To me, te response from WotC should have been sooner, and I feel ignores most of what people have been saying or asking over the last two weeks. They seemed to have completely missed the point of protests, or are ignoring them. It's not reassuring.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The real damage was to the community and its trust. WotC demonstrated that it is no longer the shepherd of the community, but its capricious overlord.

    ReplyDelete

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I'm a Canadian political philosopher who lives primarily in Toronto but teaches in Milwaukee (sometimes in person, sometimes online).