Wizards of the Coast are looking to earn more money from their D&D assets, this has led to some 3rd party creators to worry about their right of access to the rules which had been available to them via WotC Open Gaming Licence OGL 1.0a. The similarity with the software industry’s open source wars and the music industries war on its customers and fans piqued my interest. So I did some reading (and viewing). Enjoy!

This story caused an explosion amongst the creator community and it has become a fast moving story. I no longer wish to follow it at the velocity that makes sense. So while I will update the page as I see fit, it’s probably best not to rely on me as a news source.

Links

  1. What wikipedia says about Wizards_of_the_Coast, a a division of Hasbro, and the Hasbro Annual Report which implies a 2021 Revenue to Wizards of the Coast of $1bn and a revenue to the division of over $2bn. I went looking for the WOTC riposte in their news archive  but found nothing there; they put it up on d&d beyond
  2. The WOTC riposte stating that little will change. I believe that these links document the current state http://www.opengamingfoundation.org/ogl and the SRD V5.1 with the OGL 1.0a  and the WOTC fan content policy
  3. Gizmodo did a piece from a leaked version of OGL 1.1
  4. WOTC’s second attempt, to clarify their thoughts, and also a third, six days later, “Have WoTC caved?”, a statement by Kyle Brink dated the 18th Jan 2023. If that wasn’t capitulation then this is., WOTC publish the SRD 5.1 under a CC BY 4.0 licence, claiming the licence belongs to someone else, and is also irrevocable. [ my mirror ]
  5. The free player’s handbook, and my mirror.
  6. Treantmonk comments on youtube on the affair, based on the first leak, he is cautious and optimistic, but changed his mind after the Gizmodo article and again after Brink’s statement.
  7. The Damage Done by the Otherwise Ineffectual Open Gaming License, argues it’s unneeded and basically propaganda for the idea it is. The Legal Eagle talks about copyright, trademarks and algorithms.
  8. The ORCPUB affair, by those who rescued the code, which I thought might be relevant but it seems I was being over suspicious. The publishers of that article, dungeon masters vault also have a character repo.

On 13th Jan, I discovered Paizo’s response, to assert that the OGL cannot revoked, that they believe their material is now free of WOTC intellectual property and that they are launching their own license, the Open RPG Creative Licence. Dice Breaker’s Matt Jarvis also comments.

Critical Resources

  1. I have mirrored the Player’s Handbook, & the OGL1.0/SRD.
  2. I wrote a blog article, on this, comparing the licences and their roles in the software industry. The article is called On wotcs permissive licences which I mirrored on medium.

More …

I’d say, they don’t want to turn into GW, who earned £386.6m revenue last year, which will include income from minis and game software income. I note that Warhammer is a competitive wargame, D&D is a collaborative story telling game. DnD would seem to be three times as large as Warhammer. Maybe not, the WOTC numbers include Magic the Gathering”.

Statement No 3.

Includes the following statement

Any changes to the OGL will have no impact on at least these creative efforts:

  • Your video content. Whether you are a commentator, streamer, podcaster, liveplay cast member, or other video creator on platforms like YouTube and Twitch and TikTok, you have always been covered by the Wizards Fan Content Policy. The OGL doesn’t (and won’t) touch any of this.
  • Your accessories for your owned content. No changes to the OGL will affect your ability to sell minis, novels, apparel, dice, and other items related to your creations, characters, and worlds.
  • Non-published works, for instance contracted services. You use the OGL if you want to publish your works that reference fifth edition content through the SRD. That means commissioned work, paid DM services, consulting, and so on aren’t affected by the OGL.
  • VTT content. Any updates to the OGL will still allow any creator to publish content on VTTs and will still allow VTT publishers to use OGL content on their platform.
  • DMs Guild content. The content you release on DMs Guild is published under a Community Content Agreement with Dungeon Masters Guild. This is not changing.
  • Your OGL 1.0a content. Nothing will impact any content you have published under OGL 1.0a. That will always be licensed under OGL 1.0a.
  • Your revenue. There will be no royalty or financial reporting requirements.
  • Your ownership of your content. You will continue to own your content with no license-back requirements.

My road to here

While letting my thoughts mature, I sought to compare this with the software industry and found, an article what-is-a-software-license, which categorises licences on a scale from PD, to “All Rights Reserved”. It seems to me that the OGL has always been a Copyleft licence; material can be used under certain conditions, one being that the new material must be a book or static file, or free.

I made and discarded some notes.

  1. What’s happening, movies, streaming content e,g, d&d beyond, and VTT’s, while they say they won’t compete I think they might. They’ll also want to licence and charge for 3rd Party MMORPGs and competitors to D&D beyond. They make a shit load of money.
  2. It seems they plan to put a financial limit on the OGL, or maybe not. The financial limits are stated in the Fan Content Policy.
  3. To what extent do we as players care?
  4. Books can be charged for!
  5. New Rules i.e. one D&D, new revenue channel, new licences, free 3rd party content for games supplied as text and images is permitted provided its free to use
  6. OGL how to use their content, and SRD, those parts of the rules they permit use. The OGL claims to be irrevocable and so the old version will allow access to the [old] SRD.
  7. Pathfinder shows what happens when it goes wrong, is it just the Hasbro suits don’t get it. Or that they will leave story telling alone; Critical Role has shown that if you make yourself important enough to them, they’ll buy [some] rights to your content.
  8. The fan policy seems fair-ish, and kindly written.

And made this summary of a 1500 word article

There’s probably a change coming in WOTC’s zero cost licensing of D&D although their statement says that they will probably only change the Fan Content policy which requires fan content to be free to the market. What is there today is less than some seem to think. It’s not in the interests of WOTC to eliminate or reduce the business opportunity the current licencing permits, but it seems they plan to extend their offerings into games and movies and want/need to assert their copyright ownership of what has always only been available under specific bi-lateral agreements and to assert and protect their trademarks. Third party creators will probably be able to continue to monetise what they already have as they will keep rights under the OGL; they will also have the ability to move their content to an alternative rule set which is in the interest of neither party.

The more I think, the more I read, I think this is about transforming DnD Beyond into a virtual table top. I really wonder if investing in virtual table tops before the COVID is really finished is wise. On reflection I think this is  about annuity income and getting players to pay more. DnD Beyond offers streaming access to the rules. 

The gizmodo article says that royalties are planned to be charged at 25% on revenue. The 3rd statement says that there will be no royalties on material designed as part of the game.

I wrote a blog article, on this, called On wotcs permissive licences which I mirrored on medium.

On 10th Jan 23, I wrote this,

I think that if a 3rd Party publisher told WOTC to shove OGL 1.1 up their arse, they could continue to ship their product on the basis of OGL 1.0(*) provided they restricted their use of WOTC material to the SRD. This would mean they could not use trademarks nor milieux  nor could they adapt their game to One D&D rules. This maybe why they’re changing the rules from 5e to One D&D to create a legal fork.

OGL 1.0 permits the use of the SRD in perpetuity and selling of printed material. Signing 1.1 would mean losing that promise of both free and forever, in fact it would mean that whatever you ship warrants, a steep 25%, royalty payment irrespective of whether the product is restricted to the SRD or not.

This is an invitation to fork the rules. It’ll be interesting to see what the big boys do, although they may get a better deal.

It also has happened before, when Oracle bought Sun and re-enclosed Sun’s software portfolio. Open Solaris survived and transformed into Illumos for which there remains, 13 years later, a number of implementations. I had a look to see if this last statement was true, and found the Illumous site, then Joyent, who built a cloud version of once-was-solaris and also found the first stopping point from Opensolaris to where they are today, Open Indiana.

I am not a lawyer; this is not legal advice.

On 13th Jan, I discovered Paizo’s response, to assert that the OGL cannot revoked, that they believe their material is now free of WOTC intellectual property and that they are launching their own license, the Open RPG Creative Licence. Dice Breaker’s Matt Jarvis also comments.

5 Replies

  1. I removed the following paragraph from the article, things have moved on and I question their current relevance. When I first heard about this, i came across some comments from sources I don’t follow. Mike Shea offers some thoughts on the OGL 1.1, he is cautious but critical and also an article, entitled, Statement on OGL from WotC from a site called EN World, again no sources, but seemingly pretty factual.

  2. WoTC have issued a third statement and it’s clear to me that this story is changing quickly. I added this, “This story caused an explosion amongst the creator community and it has become a fast moving story. I no longer wish to follow it at the velocity that makes sense. So while I will update the page as I see fit, it’s probably best not to rely on me as a news source.”

  3. A day or two ago, WOTC did the right thing, and publish the SRD 5.1 under a CC BY 4.0 licence, claiming, correctly the licence belongs to someone else, and is also irrevocable. Those inside WOTC arguing that reputational damage and the loss of their 3rd party publishers was a price too high to pay for the advantages of the more enclosed licence have it seems won. I have noted the DnD Beyond blog post making this announcement in the main article. NB This does not necessarily open source “One D&D” which some argue is actually D&D 6th edition.

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