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The Open Game License as I See It, Part IIPast, Present, and Future0I think the Open Game License was brilliant. Last week I wrote about why it was good for Wizards of the Coast and good for the game. This week, things get a bit more controversial. I suspect I'm about to raise a few hackles. The OGL Is Good for the Industry I've heard a lot of talk that, in the end, the whole OGL "movement" has been bad for the game industry as a whole. Poppycock. The people who say that (usually industry types) do so because from their point of view, they were hurt by the OGL. But that's extremely narrow thinking. When it all started five or six years ago, people feared that the "industry" would be swallowed up and destroyed and everyone left would produce only d20 and OGL material. First of all, that's obviously absurd, but second -- even if it was true -- it's fallacious to posit that such a result would be bad for the industry. If RPG sales went up across the board because of 3rd Edition and the OGL, even if non-OGL games were hurt, it's still an improvement for the industry overall. It means, of course, that some of the "old guard" companies go away and some new companies come to the fore (and many new companies don't survive) but that's just evolution. But that's not even the coldest, hardest truth. Pared to the core of the issue, here's the real fact, simple but harsh: How goes Wizards, so goes the RPG industry. Frankly, the difference in sales between Wizards and all other producers of roleplaying games is so staggering that even saying there is an "RPG industry" at all may be generous. If something helps Wizards 1% and hurts the rest of the industry 10%, it's a net gain. When I started full-time in the industry at Iron Crown Enterprises, at the time the publishers or both Rolemaster and Champions, a smart guy (it was either Kevin Barrett or S. Coleman Charlton, I no longer remember which -- perhaps it was both... they're both smart guys) told me that TSR, the market leader at the time (by a long way) and the company that owned D&D, wasn't the enemy. We weren't in competition with D&D, and we'd be kidding ourselves to think it. Our audience was made up almost entirely of people who had played D&D and now were looking for something else (or who still played D&D and were looking for something more). To be blunt, we lived off TSR's scraps. But we lived quite happily on those scraps -- it was a viable niche, and one best served if those within it recognized that we were in it. That awareness stayed with me over the years, even as I went to work for TSR and then Wizards (who became the market leader after buying TSR), and when I left again. I knew that when I worked on D&D, I wasn't competing with other game systems, and when I left I knew I wasn't competing with D&D. The OGL gave this only more truth. With each Malhavoc product that I publish, I'm helping Wizards and helping D&D. (And I'm fine with that.) So here I am saying that D&D is the most important roleplaying game and Wizards the most important RPG company... does this mean that I'm against all non-d20-compatible games? Of course not. I love a lot of games, and like I said, it's absurd to think that the OGL would suddenly erase great games like Call of Cthulhu, GURPS, Champions, Vampire, and others. Or that it would do away with the very small, so-called independent games. It couldn't, even if it wanted to, and thank goodness for that. The sudden success of d20-compatible games does suggest, however, that perhaps the industry paid too much attention to producing, distributing, and selling games not compatible with D&D in days gone by. How can I say that? Because when given the chance to produce OGL games, the industry taken as a whole flourished. Small companies saw sales figures for books in the tens of thousands -- figures they would never have seen otherwise. New companies started up and did well. New blood was injected into the hobby, both with new professionals and (much more importantly) with new players. To use a simplistic analogy, for years we had one large company making red hats and lots of smaller companies making blue hats, green hats, plaid hats, and so on. When looking at general market trends, it seems that there were more people out there wanting to buy red hats than even the one large company could produce, and in reality there were too many non-red hats out there. With more red hats available, total hat sales went up. Why the Bubble Burst So if it was all so great, why didn't it last? Why aren't companies producing OGL material still selling great numbers? (Actually, here's a secret: a couple -- but only a couple -- still are, and they are doing so fairly quietly. Maybe not as great as in the beginning, but even Wizards' sales figures reportedly are down from those heady days.) Most people will tell you that the problem was just the sheer number of companies producing material, and the sheer number of products. But I don't think it was quite that simple. To be blunt, the problem was that so many of the products being published were crap. And it's because so many of them covered such absurdly narrow topics, many of which would have been better topics for a three-page magazine article than a 64- or 96-page book. And, while I tried to avoid it, Malhavoc Press was guilty of this to some degree as well. Our event book line -- Requiem for a God, When the Sky Falls, and Cry Havoc -- while enjoyed by many (they are some of my personal favorites too), were our most narrowly-focused and worst-selling products. The game industry must never forget how smart our customers are. When a gamer buys three d20 supplements and they're all disappointments, he's not going to buy a fourth. Or when they go to the game store and they see a dozen new titles, all extremely focused -- many with topics seemingly chosen simply on the basis of "no one's done this yet" rather than "I'm sure lots of people would find this useful" -- gamers know they're not going to use them, so they don't buy them. Which is fine, but when that goes on for a year, pretty soon the gamers stop looking. Which means that even the quality books get overlooked. But there's more to it than even that. Retailers and distributors, most too busy to be familiar with every single title (particularly in the boom period), begin to think of all d20 and OGL products as the same. One's as good as another. When they see the poor ones beginning to clog up their shelves (or their warehouses) unsold, they stop ordering or reordering the good ones. Again, the problem isn't so many products, it's so much crap. And there's another reason as well. Wizards' release of 3.5 was a kick in the teeth for most d20 publishers, particularly those producing only material meant to directly support core d20 -- which is to say, D&D. Ironically, the ones Wizards hurt the hardest were the ones who were helping them the most. (And here's another secret: In the end, it was bad for Wizards' own long-term sales as well, as the sales of their own older products dried up. Their so-called "evergreen" titles -- the very ones that the OGL was created to help sustain -- stopped looking so green.) 3.5 was such a major revision that the buying public believed that 3.0 material was now useless to them (which is nonsense, but that's another topic). Lots of people threw up their hands and stopped buying much stuff. Oh, they bought the 3.5 core books, which reportedly sold well (but nowhere near 3.0 figures), but then they stopped buying. Or they bought only official D&D material. The OGL and the Future There are still good companies producing quality OGL material. And Wizards is still producing good D&D material. So there's little reason to think that much will change from right now, in the short term. But what about the long term? At some point, Wizards will decide to do a 4th Edition, which is a good thing. What would be a bad thing is if it happened just because they needed to boost their bottom line when it came time to answer to Hasbro. Let me preface this by saying that nothing I'll write here on the subject of 4th Edition is based on any kind of direct knowledge. No one's told me a thing. But I did work at Wizards for years, and I knew the original plans. Moreover, I know the kinds of products that you release before a new edition, and the kinds of things you post to the Internet and say at conventions when you're working on a new edition. And so based on all that, my wild guess is 2008, with an announcement in 2007. That said, I think it maybe could come as early as 2007, with an announcement this year. If that were to happen, however, and I was working on D&D at Wizards, I'd polish up my resume, because a release that soon would seem to indicate that Hasbro was forcing the issue; it would suggest the corporation wants squeeze the game for what it was worth and then dump it, because the timing would be wrong for optimal success. It would indicate that they (Hasbro) just didn't care. To be blunt, 2007 would be too early--sales would not be as good, and the finished game would likely have been rushed. It would be very bad news for the game, for people working on the game, and likely for the rpg hobby as a whole (remember, so goes Wizards...) Of course, I could be completely wrong. Maybe it will be farther off. Like I said, I have no special knowledge. Regardless of when it comes, however, the issue at hand is: Will 4th Edition continue to be an open game? This is a complex question. I suspect that as the Wizards revolving door continues to toss out more and more of the so-called "old guard" (willingly or unwillingly), fewer people remain who believe in or even really understand the Open Game License. There are people at Wizards, for example, that think of companies like Malhavoc as competitors, not as licensees. There may be a desire on such people's part to close it all up again. Even if that happens, however,
the better question is, could they? Let me point out that the OGL is
pretty much irrevocable. Companies could continue to produce books compatible
with 3rd Edition, or with OGL games like Arcana Evolved, Spycraft, or
Mutants and Masterminds. And even if Wizards took away the d20 license
and didn't update the SRD, if 4th Edition still used hit points, Armor Class,
six ability scores 3-18, and so on, it would be easy enough to create material
under the existing OGL pretty compatible with 4th Edition. Arguably, to make
the game airtight-closed, Wizards would have to change it so radically that
it wouldn't even be D&D anymore.* Will this be good for Wizards? Probably not. The smartest thing they can do for their own good is to make 4th Edition open, so that it can get a lot of support. Otherwise, suddenly the OGL works against them rather than for them. (Arguably, the negative impact might be small -- it's difficult to tell--but the positive influence would certainly be gone.) Will a new edition be good for the game? In my opinion, if Wizards is truly interested in what's good for the game, they'll wait until people really want a 4th Edition, which I imagine would come no sooner than 2008. Then, if they come up with something that's truly innovative and honestly improves the play of the game, it's good for the game. With the creative minds they have working there, there's little doubt that they could, given time, come up with a new edition that makes us all stand up and take notice. Will it be good for the industry? Too early to tell. It seems unlikely that lightning will really strike twice and that there will be a 4th Edition boom to roleplaying game sales as occurred with 3rd Edition. I hope I'm wrong -- if nothing else, as an RPG fan, I'd love to see them flourish. But in so many ways, 3rd Edition was a perfect storm. It was long overdue, people were hungry for a change, and yet (particularly at the outset) their expectations were low. Today, things seem to be just the opposite. A few forward-thinking gamers are only just now starting to even consider a new edition. The general public seems to actively not want it to happen. And yet, I think expectations are very high, and that if it did happen, people would be expecting the veritable second coming of RPGs. It will be hard for the industry to know what to do. Ignore it? Support it? Rush to support legions of disenfranchised 3.0/3.5 fans? Like I said, interesting times. *I'm not a lawyer. This isn't legal advice. This is just my opinion and the opinion of others (some of whom are lawyers, but it's still not legal advice, so please don't take it as such). Related Articles
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