After a week of silence amid intense backlash, Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast (WoTC) has finally managed your community’s concerns about the changes to the open gaming license.
The Open Gaming License (OGL) has been around since 2000 and has made it possible for a diverse ecosystem of third-party creators to publish virtual tabletop software, expansion books, and more. Many of these creators can make a living from the OGL. But over the past week, a new version of OGL has been leaked after WoTC sent it to some major creators. More than 66,000 Dungeons & Dragons fans signed an open letter under the name #OpenDnD ahead of an expected announcement, and waves of users unsubscribed from D&D Beyond, WoTC’s online platform. Now, WoTC admitted that “it’s clear from the reaction that we got a 1.” Or, in non-Dungeons and Dragons language, they screwed up.
“We wanted to make sure that OGL is for the content creator, the homebrewer, the aspiring designer, our players and the community, not for large corporations to use for their own commercial and promotional purposes,” the company wrote in a statement. release. declaration.
But fans have criticized this language, as WoTC, a Hasbro subsidiary, is a “major corporation” itself. hasbro won $1.68 billion in revenue during the third quarter of 2022.
TechCrunch spoke to content creators who had received the unreleased WoTC OGL update. The terms of this updated OGL would force any creator earning more than $50,000 to report earnings to WoTC. Creators earning more than $750,000 in gross revenue would be required to pay a 25% royalty. These latter creators are the closest thing third-party Dungeons & Dragons content has to “big corporations”, but gross revenue is not a reflection of profit, so referring to these companies that way is a misnomer. .
magician hand press Editor-in-Chief Mike Holik, who organized the #OpenDnD letter, says his business would suffer from this 25% royalty. As he told TechCrunch, most Kickstarters that raise that kind of money don’t even make a 25% profit, as most of the money raised goes to fulfilling orders, printing books, and paying backers. .
“A Kickstarter involves a lot of small products, so your profit margins actually go down, because really, you’re going to give people some dice, some adventures, and a box, and all those individual things end up cutting into your profits. margins quite significantly,” Holik said. “Kickstarters don’t walk away with 80% of your money and profits. None of it is legit. I don’t know where they’re getting that 25% number beyond…they’re trying to completely crush the competition.”
The fan community was also concerned if WoTC would be allowed to publish and benefit from the work of third parties without crediting the original creator. noah downa partner at Premack Rogers and a Dungeons & Dragons streamer, told TechCrunch there was a clause in the document granting WoTC a royalty-free, perpetual sublicense for all third-party content created under OGL.
Now, WoTC seems to be backing down on both the royalty clause and the perpetual license.
“What [the next OGL] will not contain any royalty structure. It also won’t include the license return provision that some people feared was a means for us to steal work. That thought never crossed our minds,” WoTC wrote in a declaration. “Under any new OGL, you will own the content you create. We won’t. WoTC claims that it included this language in the leaked version of OGL to prevent creators from “wrongly claiming” that WoTC stole their work.
Throughout the document, WoTC refers to the document that certain creators received as a draft; however, the creators who received the document told TechCrunch that it was sent to them with the intention of getting them to sign it. The backlash against these terms was so severe that other tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) publishers took action.
Paizo is the publisher of Pathfinder, a popular game covered by the original WoTC OGL. Paizo’s owner and presidents were leaders in Wizards of the Coast at the time the OGL was originally published in 2000, and they wrote in a statement yesterday that the company was prepared to go to court over the idea that WoTC could suddenly revoke the license of the OGL of existing projects. Along with other publishers such as Kobold Press, Chaosium, and Legendary Games, Paizo announced that he would be releasing his own Open RPG (ORC) creative license.
“We have no interest in the new Wizards OGL. Instead, we have a plan that we believe will irrevocably and unquestionably keep alive the spirit of the Open Gaming License,” Paizo said. declaration He says. The license has not yet been published.
Dungeons & Dragons content creators are still cautious about how the OGL changes will affect the community, even if it looks like WoTC might make some concessions.
“Ultimately, the collective action of the signatures on the open letter and the unsubscription from D&D Beyond made all the difference. We have seen that the only thing that matters to them is profit, and we are reaching their bottom line,” he said. eric silver, Dungeons & Dragons Podcast Game Master Join the party. He told TechCrunch that WoTC’s response on Friday is “just a PR statement.”
“Until we see what they post in clear language, we can’t take our foot off the gas,” Silver said. “The corporate playbook is to wait until people get bored; We can’t and we won’t.”
