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I knew that Paizo was waiting to strike the king when he was weak, and this "Open" Gaming License drama and complete lack of information from Wizards was the moment. Paizo wins, and Wizards lost.
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Jan 13, 2023 02:42
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sebmojo posted:Yeah, that's a slam dunk case of estoppel. Their whole handling of this has been comically terrible. The ex-Microsofters now running the show just clearly have no clue how any of this works and think that tabletop games are completely interchangeable with The XBox Marketplace™. hyphz posted:So are they actually going to clean-room a new Pathfinder? That's effectively what PF2E already is. The old OGL was just used for the sake of convenience and making things like Pathfinder Infinite easily possible, without the need to even bother with the costs associated with drawing up a new kind of perpetual, irrevocable license. Hasbro's actions here have basically forced their hand to pay that cost.
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Jan 13, 2023 02:47
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hyphz posted:So are they actually going to clean-room a new Pathfinder? I mean, not to sound snarky, but have you actually read their press release? Paizo posted:As Paizo has evolved, the parts of the OGL that we ourselves value have changed. When we needed to quickly bring out Pathfinder First Edition to continue publishing our popular monthly adventures back in 2008, using Wizards’ language was important and expeditious. But in our non-RPG products, including our Pathfinder Tales novels, the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, and others, we shifted our focus away from D&D tropes to lean harder into ideas from our own writers. By the time we went to work on Pathfinder Second Edition, Wizards of the Coast’s Open Game Content was significantly less important to us, and so our designers and developers wrote the new edition without using Wizards’ copyrighted expressions of any game mechanics. While we still published it under the OGL, the reason was no longer to allow Paizo to use Wizards’ expressions, but to allow other companies to use our expressions. Paizo posted:Of course, Paizo plans to continue publishing Pathfinder and Starfinder, even as we move away from the Open Gaming License. Since months’ worth of products are still at the printer, you’ll see the familiar OGL 1.0(a) in the back of our products for a while yet. While the Open RPG Creative License is being finalized, we’ll be printing Pathfinder and Starfinder products without any license, and we’ll add the finished license to those products when the new license is complete. Paizo seems fairly confident that their 2e and Starfinder products do not touch the WoTC SRD in any meaningful way that would require them, as publishers, to license them under OGL 1.0(a) and was purely done for the benefit of 3pp. They plan to start stripping OGL 1.0(a) from any product printed moving forward. You might see some copies sold still with the OGL 1.0(a) in the back, but that is because they were printed before this change and are just out in the wild. Paizo wouldn't be making this move unless they were incredibly sure about their legal footing and are doing this to avoid a lawsuit, but are entirely prepared to go to court if need be. Yeah, WoTC and Hasbro have a poo poo ton of cash on hand, but when you actually get to arguing the case, money doesn't always help you. Paizo has a very good defense with being able to argue the intent behind OGL 1.0(a): Paizo posted:We believe that any interpretation that the OGL 1.0 or 1.0(a) were intended to be revocable or able to be deauthorized is incorrect, and with good reason. Paizo's lawyers are not gonna give them the OK to make these kinds of statements if they were not very confident they'd win a potential lawsuit or what they were planning to do (stripping the OGL from their products) was something WoTC could legally stop without losing and making a bigger rear end of themselves. Also let's not forget that Lisa Stevens probably has a pretty decent sized war chest after she sold all her WoTC stock. Enzer fucked around with this message at 03:27 on Jan 13, 2023 |
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Jan 13, 2023 03:00
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https://arkenforge.com/what-does-ogl-v1-1-mean-for-vtts/ a good breakdown about the effect of 1.1 on VTTs.
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Jan 13, 2023 03:19
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Vire posted:It’s because twenty years ago when written that wasn’t a common legal term and all open source software didn’t use that word. It wasn’t till later that this became common and was updated into most updated open source licenses. It was incredibly common in licensing; it often wasn’t used by open source licenses because they were intended to be revocable in certain circumstances. As just one example, the license Disney obtained for use of Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring in 1939 included the following language: “In consideration of the sum of Six Thousand ($6,000.) Dollars, receipt of which is hereby acknowledged, [Stravinsky] does hereby give and grant unto Walt Disney Enterprises, a California corporation ... the nonexclusive, irrevocable right, license, privilege and authority to record in any manner, medium or form, and to license the performance of, the musical composition hereinbelow set out” Copyright lawyers knew exactly what that word meant and did.
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Jan 13, 2023 03:39
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Of course it's called the ORC. This is the best possible outcome.
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Jan 13, 2023 03:46
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Okay, why not just use creative commons...?
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Jan 13, 2023 03:52
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Covok posted:Okay, why not just use creative commons...? You know how con men will target people who've already been burnt by cons once, because taking advantage of a ready-made filter for gullible marks actually outweighs the learning experience of getting fooled once? 
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Jan 13, 2023 03:56
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Creative Commons is more restrictive I'm pretty sure
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Jan 13, 2023 04:01
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Dexo posted:Creative Commons is more restrictive I'm pretty sure It comes in a ton of flavors based on what you want to allow.
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Jan 13, 2023 04:04
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Writing their own licence lets them tailor it for the tabletop market. Arguably, the ORC would be a form of creative commons, since the various SRDs under it would provide a pool of material people could draw on. You can have a creative commons without using the boilerplate Creative Commons licences, they don't own the concept.
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Jan 13, 2023 04:08
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hyphz posted:Which puts them squarely in the path of Hasbro’s legal department and money tree. Again, good luck. If there's a publisher that can go against Hasbro in court is them. And Chaosium and al might also help with any legal fees too.
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Jan 13, 2023 04:15
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So many people not understanding copyright law here so a couple of important notes: 1: Copyright applies to creative works, not functional ones. A set of rules is not sufficiently creative to be done under copyright. Monster descriptions, fluff text, stories, adventure designs are all creative works and subject to copyright. Functional poo poo falls under patent law. As a rule, courts interpret copyright law to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts...". Locking poo poo down as people have been predicting runs contrary to that, in conjuction with the other point above, will almost certainly get any case brought regarding it thrown out of court at the summary judgement stage. 2: The doctrine of Scènes à faire would preclude a bunch of the more hysterical predictions I have seen lurking this thread, like attempts to go after people for using standard stat systems like the old Str/Dex/Con/Int/Wis/Cha system, or the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system or what have you. This is in addition to them being functional, not creative. Anyway, now I can go back to lurking.
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Jan 13, 2023 05:05
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The Bee posted:They aren't publishing a joint game together. They're just mutually agreeing to their own version of an OGL. I'm reasonably pleased by this announcement but let's be clear: Paizo is paying for and making their own version of an OGL, and a bunch of other companies have signed on to using it (probably tentatively). Paizo will be taking feedback, which is very cool. "Paizo will pay for this legal work" means that Paizo gets the final say. This is OK, the alternatives are somewhat complex, but that announcement is also marketing and PR and Paizo is not immune from being a corporation.
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Jan 13, 2023 05:10
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Plutonis posted:If there's a publisher that can go against Hasbro in court is them. And Chaosium and al might also help with any legal fees too. If you want an outside counsel to draft a simple letter, you’re looking at a high three figure bill. If you want to engage in any kind of discovery - where documents are exchanged only, no deposition - that’s mid five figures. Getting a deposition set up and run pushes that bill closer to six figures all in and IME about 2 years of headaches. This is without any kind of court proceedings or real filings. It’s a headache and a half dealing with a lawsuit you’re likely to win, and you need to have deep pockets. Inside counsel shifts the figures differently, you’re not paying per use but you do have a higher floor - likely in the same ballpark after it’s all said and done honestly, lower fees but higher salaries. And that assumes you have the infrastructure in place to handle the discovery. If not those vendors start in the five figures and they get more expensive very quickly. So anyone asking Paizo Press to fight Hasbro is thinking they have free cash sitting around roughly equivalent to the average American salary at hand the moment they get served, and willing to go up to $500k before the first hearing. Hasbro knows this and honestly so does Paizo. Nystral fucked around with this message at 05:30 on Jan 13, 2023 |
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Jan 13, 2023 05:28
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MockingQuantum posted:I do think it's a pretty short-sighted culmination of that path, for reasons others have articulated better than I can--it feels like a blatant attempt to monopolize the VTT and D&D-as-a-service model, and trap their core users in a curated ecosystem where they get the biggest cut... but I would think for that to work, it would rely on a fairly robust stream of 3PP modules and supplements to keep people active and paying money for the foreseeable future, since WotC's current leadership doesn't seem particularly interested in investing in top talent to make that stuff in house (though honestly I haven't paid much attention to what they've put out lately besides Spelljammer, so maybe that's changed). I like your analysis here, but I wanted to zero in on this because there's an interesting point to raise here in relation to this ORC news. Kobold Press already announced their own in-house system will be developed, and they've also now agreed to join the ORC license Paizo is crafting. This is a pretty big deal given they've worked so closely with WotC on 5e D&D that they've even been contracted to publish first-party adventures for the game, sort of like the position Paizo was in with 3e D&D. I'm not expecting Kobold Press to become some surging industry force that establishes a nook as big as Paizo's. Maybe it will or maybe not. At the present though, it's a pretty notable to see a third party publisher with so much experience and respect break away so resoundingly. I have to imagine it was one of the "~20" publishers making enough off of D&D supplements (and especially Kickstarter campaigns) that WotC was hoping to reap that 20/25% royalty off of, and they've made their stance on the whole OGL 1.1 clear.
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Jan 13, 2023 05:37
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Matt Colville talked about this on stream tonight and what his lawyers told him is basically that it would cost probably a couple of millions and it was about 50/50 odds of going in their favor which seems like a big gamble for any company to take.
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Jan 13, 2023 05:37
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sebmojo posted:Yeah, that's a slam dunk case of estoppel. The thing I think makes this extra huge is that it's an actual interesting proposition if you're a creator. Do you want to publish under the weird "we might gently caress you at any time" corporate license or the one that a billion different systems are participating in. Sure, none of them are as big as D&D but together it's pretty much the list of everyone else that matters. hyphz posted:Which puts them squarely in the path of Hasbro’s legal department and money tree. Again, good luck. Yes, but I think it's worth noting that the case against Hasbro actually has a good shot and there's already a lot of public interest going to bat on this. Maybe the EFF will get involved along with other open-source advocacy legal groups and Paizo isn't gonna have to pay them (or at least, not nearly as if they did it alone). Moreover, a drawn out legal battle over the OGL is as bad as a loss. It just makes the license seem even more toxic and will convince people to publish solo or under something newer and safer. Hasbro won't like winning a pyrrhic victory here and it's a very possible outcome.
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Jan 13, 2023 05:52
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With Paizo and ORC, I think it's worth pulling out this quote from the screenshots while their website is still down from all the traffic:quote:We believe, as we always have, that open gaming makes games better, improves profitability for all involved, and enriches the community of gamers who participate in this amazing hobby. And so we invite gamers from around the world to join us as we begin the next great chapter of open gaming with the release of a new open, perpetual, and irrevocable Open RPG Creative License (ORC).
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Jan 13, 2023 06:07
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Nuns with Guns posted:With Paizo and ORC, I think it's worth pulling out this quote from the screenshots while their website is still down from all the traffic: This will finally be the year of Linux on the tabletop
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Jan 13, 2023 06:07
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quote:Ultimately, we plan to find a nonprofit with a history of open source values to own the license (such as the Linux Foundation). Magnetic North posted:This is the trad games equivalent of "2024 will be the year of Linux on the desktop" oh my god
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Jan 13, 2023 06:08
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So outside of circles where people are really into TTRPG news how much does the average DM or player of D&D care about the OGL situation? I personally am seeing outrage in a lot of places, but I also spend a lot of time looking at D&D content online. Meanwhile I'd be surprised if the average person among the estimated 10+ million member D&D player base (which as of 2020 was 40% made-up of people 25 or younger) knows anything about the OGL.
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Jan 13, 2023 06:14
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Hexmage-SA posted:So outside of circles where people are really into TTRPG news how much does the average DM or player of D&D care about the OGL situation? I personally am seeing outrage in a lot of places, but I also spend a lot of time looking at D&D content online. Meanwhile I'd be surprised if the average person among the estimated 10+ million member D&D player base (which as of 2020 was 40% made-up of people 25 or younger) knows anything about the OGL. Not much, but they're also exceedingly unlikely to be on D&DB or similar either. The problem for WOTC though, is that the fallout from this will reach those casual people directly or indirectly through friends, streamers, publishers, etc.
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Jan 13, 2023 06:17
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Hexmage-SA posted:So outside of circles where people are really into TTRPG news how much does the average DM or player of D&D care about the OGL situation? I personally am seeing outrage in a lot of places, but I also spend a lot of time looking at D&D content online. Meanwhile I'd be surprised if the average person among the estimated 10+ million member D&D player base (which as of 2020 was 40% made-up of people 25 or younger) knows anything about the OGL. Apropos of nothing, I just came from a completely unrelated tabletop thing tonight and more than once discussion of the OGL came up. Completely anecdotal, but when the hot topic at Digimon TCG night is DnD (and whether Bandai will bring the reprint booster to America) I think it has some level of zeitgeist consciousness to it.
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Jan 13, 2023 06:18
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I think it's a fair bet that anyone that's "into" D&D is going to hear about this OGL thing sooner or later, even if they've never heard of it before January 1, 2023, if only because you're likely to be interfacing with D&D-adjacent content in social media, and the content creators are going to be talking about this
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Jan 13, 2023 06:18
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Stephenls posted:If the audience doesn't fit the financial model that allows for optimal growth, use marketing to pivot to a new audience, and gently caress the current audience for not fitting the financial model. The idea of fitting the financial model to the audience doesn't make sense because you're in it for financial growth, not audience. I've seen this pattern happen a lot of times. Depressing when it works, but entertaining when it doesn't (which is the far more common outcome, especially with niche hobbies) and you got a company that's got to come crawling back across the bridge they burned with a now pissed off audience because their new, more desirable audience failed to materialise. I think we can all name a few examples. gradenko_2000 posted:I think it's a fair bet that anyone that's "into" D&D is going to hear about this OGL thing sooner or later, even if they've never heard of it before January 1, 2023, if only because you're likely to be interfacing with D&D-adjacent content in social media, and the content creators are going to be talking about this And you know how people are suckers for a good drama. Nowadays this kind of poo poo spreads like wildfire through pretty much every channel, especially since the whole popularity boom is basically among specifically people most plugged into social media.
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Jan 13, 2023 06:20
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A 100% normie I know brought it up to me unprompted that they were cancelling their DND subscription and that I was right about WotC.
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Jan 13, 2023 06:23
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Ghost Leviathan posted:And you know how people are suckers for a good drama. Nowadays this kind of poo poo spreads like wildfire through pretty much every channel, especially since the whole popularity boom is basically among specifically people most plugged into social media. yeah I was going to add a bit of social commentary that because of the internet and social media, a person is far more likely (at least in my estimation) to encounter "current events" about their hobbies, just because of how this stuff works nowadays You get into miniatures painting, you search out the relevant hashtag on TikTok, you find someone on Instagram, you look for a few youtube videos, and then when Warhammer gets into a legal kerfuffle the algorithm serves it up for you
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Jan 13, 2023 06:24
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Hexmage-SA posted:So outside of circles where people are really into TTRPG news how much does the average DM or player of D&D care about the OGL situation? I personally am seeing outrage in a lot of places, but I also spend a lot of time looking at D&D content online. Meanwhile I'd be surprised if the average person among the estimated 10+ million member D&D player base (which as of 2020 was 40% made-up of people 25 or younger) knows anything about the OGL. The magic 30th news spread like wildfire because big streamers put out videos with a mil plus youtube views and news sites reported on it, the same will happen for this. Moist Critical has already made a video.
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Jan 13, 2023 06:32
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EDIT: Beaten to MoistCr1TiKaL! I was actually posting earlier this week that the casual players at the gaming shop last weekend weren't talking about it, but over the last 6 days the story has popped into some more visible areas including motherfucking MoistCr1TiKaL posting a video on his YouTube channel with 12million subscribers (over 2 million views on the video so far), and several rather well known D&D AND Pathfinder channels suddenly tweeting and posting about it over the last few days. So yes, I think it finally did break over into the greater part of the player base.
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Jan 13, 2023 06:34
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Nystral posted:So anyone asking Paizo Press to fight Hasbro is thinking they have free cash sitting around roughly equivalent to the average American salary at hand the moment they get served, and willing to go up to $500k before the first hearing. Hasbro knows this and honestly so does Paizo. Paizo knows it and has the resources and will to make a fight of it. They're nowhere near WotC in revenue, obviously (M:tG is still printing money in armored car-sized lots even with the 30th-anniversary debacle), but both Paizo and its owners are quite well-off. Further, they pretty explicitly stated in their ORC announcement that they're willing to fight the legal battle. This isn't a case like WotC vs Cryptozoic over HEX, where Cryptozoic was tapped on resources thanks to the ongoing costs of developing a MMO TCG engine and game from scratch. It's hard to get accurate revenue figures for Paizo since they're not publically traded, but keep in mind that they have not only Pathfinder (which was actually more popular than D&D during 4th edition and is still, AFAIK, 2nd place in the tabletop RPG world), they also have an active publishing imprint, revenue from two popular video games, their own online store which sells OGL material from a wide variety of publishers, etc. As for Lisa Stevens, she was WotC's first full-time employee--back when they were still paying employees with $0.50 stock shares--and she was a senior executive when Hasbro bought them out. Even if she earned zero dollars from the entire span of Paizo, she'd still be quite wealthy just from those. Her partner and co-owner Vic Wertz was also a WotC employee in the early days (he claims to be the source of the name "Magic: the Gathering"). I'm not saying that Paizo can out-money WotC, because that's ridiculous. No company with a hat in the ring can out-money WotC. They're a billion-dollar company. However, they have enough money (and more importantly, not-at-risk revenue) to make Wizards actually spend all that money and effort of a long, drawn-out legal battle where they risk losing more than they could gain. And WotC knows that. I'm pretty sure that Paizo is the one company they'd really prefer not to get into an actual legal battle with, though of course if their back's to the wall, they will. I don't think this will come down to lawsuits. Everyone except WotC is abandoning the OGL, so there's not much to fight over. ORC isn't going to be owned by Paizo, so even if they figure out some way to attack it directly, they'll be facing a legal battle against a noncompetitor who they can't scare away. Even WotC's money bags won't let them enforce the 1.1 OGL on pre-1.1 products, so the worst that happens is everyone scrambles to de-D&D-ify their products (which won't take long because very few new 1.0(a) OGL products actually use any WotC copyrightable material).
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Jan 13, 2023 06:36
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miniscule12 posted:Moist Critical has already made a video. With 2.7 million views in 2 days. So many people were cancelling their D&D Beyond accounts that it crashed the website. And then they tried hiding the 'cancel your subscription' button. Because that always goes well. Various game/geek/media people have been posting about it, Gaiman for example. It's definitely a thing beyond the people who are hyperinvested in D&D.
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Jan 13, 2023 06:36
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Plus, D&D is unique in that it may have plenty of -players- but DMs are much rarer and on average, much much more plugged into everything because they generally have to get far more into it out of necessity. So this does an interesting double whammy because when you cause a DM to say gently caress it, you’re also likely taking all their players out of the equation too. I don’t expect execs to understand that, but I can say as a DM I have massive sway over what we run because I can simply say ‘I don’t run D&D, but I own a ton of systems books, let’s see what would be fun for us’ and just like that I’ve pulled 5-10-15 people depending on how many groups I have going into different systems and not getting sunk cost fallacy with D&D.
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Jan 13, 2023 06:38
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I think the thread has only tangentially touched on this, but was there a change in leadership at WOTC and/or Hasbro that would have precipitated this?
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Jan 13, 2023 06:40
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Considering Piazo/Pathfinder in its current form is because of WotC first go-round with license fuckery, one would hope their lawyers have been spending the last 15 years on a plan to fight a second round of license fuckery
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Jan 13, 2023 06:46
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gradenko_2000 posted:I think the thread has only tangentially touched on this, but was there a change in leadership at WOTC and/or Hasbro that would have precipitated this? quote:On February 25, 2021, during the 2021 Investor Event, Hasbro announced a company reorganization with three divisions: Consumer Products, Entertainment, and Wizards & Digital. I think a lot of this is fallout from this restructuring along with the WotC branch being so lucrative in it's profit margins and the natural drive to push that harder.
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Jan 13, 2023 06:47
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Alright having looked into it, this ORC thing is loving apalling and has made me support Hasbro 100%. ”Open RPG Creative License”. Putting an acronym in your acronym and leaving out the final word? The only good thing that could come out of this would be if they decide that “RPG” is actually a single word and everyone is now legally required to refer to their game as an “arr-pegg”.
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Jan 13, 2023 06:47
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gradenko_2000 posted:I think the thread has only tangentially touched on this, but was there a change in leadership at WOTC and/or Hasbro that would have precipitated this? The head of D&D Ray Winninger stepped down and was replaced not too long ago. And the former WOTC head became the Hasbro head and was replaced as WOTC head last year as well. Nuns with Guns posted:With Paizo and ORC, I think it's worth pulling out this quote from the screenshots while their website is still down from all the traffic: You know what would be wild, if Wizards suddenly announced tomorrow they were also signing in on ORC. (I don't think this would actually happen mind you.)
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Jan 13, 2023 06:48
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Comrade Koba posted:Alright having looked into it, this ORC thing is loving apalling and has made me support Hasbro 100%. Look up GNU and have your mind blown.
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Jan 13, 2023 06:51
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Comrade Koba posted:Alright having looked into it, this ORC thing is loving apalling and has made me support Hasbro 100%. It neatly avoids the PIN Number or ATM Machine redundancy problem. ORC License supremacy.
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Jan 13, 2023 06:55
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