It's worth noting that the OGL was not created out of the goodness of WotC's heart. Ryan Dancey, former VP at TSR and former business head for the roleplaying department at WotC, was one of the architects of the OGL as DnD was preparing to switch to 3rd edition (circa 2000). Dancey explained in a recent interview that the OGL was designed to make DnD profitable. They recognized that the value of any TTRPG was not in the content itself (the system, adventures, rule expansions, etc), but the network created by that content. In short, the more people that played a game, the more valuable that game became. At the time, the TTRPG scene was flagging and many small businesses were going under. Part of the problem was how fractured the market was, with scores of small game systems all competing for player attention. In such an environment, no system could achieve the network size needed for profitability. The OGL was a method of encouraging third party developers to make content for DnD rather than create their own isolated systems. This would not only cut down on competition, but it would improve the DnD ruleset and create more content to keep players playing than WotC could create themselves (and, considering that adventure modules have razor thin profit margins, not having to produce as many would mean more time and resources for WotC to devote to more profitable ventures). The end result would be far more people playing DnD and sticking with DnD rather than jumping to a different system. It was seen as a win-win-win: small companies could stay profitable by riding the coattails of the DnD brand; WotC would benefit from the decreased competition, growing player base, brand name recognition, and free content updates; players would have both higher quantity and quality of content to add to their games. Not only did it succeed, Dancey believes that, without the OGL, DnD would not have survived to the modern day. Either it would have been abandoned by WotC/Hasbro in the early 2000s or it would have sunk itself with the disastrous release of 4th edition in 2008. The OGL saved the brand, and now that DnD is big enough to survive without it, WotC wants to pull it.
It's also worth noting that change of license was already attempted in mentioned D&D 4e - which has led to Wizards losing market to Paizo, who stopped producing content for D&D and continued their work on OGL based D&D 3.5 in form of Pathfinder. I really wonder if they do that again with Pathfinder 2E. D&D is big, but is it big enough?
@@katerinachuranova8435 Unfortunately, I think it is big enough. DnD holds roughly 80% of the TTRPG market share. Furthermore, DnD has become synonymous with tabletop gaming in the public zeitgeist (in the same way that my parents called every video game console "a Nintendo" and every handheld a "Gameboy"). At this point, DnD may be big enough that the majority of its players don't know or don't care about the OGL. Players aren't likely to completely change their gaming habits over a moral stance on an issue that doesn't really affect them directly. People also didn't switch from 4e because of the OGL. 4e was, essentially, a different game from 3e. Pathfinder, meanwhile, was basically a modified 3e. People shifted to Pathfinder because it was just the same thing they had always been playing; they could use the same adventures and supplements and even keep their same campaigns running under Pathfinder. When 5e came out (5e being basically an updated and sleeker 3e), those people came back because they wanted to play DnD. Unless 6e is massively different from 5e (in the same way that 4e was to 3e), the average group won't want to switch.
No, some people left at 4E and because they'd bought into 3.x and didn't want a slightly different system. Those people are kind of dumb, but plentiful enough that Pathfinder became popular.
@@katerinachuranova8435 It's bigger now than it was then, and 5e is more popular than 4e. But this was definitely a stupid decision that angered a lot of people right when they're releasing a movie and announcing a TV series, so...yeah.
One important thing to note is that the updated OGL has been called a "draft" in the response, when in fact it was sent out with contracts and if it had gone to the plan WotC and Hasbro wanted, it would have been signed by now. You don't send out drafts with contracts to be signed
Not necessarily. It's plausible that WotC sent out a contract that was intentionally weighted in their favor, with the idea that the other party would negotiate them down to what they REALLY wanted. Then one those contracts went to somebody who decided to leak it, either because they didn't get the memo, they were pissed off to be jerked around, or they figured to one-up the aggressive negotiation with some of their own.
@@asteriondeltoro124 "this draft says you owe me your soul.....go ahead and sign it...its just a draft " "Um....no?" "BRO! ITS A DRAFT! Just sign it and send it to my lawyer!"
I love how WotC just can't take the hint, and just keep falling on their face over and over again with increasingly brazen monetization scams. Guys, your game is cooperative daydreaming with dice. You can't reign in players from doing whatever tf they want with it. You literally have no leverage. Maybe they'll learn their lesson this time but I doubt it. On the plus side, Paizo's ORC license looks like it's going to be awesome! Get ready for an embarrassment of riches as a thousand basement operations that are better and more creative than D&D spring onto the scene to see who is going to be the new Pathfinder to WotC's dumber, uglier clone of the 4e debacle.
My favorite part of this story is that Paizo announced a partnership with several other companies to create their own license, the Open Roleplay Creative (ORC) License.
This is probably the most important part of the story, really. WotC were content to sit on their hands and weather the shit storm until the players got tired. Paizo dropped an ultimatum after a *week* of silence, and WotC created their empty statement within a day of that. They're fucked. If Paizo commits to ORC, which I have no reason to believe they won't, everybody will abandon WotC.
@@PaperFlare I'd like to believe that, but the popularity of D&D compared to literally every other tabletop RPG can't be overstated. Nothing else even comes close, which is damn shame since many of them are better games.
Legal Eagle's video about this reveals a potential downside the idiot brain broken executives don't realize: *D&D doesn't actually own that much*, they own like 5 of their monsters and a few dozen spell names, the specific formatting, art, and text of their rulebooks, and their lore and campaigns. They don't own fuck all else, not the mechanics (uncopyrightable). Hilariously nobody needs them, and even things they do own (mind flayers, beholders) have been used in other properties in the past and probably aren't owned by them!
Some useful context, which may have been mentioned somewhere in the comments already: Back in the old days, when the D&D licence was held by TSR they used to very heavily go after any creator in the space that got even slightly close to D&D, leveraging their size and money to muscle out small creators who were often legally in the right but unable to afford to fight it. So in 2000 when Wizards picked up the licence from the shell of TSR the OGL was created more as a promise to creators that if they followed some guidelines Wizards wouldn't pull the same nonsense and would let creators do their thing. It's been mentioned that legally there's very little that the OGL allows you to do that you can't do with a few simple steps to file the serial numbers off the copyrighted bits of rules & settings, it's just that Hasbro are an even bigger company than TSR were back in the day and could easily start overpowering creators with money again. Worth noting that D&D as a hobby and a business has flourished in the times when the intent of the OGL has been supported (3e and 5e) and stuggled during those times without it (the TSR days and 4e), but I'm sure Hasbro will be happier with their 100% of barely anything rather than 75% of way more, at least they're getting all of it, right?
I miss TSR. Not the corporate side, I don't like the corporate side. But the creative side was amazing. Those guys were able to take an idea as silly as "Literally D&D in space." and turn it into something great and fun, with just enough silliness to keep it from becoming too serious.
If it's any consolation, Paizo who owns Pathfinder, D&D's main RPG rival has announced a neutral open gaming licence, effectively giving the middle finger to WotC and Hasbro. Paizo does own much of its own content pertaining to Pathfinder, free of both WotC and Hasbro, meaning it does at least have independence of these two corporations, I just hope Paizo and Pathfinder stays free from corporate greed, so keep third party and community support alive.
@@vincentmuyo That's an irrelevant statement. They stand to lose big if WotC pulls off what it's trying to do, so they can be expected to go through with a plan that takes that power away from WotC.
Me and my group decided "You take shelter from a storm in a cave, because you're wet and tired you fail to notice some runes in the cave walls, when you wake up the mouth of the cave leads somewhere else. Welcome to Rifts." I've played dnd for 40 years, I'm done. We're moving everyone to different systems.
@@kylejohnson423 Good for you! Steve Jackson is an amazing game designer. May your RPG journey (which some of us started in the late 70s) be fruitful! Maybe one day, you'll try out an indie release RPG! They were all the rage in the 1990s... but I guess the 'nerd culture' of 2023 has probably never heard of it.
@@kylejohnson423 Hope you love calculating how long it takes to dig a ditch. Why not use a system that wasn't made by a boring accountant? I advice indie RPGs, e.g. Dungeon World and other "Powered by the Apocalypse" games.
12:58 companies are basically like the raptors from the Jurassic Park novels, constantly testing the strength of their barriers until they find a weakness they can break down and eat your kidneys while you scream
As a nerd, there's some missing context. While the OGL 1.1 suggested that it only taxed over 750k in revenue, they required ANY revenue over 50k to be reported like the IRS, made the document reviseable at any time so that those lower incomes were vulnerable at any executives whim, and while it stated that Wotc gets permenant rights to your content, they can revoke your right to your own content at any time for any reason. Basically legally protected theft You also missed the now famous quote from an insider who said that Hasbro executives saw consumers as "an obstacle between them and their money"
Also, for the sake of completeness, D&D Beyond is a virtual tabletop (i.e. online) for people who don't (for whatever reason) play around and actual tabletop. Before all this started, it was already looking shady , as WotC were looking to oust all the third party VTT (like Roll20) with this new system. And furthermore, intended it to start incroaching on actual tabletop play, by making everything online (dice, character models, characters sheets) and something you could use on your phone. (Because when you are actually sitting at a tabletop, you of course want people looking at their phones MORE...) One member of my group said that he was going to be attending a convention where this was in use, so that EVERYONE playing would HAVE to have a tablet or phone. I'm sure I don't have to underline how this would inherently exclude everyone that doesn't have one. And, of course, WotC were pusing these digitals models, because they saw this digital table top as a way to push cosmetics... As microtransactions. And of course, a subscription. Basically, WotC were trying to make D&D Beyond a live-service microtransaction video game *without even the minimum effort of making a video game*. In fact, recently they apparently *cancelled* five games in development. They wanted video game money, without having all that time and money to actually MAKE a game. (I don't even know if these digital models are supposed to be animated but I don't think they would be.) This shows less savyy than *Games Workshop* who are reputedly buffered against all their othe failures financially by their strong video game strategy. Hasbro would have - and *I cannot believe I'm saying this* - likely have been far better served by taking a leaf out of GW's playbook. (Or just simply making a better D&D product, apparently their output has been slow and not of high quality.) But that, of course, would have taken effort... Thsi debarcle also demonstrates a couple of subtleties WotC missed about the RPG community as a whole (both of which I hadn't really thought about until they were brought up). One, in general, you don't sell products to PLAYERS, for the most part, you predominatly sell them to DUNGEONMASTERS. Because without a DM prepared to spend the significant effort to run the game, game don't happen. And DMs are what, something like at best 20% of the total of available players (4 players plus DM, but not accounting for folks like me who prefer to run with 6-8 players, where it's even smaller). DMs are in much shorter supply and as a smaller number, it's so much easier to tweak more of them off. Secondly, this is the community that *coined the phrase "rules lawyer"* and they expected to be able to puit several past the community as a whole. (Oh, and reading between the lines, the amount of leaks coming out of WotC suggest that this was definitely not what the ground-floor staff wanted (i.e. the devs) and was decision by the Suits, likely waving their dicks around and refusing to be gain-sayed.) Finally, as some people have mentioned, Paizo and several other companies are banding together to make their own new OGL with brimvoraks and hook horrors, ORC, which they have the stated intention of eventually moving off to the custody of a non-profit organisation like the Linux Foundation so that it cannot be placed under threat by any one corporation again.
@@jack-a-lopium Yes it is, and WotC was forced to roll back the worst dumb of all the dumb decisions (which they had to pare down from a list of dozens and dozens of examples.) If WotC had done things right the first time, this wouldn't have happened. That's their fault. Not Sterling's.
Something to note, they sent the "Draft" to content creators to sign, allegedly according to some people's sources, which if true would mean WotC lied in order to gaslight the community so they can try to claw back some subscriptions that they had lost. You don't ask people to sign a Draft document.
add the whole digital D&D 0 or what it is called that is ment to be a digital subscription plattform for the next edition. Screenshots from test runs with it show skins and alternative appearances etc being SOLD for "models". Last time I checked that happened the only way to get into that kind of closed store is to either sell rights through them with a cut taken on EVERY sale or alter said content to make it fit their view killing original ideas on monsters/champaigns etc
As I heard it, the "signing" requested was an NDA, which would be totally fair and reasonable for commentary on a potentially (and indeed, as it turns out, incredibly) inflammatory piece of corporate policy. I haven't seen anybody I trust say that they were being asked to sign the actual OGL, but if you've seen that, would love to see the source.
@@berndb23 the RollForCombat channel has been a consistent and early source of information. The guy there publishes Pathfinder books under the OGL and knows a lot of people in the industry. According to him, multiple sources have given him the same story of being given the new OGL 1.1 with contracts and a Jan 13 deadline to sign. Check out his channel to see if you believe him.
One point: the stuff about bigoted content was already a thing - under the original OGL, WotC and Hasbro always had the right to withdraw the licence from people or companies creating bigoted content, material or supplements (and, in fact, have done so before now). The fact that they said this is a feature of what they wanted to do with the new licence is complete gaslighting. This was never about that; it was about money farming and IP theft.
IP theft - isn't that what these third party creators have been doing for years? If some of them are making over 750k on the back of source materials and IP they do not own, shouldn't they be liable to pay something?
this is a super important point. i find that people outside of dnd are more suseptable to falling for that justification, just because they havent been around the ogl 1.0a and how its basically a lie that watc would need to make a revision to keep bigotry in check
@@Enriqueguiones Sounds like theft to me. These people and companies have been making stuff with IP they don't own and making money off it. Don't see how it's any more difficult than that.
Even if it didnt, what a shocking indictment of their lawyers it'd be if they genuinely didnt see that coming. Either they're lying (which they are), or they're fucking incompetent. What a sad excuse for an excuse
The weasel words immediately after it are something most people haven't noticed. The "draft" said that you grant them an irrevocable license. It never says they now own it, just that they get a perpetual license. So when they come back and say that you still own the thing, it doesn't address the big problem.
As soon as I heard that WotC and Hasbro wanted to "replicate Recurrent User Spending as seen in the video game industry", had a feeling you'd be covering this. And on top of the licensing fees, the IP rights, and so on from the actual leaked OGL, their press release afterwards also mentioned they were also making sure nobody else could make D&D based NFTs... kinda sus...
That 'non-negotiable' licensing (exploitation) agreement sounded exactly like the updated Warcraft Reforged terms and conditions for user-created content
What's killing me is that if this was carried over to video games, it makes it sound as if the OG game is just asserting legal ownership rights over mods, which is one step away from what happened with Skyrim... for no monetary compensation. This how they get around crunch?
Legal Eagle did a breakdown of this and the TLDR is that you can't own the rights to a system ie D20 so as long as you don't use copyrighted or trademarked monsters/items there's basically nothing they can do . Oh and there's the "in perpetuity" clause in the OG OGL.
"Under any new OGL, you will own the content you create. We won't." I wouldn't be so quick to take them at their word here. The whole shtick was that by signing the OGL you would grant Wizards a perpetual, irrevokable, and heck sub-licensable license to do whatever they liked with your content for free. Whether "ownership" still means anything at the end of that seems a matter for the philosophers.
Yeah, in addition to the "we own anything you make forever" bit, there's also the bits about "we can change this contract whenever we want without notice" (meaning they can just change their rules and how much of your money they take at any time) along with the "you can never take legal action against us for any reason". If any contact EVER has that last bit in it, you know that whatever's involved is 100% illegal.
Hence why companies like Onyx Path and Kobold Press were getting ready to in essence pull everything and switch to in-house systems, as well as potentially lawyer up to defend their IP (which is a big deal at least for OPP, because their big draw is deeply detailed and thematic settings). Honestly if there's not a widespread move to a legally distinct but technically compatible system with a more irrevocable licence (like CC-BY) I'm going to be shocked.
Yeah, there's two major reasons why this whole line means the square root of sweet F A: 1. Owning your content is totally different from giving Wizards the right to do literally anything they want with it without giving you credit or compensation, and you waiving all right to take legal action against them. 2. Until that one ridiculous clause that says they can change ANYTHING they want about the OGL at any point with just 30 days notice has been erased off the face of the planet, literally NOTHING they say means anything at all.
11:59 this might be more connected to the current situation than you think. Last year Hasbro appointed Cynthia Williams as new CEO of Wizards of the Coast. Cynthia was previously General Manager and Vice President of “Gaming Business Expansion” at Microsoft's Xbox team, where her job was literally to attract people to the Xbox brand and expand how they could monetize Xbox. And now at WotC she has previously said the Dungeons and Dragons brand is "undermonetized". The new version of Dungeons and Dragons they announced last year is even called "D&D One" in the exact same way as "Xbox One" was.
I remember the Xbox One thing. And I'll remember this from Hasbro too. The fact that one of the exec's specifically said that they wanted D&D to be monetized like video games shows the pollution from the video game industry to other industries. Though that's really just the way executives and board members just circulate around and spread the same shit everywhere they go.
Hey, were you aware that the new WotC CEO Hasbro appointed last year, Cynthia Williams, was previously General Manager and Vice President of “Gaming Business Expansion” at Microsoft's Xbox team?
Remember, Hasbro has killed video games before because they refused to renew the license to the characters in the video game, so the creators of video games just pull the game from sale. Hasbro as a company sucks, and it's very clear that they will use whatever property they known to do so. Wizards of the Coast happened to me today's subject of how can we extract money from our marks.
Corporate and shareholder greed is not a video games industry thing, it's a corporate and shareholder thing. Its a natural mechanism of Crony Capitalism.
@@AdmiralBison corporate and shareholder greed is not a crony capitalism thing, it’s just a capitalism thing. The formation of corporations and the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of private entities is a natural mechanism of capitalism.
Hearing someone yell "chokeslam!!" from the crowd right before you did it gave me goosebumps and I don't follow wrestling at all. 😭 So happy for you! !!!
@@neelot9842 That's what I put into the survey they sent me about it. I hope the rest of you do too. We need to hammer this point relentlessly. They say they want our feedback, well here it is. Do they still care about our feedback? We're going to find out soon. Its very exciting, because their response to the survey could decide whether they win people back, or they lose more money than their new license was ever going to get them. And they know it. I can't wait to see how it goes.
I will say a couple of things you missed. They tried something similar way back when 4th Edition released and it was unpopular then too. Combine this with the system already being controversial, and Paizo, a third-party company who wrote adventures for 3.5 decided to make Pathfinder based off of the 3.5 rules. They have since printed a Pathfinder 2e. With the release of the 5th and current edition, they returned to the OGL of 2000 because of how unpopular it was and because it created its major competitor who at the time was outselling 4th edition. Since then, 5e has exploded in popularity due to cameos in Stranger Things as well as Critical Role, who have been notoriously quiet about this, likely for legal reasons or biding their time. Also, the first draft included a clause suggesting the revocation of all previous OGL agreements. This means if you had written anything for 3.5 or 5e from 2000 to 2023 they would be able to (if this new draft of the OGL was legally enforceable, which there are questions about) use the content created freely and claiming that you have already forfeited the right to this stuff. Since this all happened, Paizo and a few other smaller publishers have banded together to promise to create their own version of an OGL to be under the control of a non-profit. This combined with other smaller publishers pushing to do their own thing. Depending on your view, this could be the little guys banding together to beat the bigger guy, or publishers see the blood of the biggest TTRPG in the water and are taking advantage of the situation. Likely a mix of both.
Wizards managed to piss off two different communities in one year. They also tried to sell 60 cards (that you can't use) for 1000 dollars to celebrate 30 years of Magic.
And then Konami swooped in and made a fool of them with Yugioh's 25th anniversary special having actually playable reprints of classic cards and promos, several boosters from old, nostalgic sets, and a special new rarity for 25 year anniversaries of which 1 card at this rarity is included in every box. Retail price? Like 35 bucks.
@@kylegonewild It's really sad when Konami, of #FuckKonami News, did a better anniversary product for their card game than WotC did. You do not, in fact, have to hand it to them.
I'm surprised you didn't go harder at their attempt to frame it as being a way to prevent hate speech and crypto malarkey. 2022 Hasbro: Hey kid, you want to try some crypto? 2023 Hasbro: Hey kid, I'll protect you from crypto!
Back in 2022, Hasbro's lawyers did have to go around stopping people and third party startups from trying to turn their properties into NFTs - most famously the "MTG Dao" From what I can tell, Hasbro themselves have been circumspect on NFTs after the negative reaction to that Megazord preorder NFT (they don't make Funko Pops, so any NFTs you see of the characters they licensed to Funko aren't Hasbro's).
Thing is, there's no such thing as enough money. You're always either growing or dying, not just culturally but inherently as a feature of capitalism. Making the same revenue at a company this size this year as they did last year is how they die.
Look at what they did with Magic and Magic 30, Steph. You’ll have a field day with how much product was made at high prices that shut out budget players. Magic 30 was a 1000 dollar price point product for 4 randomized packs that only contained proxy’s. It bombed spectacularly.
They wouldn't care regardless of understanding: All of the original gaurd who hoped to put out a great product have either died, left, or both at this point. The 80's weren't kind to WoTC
Most people at the top who make decisions on big corporations don't have any idea what a good product is. This is for videogames, card games and apparently DnD as well
it's been said before but they don't care what fun is. shareholders hired accountants to top positions to maximize profits and those accountants are gonna do that the only way they know how, through accounting. it's happening in every industry, from video games to physical games to the airline industry. look up the public letter the southwest airlines pilot's union VP penned to Southwest Airlines where he explains how accountants kept being hired to top positions for over the decade and all the dumb policies they put into place over the decades to maximize profit and how that is what caused the horrendous Southwest airlines meltdown end of year
I've been watching a lot of your older content lately, and I gotta say that you look so much happier and confident in your new videos. Keep up all the good work, thank God for you!
They didn't walk back anything yet. They said they will walk it back, but until they actually present a new license, their words are empty. Trust has (again) been broken when it comes to wizards and the OGL, and for many creators it would be irresponsible to rely on them again for their livelihood. Which is why a lot of creators are looking to contribute to the new ORC license, who's framework promises a license that requires a lot less trust to rely on.
A couple important things that imo deserved a mention. WotC can't legally take away the old OGL 1.0a and people are prepared to fight it in court if need be. Also in response to this, Paizo has started working on their own license cslled the ORC, with legal protections from the future.
Yeah. This license would be irrelevant if not for their illegal attempt to "deauthorize" the OGL 1.0a even though it doesn't have a method for that and was explicitly established and sold to others as irrevocable by the company.
I think this happened BECAUSE we've seen this shit in videogames and the TTRPG community were like "no, we lost that battle once, we're not fucking losing it again!" since WotC/Hasbro are looking to turn D&D into a 'live service' type deal with microtransactions out the wazoo through D&D Beyond.
@@MK_ULTRA420 DNDBeyond has seen a sharp reduction in subscriptions, major content producers have threatend or already announced they are moving platforms and the community raised such a shitshow that fking Legaleagle made a video about it. What more do you think tabletop gamers should do? Firebomb the cars of the Hasbro and WotC execs?
@@MK_ULTRA420 no. We asking for and intend to receive, all of Wotc and Hasbros corporate heads ousted publically. Complete purge. All of them. Anything else, we keep tanking their precious IP and Brand's profits til its worth negative amounts of money.
@@MK_ULTRA420 yea... that's what people are most annoyed with. Not being allowed to be sexist anymore... not the fact that content people've worked hard on could just get stolen by WotC and then sold on while WotC could still demand a quarter of any revenue you made past 750k. WotC and Hasbro need to understand that DnD is as big as it is because of the OGL 1.0 and the freedom it gave. That'd the only lesson here: corporate greed is bad for everyone involved.
Let's talk about their "rolled a 1" comment. Rolling a 1, traditionally, doesn't mean you just happen to do a shitty job that day. The books make it pretty clear that what you roll determines external factors you couldn't predict, and your stat is your ability to compensate for these factors. Rolling a 1 doesn't mean your ranger forgets how to track targets, it means that tracking is impossible under these conditions. With this in mind, them thinking they just "rolled a 1" means they think they were unlucky to get this reaction.
DnDShorts posted an indepth breakdown of the statement Hasbro made. At first glance it does seem good but it's not actually a win for the TTRPG community and many have already expressed they won't stop hounding Hasbro until the original OGL gets reinstated
I'm surprised you missed the part at the end of the official statement where wizards said something to the tune of "the community took a "win" here but just so you know this is just the beginning and in the end we hope that both the community and wizards of the cost can win" they aren't going to change a thing just gaslight there way into getting all the money
Had to comment because I can’t stop reading the Vampire Survive bestiary entries without hearing your voice reading them. You’re an icon Steph, keep standing up for every zombie used as cheap labor!
Oooh I've been looking forward to your take! WotC got so much backlash and so many D&D Beyond subscription cancellations, their landing page supposedly "crashed". Seeing them get hit where it really hurts, does put a smile on my face!
I mean I like Beyond because as a disabled gamer its much much easier than using a character sheet and rolling physical dice. But god fuck Wiz/Hasbro. And I was thinking of getting a sub to make more characters lol
Firstly, thanks Stephanie for covering this for us! I'm glad that this has become so huge and our community has been aided by several non-D&D and TTRPG pundits for maximum effect. Talk about not splitting the party. Second, the incredible thing is that Hasbro--being the megacorp that they are--could have easily just made D&D a better product overall by improving the quality of their supplements and adventures, even hiring some of the writers and designers that worked on 3rd party supplements. But of course, WotC wanted maximum payout with minimum effort, and here we are. Shouldn't have been surprising considering WotC's CEO came from Microsoft. They grossly underestimated the difference between video games and tabletop while simultaneously overestimating the RPG community's tolerance for bullshit.
Slight correction: Gizmodo weren't the first people to publish parts of the OGL 1.1. The RUclips channel Roll for Combat leaked parts of it a day before Gizmodo after verifying it from several sources. (no slight against Gizmodo but I do want to point out the small sources that were actually doing the initial work. Gizmodo did confirm everything posted by Roll for Combat and was able to add several passages.)
That's true, although Roll for Combat also posted a bunch of misleading bullshit clickbait on Twitter and haven't had the same inside sources as Linda Codega at Gizmodo. If not for Linda Codega, few people would have believed them because they seemed so sketchy about things. (For example, falsely claiming that Knights of the Old Republic was published under the OGL, which is not true and which anyone with two brain cells could have looked up on the internet if they somehow hadn't figured it out already.)
The new OGL thing is beyond disgusting. Basically giving them full ownership of absolutely everything, and letting them claim any money you make off things as they own. "We can change this at any time and you can take no legal action against us" is never something that should be in ANY contract. EVER.
As one individual in the crowd, thank you. This is a subject near and dear to me, and it initially felt like no one would concern themselves with the problems happening in this hobby. D&D and RPGs are, after all, still the redheaded stepchild of the gaming community, and our budget is shoestring. So to see the rest of the community stepping up is heartwarming.
He just reposted another legal site's BS misunderstanding. It's not about who owns mechanics, it's about having your work stripmined, repackaged, having a label slapped on it, & it being resold back to you.
@@SodaPopBarbecue Yeah. I like Legal Eagle, but he admitted this wasn't his wheelhouse, and his video missed a lot of really important context and details.
Surprised to see you cover this! But glad you did. I think the only thing you missed was a leaked email between WotC executives that basically said D&D players were an "obstacle" to them making money, and also anonymous insiders confirming that the OGL changes were solely from the C-suite of executives and none of the D&D development team was consulted about it. But both those facts are so predictable and anyone could've guessed them to be fair, and mostly are just further proof of the kind of corporate greed you already covered. All in all, great video!
Hearing about this reminds me of when Bethesda first started monetizing mods. They started putting paid mods into Skyrim, got called out on it and eventually rolled it back. Then they reintroduced it under the Creation Club and have managed to keep it going as such ever since. I see this story, and I just have a horrible feeling this kind of money grabbing by WOTC is going to come back again, just wearing a different suit. I hope not, but unless corporations suddenly become satisfied with getting some money rather than all of the money, I'm not going to hold my breath.
That is why Paizo and other 3rd party publishers are currently developing the ORC license, while smaller developers are moving away from having anything that WotC have actually copyrighted in their games.
@@godqueensadie Ah yes, a one-time payment to the creator, with the content created being fully owned by the company, who then proceed to take 100% of all profits from selling it. You're right, that's not evil at all.
Paid for mods isn't nearly as bad as you think. I quite like the idea, personally. The only problem is that it's only applicable to mods that they make.
I thank Yongyea and Sterling for covering this on their channels. This story needs to hit other non-tabletop channels. It would be amazing if Angry Joe could cover this too. In fact, I would love an Angry Rant.
The wording on the new OGL sounds like a wannabe dictator wrote it. They can claim the work of a third-party for themselves and they can do whatever they want with it forever, without any say from the original artist / creator. That's some brutal Legalese right there.
Wow the D&D OGL 1.1 stuff even made it to this channel! That is great! I really appreciate you helping to get the word out on this to more people. WoTC and Hasbro must be stopped.
You do know that almost no one's affected by OGL 1.1, right? Like, if you do DnD stuff on youtube or a podcast and you just get Patreon donations for it, you don't have to report anything or pay them a thing. Contrary to the reporting on it, the actual OGL 1.1 explicitly says that's fine and exempt from that.
@@TheYpurias Almost nobody except most of the content creators we watch because they make stuff for D&D and use the OGL 1.0 and WoTC is trying to force OGL 1.1 which is quite bad.
Honestly I think you did a really great job covering it, especially since it isn't your wheelhouse. It's one of those very complicated topics that has a good barrier of understanding. As a fan of you and D&D it was a really fun episode to see you make. And you covered it well and I appreciate your messaging with it, not everyone is in the "never forget" camp and it's an important lesson. They even tried it for 4th edition, crashed and burned; created their biggest competitor (relatively) in Pathfinder. And it's a shame because the OGL lets creatives build the D&D brand in ways that WotC can't and won't. People can explore ideas, themes, and genres that would muddy the brand WHILE encouraging people to invest and maintain investment in the core brand. Got a sick new 3rd party adventure? Buy the character options by WotC to play in it. Got a new character option that your DM approved? Encourage your friends to play a new WotC adventure. Or hell your DM bought 5 books to use all the ideas to inspire their homebrew world.
@@Klaus-bm5ek they have their own contracts. OGL is there to say what you can freely use some of the rules of D&D (the ones in the Source Reference Document) and WotC won't mess with you. It does not cover their copyright (anything original, like settings, spell names, races and so on) since you cannot copyright game mechanics. So the OGL can be freely ignored, if you rename everything, but that's a lot of work. Hence the OGL saying "The text in the SRD, which is copyrighted, can be used in your book. We allow that, you can copy the rules as we wrote them." You can still make 3rd party content and never use anything in the SRD, you just have to rewrite the rules of D&D with your own words and if you do then the OGL has no effect on your creation. I'd suggest LegalEagle's video for an explanation why the OGL is just convenient, but can actually be safely ignored.
@@Klaus-bm5ek Baldur's Gate and Knights of the Old Republic are/were licensed through Wizards of the Coast and will be unaffected. The Pathfinder video games absolutely would be affected, though. (Except it's important to note that Paizo, who owns Pathfinder, has stated that they'll fight this in court if forced, and it's pretty clear the law is strongly on their side here. Wizards of the Coast can't just decide to tear up the OGL 1.0a. And a lot of Paizo folks were actually Wizards of the Coast folks first and were involved in drafting the OGL, so they're expert witnesses as well.)
I've been waiting for this. Knew it was right up your alley, and your voice was echoing in my head. "Not enough to make the money, they have to make ALL the money."
Some extra things to note I heard others mention. They included an option to change anything in the OGL at their will at any time just needing to give 30 days notice, meaning they could put the worst things back in once people aren't paying attention. Their stand against NFTs goes against them trying to make their own NFTs last year, and they already had the option to deny people using the lisence so they didn't need to change anything if they really did care about pushing back against hateful content so its blatantly just an attempt to garner support.
Hi all! I wanted to pop in with not only the perspective of a local game store owner, but also a potential solution. First off, to start, I've been running my store for a little over 2 years now. Not a very long time, but plenty enough to watch the slow decline. Both in the quality of products as well as the corporate greed exploding into what it is today. One of the things WOTC is notorious for is massively underprinting, and creating a false scarcity as well as "fomo". This is most evident with Magic the Gathering. They're simultaneously notorious for OVERprinting. One of the biggest issues we're experiencing as a store is, right now I can pre-order a grand total of 5 different magic the gathering sets. For those of you who don't know, this is the equivocal to 5 different call of duty games releasing within the time span of 4 months. 1 is a "remake of an older game" and the rest are "new". This is flooding the market. Not only that, but there are around 5 different types of boxes per new set that I can order, each of which is "catered" to a specific audience (akin to store-exclusive preorder bonuses). Not only this, but what USED to be exclusive to us (local stores) are now being sold DIRECT FROM WOTC On Amazon. We are now DIRECTLY competing with the company that makes the game that was made specifically for hobby shops. With this, my point is, it's damn near impossible for ME as the store owner to keep up with the sheer tsunami of items being released. How do they expect the average customer/player to keep up with it? How are we supposed to know what's in what set when there are so many things releasing at once that lists of cards coming out each month overlap? How are local ma&pa stores supposed to compete with the prices that Amazon has when the very company we buy from is undercutting us? As I mentioned before, though, there is a potential solution. Right now, the execs up at Hasbro are looking at 3 total things. 1) DnD Beyond subscriptions 2) How well Honour Among Thieves does in theaters 3) Sealed MTG sales If we cancel subscriptions, boycott Honour Among Thieves and stop buying sealed product from WOTC, HASBRO LOSES WOTC. This isn't speculation either. It's a direct piece of information from the investors. They WANT to spin off WOTC into it's own company instead of being under Hasbro. Right now, the investors think Hasbro having WotC is the best thing for the company and will make them more money. It is up to US to prove them wrong. We can fight this.
When I was in college we didn't have the books and just role-played with a few 20-sided dice, it's ridiculously simple. We didn't even use character sheets. We just said "I'm the fighter, so I'm good at fighting," and another person would be the wizard and good at magic, etc. So they'd tell me (I was the GM, but it feels kind of silly to even call it that) what they were gonna do, and I'd tell them what they had to roll, keeping in mind that if it was something their classes were traditionally good at they got a better chance. The wizard didn't even have spells, he just made them up as he went along.
Yeah thankfully D&D as a game can never really be controlled by it's copyright holders, because it is all just roleplay and personalized stuff. There is nothing they can really do to stop players from making their own shit and playing, we will just not use the company's content or not pay for it if we want it. That's why the OGL was perfect, it allowed them the good will to monetize their "brand" while still letting people make their own game. But of course the suits at the top don't understand that and want to try and grab as much money as they can, and so they have killed the good will they've had for so many years.
In a way this IS a video-game issue as well because a few games have been made using the OGL and two games (Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous) use rules from Pathfinder 1e, which also uses the OGL.
@@Korvmannen but if the end result is the same, does it actually matter if the law was on their side? There is no punishment coming their way, and they got what they wanted. A few consumers like us might be going "oh Hasbro you did a naughty, the law wasn't on your side," but that's all that will happen. If you don't believe me look at what happened when Games Workshop simply published its intention to look at fan made animations to see what was in breach of their terms. It didn't need to send out many cease and desist letters, as most fan content shut-down pre-emptively. It didn't matter to the content creators that they were safe under British law, they still retreated at the perceived threat.
One of the people I saw cover this pointed out one clause in particular. The clause says that the updated OGL can be rewritten at any time, in any way, for any reason with little warning or discussion. They mention specifically that if the new final version of the updated license includes this clause, than NOTHING that WotC has 'walked back' even counts. With that one clause, the company can effortlessly put everything back the way the 'drafts' had it, if not worse.
Just to add on about the bit where WoTC can take all your stuff and use it without telling you. If you scroll further down, there's a bit where if your content got them into legal trouble (you know, the one that they took most likely without your input in the first place and published it somewhere in some form) , you're liable to pay them for THEIR legal fees.
This move to "Not benefit" competitors is probably gonna be the largest driving force to create more competitors even with the walk back. People who otherwise wouldn't have been are now planning for when they try this again.
Thank you for doing this. As a fan of your channel for over 5 years and watching video games reviews of games I will never play while meeting up with my group to play dnd every week I appreciate you brought light to this issue.
I'm glad you covered this because there was indeed adjacence to the video gaming space. That bit about Wizards having a "nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, sub-licensable, royalty-free license to use" everyone's content feels like it was cribbed from the Warcraft 3: Reforged EULA. (Remember WC3:R? I was actually excited for it when it was announced since I'd never played any of the old Warcraft games and thought this'd be good to get into. Shame how it turned out.)
The tie into video games goes further than that. This ties into video games directly because the entire point of this wasn't about money. It was about getting control of the IP and removing all 3rd party content. Why? Something else that this entire thing is tied to: One D&D. One D&D is a new version of D&D focused around a virtual table top version of D&D that Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro is currently developing. Straight up a video game version of the game. The point of this new OGL, that is now at 2.0, was not to get any money from other creators. It was to force other creators into such a bad spot that they couldn't create anything. Taking the money was just the way they tried to do it the first time around with the 1.1 revision. With the 2.0 revision they straight up revoked the ability to create anything 3rd party that wasn't written content on paper for the table top version. Why? To force players to play the VTT (virtual table top) version of the game. Why were they trying to do this? So that Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro could nickle and dime the player base with mircotransactions like what has happened to most of the rest of the video game industry. They can't do that if there is 3rd party content out there being made and they cant force players to play the VTT version if the players want to play 3rd party content instead. My sources: Flutes Loot's OGL 1.1 and One D&D VTT video (Watching this one first is critical because it clearly sets the stage with the background story of what is actually happening and what WotC and Hasbro's goals actually are with this entire thing. The rest of the videos after this is just breaking down what is going on and why using the same sources that the great Stirling did with a more knowledgeable and familiar mind on the subject at hand.) DND Shorts' Wizard's Desperate Response and Exposing Every Lie videos LegalEagle's Dungeons and Dragons video Dungeon Craft's Episode 300 and 301 videos In those videos there is one table top game designer that predicted exactly what was going to happen and why, one lawyer, and then a number of creators that have a good grasp of what actually is going on thanks to having access to lawyers who are helping direct the legal responses of a large group of DMs and creators, including many of the companies named in Sterling's video.
The whole line about "we just want to get to know you" while basically requiring ALL D&D creators to share their earnings is what worries me the most. Sure, most creators won't be affected immediately, but who's to say the numbers won't change as part of a "new strategy" from corporate? You know they'll do it eventually...
One other point that's really significant, probably the most significant, is that the OGL 1.0a was repeatedly stated to be irrevocable by Wizards of the Coast and the specific people who wrote it, and doesn't have any revocation clause. Wizards of the Coast presented it as a two-way contract where they and third-party companies benefit, but now they're trying to break the contract even though that's a violation of the agreement. So it's not like they just made a nice license and then decided to be mean with their property. They made a binding agreement, other people built companies on that binding agreement, and now they're trying to pretend it's not binding on their end.
They know it will blow over eventually. Like Steph said, it's like loot boxes and other microtransactions. People will get tired of it and stop talking about it, and the company is free to take its ball made of shit and run to the hills with it. Just because this game is pencil and paper doesn't mean this shit hasn't happened countless times before, and these companies know that.
Oh my God I remember those terrible Ghostbusters toys. I wasn't allowed to have them because "they looked too much like guns." Friend had em. That goofy yellow piece constantly fell out and got lost.
I'm glad the community and content creators are fighting back. I got into D&D during the pandemic, haven't played a ton, but learning another game won't be that difficult.
100% I'm glad you are covering this. I'm not a TTRPG person myself, but I have many friends who are, and this kind of crap trickles downstream. We all gotta have each other's backs against cAAApitalism.
I know you probably didn't enjoy being badgered into covering this topic, though it is appreciated, and if it helps; this directly affects games too. There are (supposedly) remakes of Star Wars KOTOR and KOTOR II in the works; both of those games used the Star Wars D20 ruleset (essentially a variant of the D&D 3.5 rules), which is OGL content. Hasbro's little kill order here covered a lot more forms of media that just us simple nerds playing with pen and paper.
Well, the interesting thing in in all of this is that Hasbro is kind of trying to pull a fast one there (at least, based on what a few lawyers have said on the subject). The rules structures can't actually *be* copywritten/require a license/w/e, only the actual, like, setting flavor stuff. This is actually sort of an issue with the old OGL (IE: Some of the things they specify you can use are things they don't actually have any legal ability to stop you using), but since it was much more broadly permissive anyway it kind of didn't matter, but basically, if you're just utilizing the process/structure of d20, they, uh, can't *actually* do anything unless you're quoting their books word for word. Custom variants of the rules sets, based on previous judicial precedent, never needed a license in the first place. Though I suppose people have semi-recently been given reason not to trust the reliability of judicial precedent...
@@thaddeusgenhelm8979 Indeed - It's not whether WotC would actually win if they took someone to court over this (they very soundly wounldn't), it's the *threat* of being taken to court and loosing all your money in legal fees that would intimidate smaller publishers, a good scheme to chase them away from the common ruleset.
@@liesandslander Which honestly makes it even more scummy, in my opinion. It's one thing to pull a Nintendo and be way overzealous about stuff you theoretically have legal standing to mess with (which is still bad, obviously), but basically trying to intimidate people into giving you money without even the grounds to do so feels more like a scammer, or nuisance litigator, move than something any respectable company should be doing. Insert obvious joke about how... Not shocking corporations acting less than respectably here is, I suppose.
The most outrageous part is that that 25% they asked for was GROSS REVENUE not profits! It's completely insane, for some businesses it might aswell be a cease and desist!
I loved the look at a different aspect of gaming! It might just be me who'd watch a hypothetical video on this, but there is an older story of Hasbro being a bit shite in gaming. There was a time when Hasbro was cool with My Little Pony fan made content, and then one day it wasn't. It resulted in a fan made My Little Pony fighting game getting scrapped and turned into a new IP, the pretty good and amazingly punny "Them's Fightin' Herds".
I'm a little surprised you didn't bring up how WotC basically tried to gaslight us in their statement, but considering your not immersed in the whole TTRPG sink hole, I'm grateful that you've been willing to bring light to this issue to a potentially wider audience. Thanks Steph A few other points of note; - OGL 1.0a (the original version) shouldn't be revocable, and at its time of writing, was intended to coexist along side any newer versions made. Tho due to some legal precedent over the 20 years between it's conception and now, there's a loophole that WotC are leaning on to go backsies. - WotC waited over a week to make their response, and made it on a Friday in the hopes it would skip the news cycle for the wider industry. Baically trying to wait out this storm in the hopes we will all just forget. Standard corporate garbage. - sending out the "draft" of OGL 1.1 to creators was an attempt to fear monger them into signing up early, as it came with NDAs and a 15% royalty for early adopters. They weren't drafts at all. The OGL 1.1 was fully intended to be implemented, and there are likely some poor souls who signed onto it in the weeks before it leaked to the public (something WotC very clearly didn't want for very obvious reasons). - one of the newest Execs at WotC is a lady who previously worked at Microsoft, and she described DnD as "under monetized", which has spear headed a bunch of horrible changes set to come to the game in its next iteration. Woman is straight up trying to treat DnD like a video game. Ultimately, The TTRPG community is not the DnD community. They are not the stewards of the hobby we love, they are just the latest hottest thing to be a part of it. If need be, we can and will revoke the welcome here that WotC seems intent to overstay. Paizo and numerous other creators have expressed both a willingness and a means to fill the void left by OGL 1.0a with a new open source, open rpg creative licence (Google ORC License for more info), and/or take up arms on the court of law to defend the OGL 1.0a. If WotC want to burn DnD to the ground, there are plenty of ships on these waters to swim to.
They haven't walked back the 30 day notice to change the OGL how every they want after once the new one is effect, from what I have read. So even if they walk back all this nasty stuff then they could theoretically just then say "Oh we are changing it in 30 days" and boom back to how they wanted it originally.
@Buzás András if that’s true then it’s sad. I admit it was an odd adjustment period for me at first, but after hearing the daily misery that Abigail Thorne was in before she transitioned...why would anyone want trans people to go on suffering?
This is very strongly reminiscent of the updated EULA that launched with WC3 Deforged (or Warcraft 3 Reforged, for Ctrl-F enjoyers). The original game had a permissive license for fan-made content, and some of that content turned into an entirely new and entirely lucrative genre, so Blizzard wanted to close that barn door in an attempt to bring the horse back. It's not coming back. That horse has sailed.
There was also an internal q & a detailing how WotC and Hasbro actually felt about their customers; gatekeepers to THEIR (Hasbros) money. It basically goes down from there the lack of respect and so on.
Steph! I thank god for you almost daily, but when you called me a nerd with that voice, I was SO close to breaking the glass on the emergency pitchfork. Love you lots, but I’ve never felt so called out in all your videos. 😅
I actually have a soft spot for Zilla, since Godzilla was the 2nd movie I've ever seen and I had a Zilla action figure as a kid. It was a stand-in figure for anything dinosaur or dragon related and it was indeed Zilla that got me into the rest of Kaiju stuff. I can't say it's my favorite itteration of Godzilla, but it's for sure one of my Top 5 because of sentimental reasons
The movie wasn't amazing but the late 90s Godzilla animated series based on it is honestly fantastic. It took a design I already liked, retroactively improved on the movie and had dozens of cool original monster designs of its own.
It is heartening to see gamers unite to defend their self interests in tabletop gaming. And it seems to have had an impact too. I wish we saw more similar coordinated resistance efforts (boycott, subscription cancellation, etc) against some of the "questionable" tactics from the video gaming world.
Steph, you're doing this, and that's great. GW has been doing this kind of thing for a while now, and I've asked you a couple of times to look into it. Hopefully, you can have a go at them, too.
1:05 Honestly I thought you would have pulled out a bust of Jeremy Irons from the D&D movie that has a button you can press and he'll repeat one of his insane lines from the movie.
You did not mention that there is an extra layer to the story that Pazio, who is owned by the former Wizard stuff who does the OGL now in response to this is now releasing there own version called ORC.
I absolutely love how much coverage this story is getting from non DnD channels!
In fairness January is slow month for content.
Because OGL is essentially the spirit of modding.
Any fan made endeavor could now have the agreement that let them go be threatened.
especially when there are a few characters licensed to Wizards D&D video games out there
Almost to the point where I think they are wanting the bad press.
Can recommend the Legal Eagle video about it, which covers some angles that most others haven't really touched upon.
It's worth noting that the OGL was not created out of the goodness of WotC's heart. Ryan Dancey, former VP at TSR and former business head for the roleplaying department at WotC, was one of the architects of the OGL as DnD was preparing to switch to 3rd edition (circa 2000). Dancey explained in a recent interview that the OGL was designed to make DnD profitable. They recognized that the value of any TTRPG was not in the content itself (the system, adventures, rule expansions, etc), but the network created by that content. In short, the more people that played a game, the more valuable that game became.
At the time, the TTRPG scene was flagging and many small businesses were going under. Part of the problem was how fractured the market was, with scores of small game systems all competing for player attention. In such an environment, no system could achieve the network size needed for profitability. The OGL was a method of encouraging third party developers to make content for DnD rather than create their own isolated systems. This would not only cut down on competition, but it would improve the DnD ruleset and create more content to keep players playing than WotC could create themselves (and, considering that adventure modules have razor thin profit margins, not having to produce as many would mean more time and resources for WotC to devote to more profitable ventures). The end result would be far more people playing DnD and sticking with DnD rather than jumping to a different system. It was seen as a win-win-win: small companies could stay profitable by riding the coattails of the DnD brand; WotC would benefit from the decreased competition, growing player base, brand name recognition, and free content updates; players would have both higher quantity and quality of content to add to their games.
Not only did it succeed, Dancey believes that, without the OGL, DnD would not have survived to the modern day. Either it would have been abandoned by WotC/Hasbro in the early 2000s or it would have sunk itself with the disastrous release of 4th edition in 2008. The OGL saved the brand, and now that DnD is big enough to survive without it, WotC wants to pull it.
Yep. It was a two-way contract. The EFF has even acknowledged that.
It's also worth noting that change of license was already attempted in mentioned D&D 4e - which has led to Wizards losing market to Paizo, who stopped producing content for D&D and continued their work on OGL based D&D 3.5 in form of Pathfinder. I really wonder if they do that again with Pathfinder 2E. D&D is big, but is it big enough?
@@katerinachuranova8435 Unfortunately, I think it is big enough. DnD holds roughly 80% of the TTRPG market share. Furthermore, DnD has become synonymous with tabletop gaming in the public zeitgeist (in the same way that my parents called every video game console "a Nintendo" and every handheld a "Gameboy"). At this point, DnD may be big enough that the majority of its players don't know or don't care about the OGL. Players aren't likely to completely change their gaming habits over a moral stance on an issue that doesn't really affect them directly.
People also didn't switch from 4e because of the OGL. 4e was, essentially, a different game from 3e. Pathfinder, meanwhile, was basically a modified 3e. People shifted to Pathfinder because it was just the same thing they had always been playing; they could use the same adventures and supplements and even keep their same campaigns running under Pathfinder. When 5e came out (5e being basically an updated and sleeker 3e), those people came back because they wanted to play DnD. Unless 6e is massively different from 5e (in the same way that 4e was to 3e), the average group won't want to switch.
No, some people left at 4E and because they'd bought into 3.x and didn't want a slightly different system. Those people are kind of dumb, but plentiful enough that Pathfinder became popular.
@@katerinachuranova8435 It's bigger now than it was then, and 5e is more popular than 4e. But this was definitely a stupid decision that angered a lot of people right when they're releasing a movie and announcing a TV series, so...yeah.
One important thing to note is that the updated OGL has been called a "draft" in the response, when in fact it was sent out with contracts and if it had gone to the plan WotC and Hasbro wanted, it would have been signed by now. You don't send out drafts with contracts to be signed
you mean you don't send out a draft with a contract sign on sheet!?
Not necessarily. It's plausible that WotC sent out a contract that was intentionally weighted in their favor, with the idea that the other party would negotiate them down to what they REALLY wanted. Then one those contracts went to somebody who decided to leak it, either because they didn't get the memo, they were pissed off to be jerked around, or they figured to one-up the aggressive negotiation with some of their own.
@asteriondeltoro124 sir, you appear to be avoiding the point - _nobody sends out a _*_draft_*_ of a contract to be signed._
@@asteriondeltoro124 "this draft says you owe me your soul.....go ahead and sign it...its just a draft "
"Um....no?"
"BRO! ITS A DRAFT! Just sign it and send it to my lawyer!"
I love how WotC just can't take the hint, and just keep falling on their face over and over again with increasingly brazen monetization scams. Guys, your game is cooperative daydreaming with dice. You can't reign in players from doing whatever tf they want with it. You literally have no leverage. Maybe they'll learn their lesson this time but I doubt it. On the plus side, Paizo's ORC license looks like it's going to be awesome! Get ready for an embarrassment of riches as a thousand basement operations that are better and more creative than D&D spring onto the scene to see who is going to be the new Pathfinder to WotC's dumber, uglier clone of the 4e debacle.
My favorite part of this story is that Paizo announced a partnership with several other companies to create their own license, the Open Roleplay Creative (ORC) License.
Agreed!
This is probably the most important part of the story, really.
WotC were content to sit on their hands and weather the shit storm until the players got tired.
Paizo dropped an ultimatum after a *week* of silence, and WotC created their empty statement within a day of that.
They're fucked. If Paizo commits to ORC, which I have no reason to believe they won't, everybody will abandon WotC.
@@PaperFlare I'd like to believe that, but the popularity of D&D compared to literally every other tabletop RPG can't be overstated. Nothing else even comes close, which is damn shame since many of them are better games.
Legal Eagle's video about this reveals a potential downside the idiot brain broken executives don't realize: *D&D doesn't actually own that much*, they own like 5 of their monsters and a few dozen spell names, the specific formatting, art, and text of their rulebooks, and their lore and campaigns. They don't own fuck all else, not the mechanics (uncopyrightable). Hilariously nobody needs them, and even things they do own (mind flayers, beholders) have been used in other properties in the past and probably aren't owned by them!
@@Maleketh42 Yeah tell that to fourth edition...
Some useful context, which may have been mentioned somewhere in the comments already:
Back in the old days, when the D&D licence was held by TSR they used to very heavily go after any creator in the space that got even slightly close to D&D, leveraging their size and money to muscle out small creators who were often legally in the right but unable to afford to fight it. So in 2000 when Wizards picked up the licence from the shell of TSR the OGL was created more as a promise to creators that if they followed some guidelines Wizards wouldn't pull the same nonsense and would let creators do their thing. It's been mentioned that legally there's very little that the OGL allows you to do that you can't do with a few simple steps to file the serial numbers off the copyrighted bits of rules & settings, it's just that Hasbro are an even bigger company than TSR were back in the day and could easily start overpowering creators with money again.
Worth noting that D&D as a hobby and a business has flourished in the times when the intent of the OGL has been supported (3e and 5e) and stuggled during those times without it (the TSR days and 4e), but I'm sure Hasbro will be happier with their 100% of barely anything rather than 75% of way more, at least they're getting all of it, right?
I miss TSR. Not the corporate side, I don't like the corporate side. But the creative side was amazing. Those guys were able to take an idea as silly as "Literally D&D in space." and turn it into something great and fun, with just enough silliness to keep it from becoming too serious.
If it's any consolation, Paizo who owns Pathfinder, D&D's main RPG rival has announced a neutral open gaming licence, effectively giving the middle finger to WotC and Hasbro. Paizo does own much of its own content pertaining to Pathfinder, free of both WotC and Hasbro, meaning it does at least have independence of these two corporations, I just hope Paizo and Pathfinder stays free from corporate greed, so keep third party and community support alive.
Well at some point a corporate cunt is going to buy Paizo. Fortunately they thought of that and made the ORC independent of Paizo.
Paizo aren't good guys.
@@vincentmuyo i dont know if there is any "good" when it comes to large corporations with large bases of consumers sadly.
@@vincentmuyo That's an irrelevant statement. They stand to lose big if WotC pulls off what it's trying to do, so they can be expected to go through with a plan that takes that power away from WotC.
@@vincentmuyo Enemy of my enemy
As a longtime D&D fan and survivor of the Satanic Panic, it makes me happy to see everyone from Commander Sterling to Legal Eagle covering this.
My group is straight up switching to GURPS permanently. We're done with this shit.
Me and my group decided "You take shelter from a storm in a cave, because you're wet and tired you fail to notice some runes in the cave walls, when you wake up the mouth of the cave leads somewhere else. Welcome to Rifts."
I've played dnd for 40 years, I'm done. We're moving everyone to different systems.
Habro would LOVE a good old-fashioned Satanic Panic revival. Moved so many units back in the day.
@@kylejohnson423 Good for you! Steve Jackson is an amazing game designer. May your RPG journey (which some of us started in the late 70s) be fruitful!
Maybe one day, you'll try out an indie release RPG! They were all the rage in the 1990s... but I guess the 'nerd culture' of 2023 has probably never heard of it.
@@kylejohnson423 Hope you love calculating how long it takes to dig a ditch. Why not use a system that wasn't made by a boring accountant? I advice indie RPGs, e.g. Dungeon World and other "Powered by the Apocalypse" games.
12:58 companies are basically like the raptors from the Jurassic Park novels, constantly testing the strength of their barriers until they find a weakness they can break down and eat your kidneys while you scream
As a nerd, there's some missing context. While the OGL 1.1 suggested that it only taxed over 750k in revenue, they required ANY revenue over 50k to be reported like the IRS, made the document reviseable at any time so that those lower incomes were vulnerable at any executives whim, and while it stated that Wotc gets permenant rights to your content, they can revoke your right to your own content at any time for any reason. Basically legally protected theft
You also missed the now famous quote from an insider who said that Hasbro executives saw consumers as "an obstacle between them and their money"
100% agree with you... this is no 'controversy'. I mean, Sterling is out of their depth, and so is every single RUclipsr covering this nonsense.
@@jack-a-lopium You didn't actually read their comment didn't you ya hasbruh bootlicker?
@@jack-a-lopium what do you mean there is no controversy?
Also, for the sake of completeness, D&D Beyond is a virtual tabletop (i.e. online) for people who don't (for whatever reason) play around and actual tabletop. Before all this started, it was already looking shady , as WotC were looking to oust all the third party VTT (like Roll20) with this new system. And furthermore, intended it to start incroaching on actual tabletop play, by making everything online (dice, character models, characters sheets) and something you could use on your phone. (Because when you are actually sitting at a tabletop, you of course want people looking at their phones MORE...) One member of my group said that he was going to be attending a convention where this was in use, so that EVERYONE playing would HAVE to have a tablet or phone. I'm sure I don't have to underline how this would inherently exclude everyone that doesn't have one. And, of course, WotC were pusing these digitals models, because they saw this digital table top as a way to push cosmetics... As microtransactions. And of course, a subscription.
Basically, WotC were trying to make D&D Beyond a live-service microtransaction video game *without even the minimum effort of making a video game*. In fact, recently they apparently *cancelled* five games in development. They wanted video game money, without having all that time and money to actually MAKE a game. (I don't even know if these digital models are supposed to be animated but I don't think they would be.) This shows less savyy than *Games Workshop* who are reputedly buffered against all their othe failures financially by their strong video game strategy. Hasbro would have - and *I cannot believe I'm saying this* - likely have been far better served by taking a leaf out of GW's playbook. (Or just simply making a better D&D product, apparently their output has been slow and not of high quality.) But that, of course, would have taken effort...
Thsi debarcle also demonstrates a couple of subtleties WotC missed about the RPG community as a whole (both of which I hadn't really thought about until they were brought up).
One, in general, you don't sell products to PLAYERS, for the most part, you predominatly sell them to DUNGEONMASTERS. Because without a DM prepared to spend the significant effort to run the game, game don't happen. And DMs are what, something like at best 20% of the total of available players (4 players plus DM, but not accounting for folks like me who prefer to run with 6-8 players, where it's even smaller). DMs are in much shorter supply and as a smaller number, it's so much easier to tweak more of them off.
Secondly, this is the community that *coined the phrase "rules lawyer"* and they expected to be able to puit several past the community as a whole.
(Oh, and reading between the lines, the amount of leaks coming out of WotC suggest that this was definitely not what the ground-floor staff wanted (i.e. the devs) and was decision by the Suits, likely waving their dicks around and refusing to be gain-sayed.)
Finally, as some people have mentioned, Paizo and several other companies are banding together to make their own new OGL with brimvoraks and hook horrors, ORC, which they have the stated intention of eventually moving off to the custody of a non-profit organisation like the Linux Foundation so that it cannot be placed under threat by any one corporation again.
@@jack-a-lopium Yes it is, and WotC was forced to roll back the worst dumb of all the dumb decisions (which they had to pare down from a list of dozens and dozens of examples.)
If WotC had done things right the first time, this wouldn't have happened.
That's their fault.
Not Sterling's.
Something to note, they sent the "Draft" to content creators to sign, allegedly according to some people's sources, which if true would mean WotC lied in order to gaslight the community so they can try to claw back some subscriptions that they had lost. You don't ask people to sign a Draft document.
And an NDA. Don't forget that they wanted feedback, but didn't want the community at large to know about it to provide feedback. Makes sense.
Yeah, these "draft" contracts were sent out over the holidays with a short turn around time. A pretty dirty, but common, trick.
add the whole digital D&D 0 or what it is called that is ment to be a digital subscription plattform for the next edition. Screenshots from test runs with it show skins and alternative appearances etc being SOLD for "models". Last time I checked that happened the only way to get into that kind of closed store is to either sell rights through them with a cut taken on EVERY sale or alter said content to make it fit their view killing original ideas on monsters/champaigns etc
As I heard it, the "signing" requested was an NDA, which would be totally fair and reasonable for commentary on a potentially (and indeed, as it turns out, incredibly) inflammatory piece of corporate policy. I haven't seen anybody I trust say that they were being asked to sign the actual OGL, but if you've seen that, would love to see the source.
@@berndb23 the RollForCombat channel has been a consistent and early source of information. The guy there publishes Pathfinder books under the OGL and knows a lot of people in the industry. According to him, multiple sources have given him the same story of being given the new OGL 1.1 with contracts and a Jan 13 deadline to sign. Check out his channel to see if you believe him.
One point: the stuff about bigoted content was already a thing - under the original OGL, WotC and Hasbro always had the right to withdraw the licence from people or companies creating bigoted content, material or supplements (and, in fact, have done so before now). The fact that they said this is a feature of what they wanted to do with the new licence is complete gaslighting. This was never about that; it was about money farming and IP theft.
IP theft - isn't that what these third party creators have been doing for years? If some of them are making over 750k on the back of source materials and IP they do not own, shouldn't they be liable to pay something?
this is a super important point. i find that people outside of dnd are more suseptable to falling for that justification, just because they havent been around the ogl 1.0a and how its basically a lie that watc would need to make a revision to keep bigotry in check
@@vallejomach6721 You have no idea what are you talking about. I mean, like, not a single f*king clue.
@@Enriqueguiones Sounds like theft to me. These people and companies have been making stuff with IP they don't own and making money off it. Don't see how it's any more difficult than that.
@@vallejomach6721 The Dungeons & Dragons brand isn't covered by the OGL
"It never crossed our minds to steal all of your ideas and make you pay us money for them. Not a single time. Promise." Yeah fking right.
Even if it didnt, what a shocking indictment of their lawyers it'd be if they genuinely didnt see that coming. Either they're lying (which they are), or they're fucking incompetent. What a sad excuse for an excuse
The fact that it was in the "draft" agreement at all tells you that it was a straight up lie
The weasel words immediately after it are something most people haven't noticed. The "draft" said that you grant them an irrevocable license. It never says they now own it, just that they get a perpetual license. So when they come back and say that you still own the thing, it doesn't address the big problem.
As someone who worked with horses for multiple formative decades, I can't explain how terrifying it is for a horse to giggle at me
Congratulations to Pathfinder for having sales explode because it's direct competition committed sudoku in front of everyone.
😂 committed sudoku is the funniest thing I’ve read all day. I hope it was an intentional joke but either way, hilarious!
@@Slann88 was it intentional? I was going to say something, but then I saw your comment 😂
*seppuku (But we get the point)
@@localhearthian2387 It's a joke.
Seriously - unless your willing to import, the 2E core rulebook is either nearly sold out or sky rocketed in price everywhere in the UK 😂
As soon as I heard that WotC and Hasbro wanted to "replicate Recurrent User Spending as seen in the video game industry", had a feeling you'd be covering this.
And on top of the licensing fees, the IP rights, and so on from the actual leaked OGL, their press release afterwards also mentioned they were also making sure nobody else could make D&D based NFTs... kinda sus...
That 'non-negotiable' licensing (exploitation) agreement sounded exactly like the updated Warcraft Reforged terms and conditions for user-created content
Yeah, I heard that quoted part with the snarky JSS voice.
Ugh, what a disgusting phrase.
Hasbro makes NFTs already, so yeah, its so only they can. They're already on board that train.
What's killing me is that if this was carried over to video games, it makes it sound as if the OG game is just asserting legal ownership rights over mods, which is one step away from what happened with Skyrim... for no monetary compensation. This how they get around crunch?
Legal Eagle did a breakdown of this and the TLDR is that you can't own the rights to a system ie D20 so as long as you don't use copyrighted or trademarked monsters/items there's basically nothing they can do . Oh and there's the "in perpetuity" clause in the OG OGL.
They can try to bankrupt or scare you off with a lawsuit they know they'll lose...but that you'll have to pay for.
"Under any new OGL, you will own the content you create. We won't."
I wouldn't be so quick to take them at their word here. The whole shtick was that by signing the OGL you would grant Wizards a perpetual, irrevokable, and heck sub-licensable license to do whatever they liked with your content for free. Whether "ownership" still means anything at the end of that seems a matter for the philosophers.
There is also a like "by signing this contract you agree to give us permission to use your content"
Line sneakily put there
Yeah, in addition to the "we own anything you make forever" bit, there's also the bits about "we can change this contract whenever we want without notice" (meaning they can just change their rules and how much of your money they take at any time) along with the "you can never take legal action against us for any reason". If any contact EVER has that last bit in it, you know that whatever's involved is 100% illegal.
Like bloody NFTs. What is the point of ownership when you have no control over a product you own
Hence why companies like Onyx Path and Kobold Press were getting ready to in essence pull everything and switch to in-house systems, as well as potentially lawyer up to defend their IP (which is a big deal at least for OPP, because their big draw is deeply detailed and thematic settings). Honestly if there's not a widespread move to a legally distinct but technically compatible system with a more irrevocable licence (like CC-BY) I'm going to be shocked.
Yeah, there's two major reasons why this whole line means the square root of sweet F A:
1. Owning your content is totally different from giving Wizards the right to do literally anything they want with it without giving you credit or compensation, and you waiving all right to take legal action against them.
2. Until that one ridiculous clause that says they can change ANYTHING they want about the OGL at any point with just 30 days notice has been erased off the face of the planet, literally NOTHING they say means anything at all.
11:59 this might be more connected to the current situation than you think. Last year Hasbro appointed Cynthia Williams as new CEO of Wizards of the Coast. Cynthia was previously General Manager and Vice President of “Gaming Business Expansion” at Microsoft's Xbox team, where her job was literally to attract people to the Xbox brand and expand how they could monetize Xbox. And now at WotC she has previously said the Dungeons and Dragons brand is "undermonetized". The new version of Dungeons and Dragons they announced last year is even called "D&D One" in the exact same way as "Xbox One" was.
I'm surprised Steph didn't mention that in the video. That "undermonetized" comment was shocking.
I remember the Xbox One thing. And I'll remember this from Hasbro too. The fact that one of the exec's specifically said that they wanted D&D to be monetized like video games shows the pollution from the video game industry to other industries. Though that's really just the way executives and board members just circulate around and spread the same shit everywhere they go.
Hey, were you aware that the new WotC CEO Hasbro appointed last year, Cynthia Williams, was previously General Manager and Vice President of “Gaming Business Expansion” at Microsoft's Xbox team?
Remember, Hasbro has killed video games before because they refused to renew the license to the characters in the video game, so the creators of video games just pull the game from sale. Hasbro as a company sucks, and it's very clear that they will use whatever property they known to do so. Wizards of the Coast happened to me today's subject of how can we extract money from our marks.
I completely forgot about the Xbox One thing, but now that I remember it I realize it's the reason why I don't have an Xbox One.
Corporate and shareholder greed is not a video games industry thing, it's a corporate and shareholder thing.
Its a natural mechanism of Crony Capitalism.
@@AdmiralBison corporate and shareholder greed is not a crony capitalism thing, it’s just a capitalism thing.
The formation of corporations and the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of private entities is a natural mechanism of capitalism.
Hearing someone yell "chokeslam!!" from the crowd right before you did it gave me goosebumps and I don't follow wrestling at all. 😭 So happy for you! !!!
Don't trust their "walkback" until you see the new OGL "draft". Don't let up on this. And thank you, JSS, for covering this.
Their new draft should just be the old OGL with an added "It's irrevocable now" clause.
@@neelot9842 Ye gods that'd be nice.
Also don't trust them unless the new OGL comes with clauses that prevent them from just changing it again on a whim.
@@neelot9842 That's what I put into the survey they sent me about it. I hope the rest of you do too. We need to hammer this point relentlessly. They say they want our feedback, well here it is. Do they still care about our feedback? We're going to find out soon. Its very exciting, because their response to the survey could decide whether they win people back, or they lose more money than their new license was ever going to get them. And they know it. I can't wait to see how it goes.
I will say a couple of things you missed. They tried something similar way back when 4th Edition released and it was unpopular then too. Combine this with the system already being controversial, and Paizo, a third-party company who wrote adventures for 3.5 decided to make Pathfinder based off of the 3.5 rules. They have since printed a Pathfinder 2e. With the release of the 5th and current edition, they returned to the OGL of 2000 because of how unpopular it was and because it created its major competitor who at the time was outselling 4th edition. Since then, 5e has exploded in popularity due to cameos in Stranger Things as well as Critical Role, who have been notoriously quiet about this, likely for legal reasons or biding their time.
Also, the first draft included a clause suggesting the revocation of all previous OGL agreements. This means if you had written anything for 3.5 or 5e from 2000 to 2023 they would be able to (if this new draft of the OGL was legally enforceable, which there are questions about) use the content created freely and claiming that you have already forfeited the right to this stuff.
Since this all happened, Paizo and a few other smaller publishers have banded together to promise to create their own version of an OGL to be under the control of a non-profit. This combined with other smaller publishers pushing to do their own thing. Depending on your view, this could be the little guys banding together to beat the bigger guy, or publishers see the blood of the biggest TTRPG in the water and are taking advantage of the situation. Likely a mix of both.
Wizards managed to piss off two different communities in one year. They also tried to sell 60 cards (that you can't use) for 1000 dollars to celebrate 30 years of Magic.
Yep and their handling of Magic is what tanked the stock price in the first place.
And then Konami swooped in and made a fool of them with Yugioh's 25th anniversary special having actually playable reprints of classic cards and promos, several boosters from old, nostalgic sets, and a special new rarity for 25 year anniversaries of which 1 card at this rarity is included in every box. Retail price? Like 35 bucks.
@@kylegonewild It's really sad when Konami, of #FuckKonami News, did a better anniversary product for their card game than WotC did. You do not, in fact, have to hand it to them.
Perpetual really is a hated term in two communities now. Congrats to them I guess
I keep forgetting that happened with Magic the Gathering
I'm surprised you didn't go harder at their attempt to frame it as being a way to prevent hate speech and crypto malarkey.
2022 Hasbro: Hey kid, you want to try some crypto?
2023 Hasbro: Hey kid, I'll protect you from crypto!
Back in 2022, Hasbro's lawyers did have to go around stopping people and third party startups from trying to turn their properties into NFTs - most famously the "MTG Dao" From what I can tell, Hasbro themselves have been circumspect on NFTs after the negative reaction to that Megazord preorder NFT (they don't make Funko Pops, so any NFTs you see of the characters they licensed to Funko aren't Hasbro's).
Because Jim would steep to the same tactics if he could spin it as "preventing hate speech".
When I was at the game store yesterday and came across the D&D section, I couldn't help but think "All you had to do was nothing."
Hah! Well said.
25 years of building good will demolished in a few short weeks.
Or perhaps follow the damn train
Thing is, there's no such thing as enough money. You're always either growing or dying, not just culturally but inherently as a feature of capitalism. Making the same revenue at a company this size this year as they did last year is how they die.
Look at what they did with Magic and Magic 30, Steph. You’ll have a field day with how much product was made at high prices that shut out budget players. Magic 30 was a 1000 dollar price point product for 4 randomized packs that only contained proxy’s. It bombed spectacularly.
It's incredible how an entertainment company can fail so much at understanding what fun is.
emphasis on Company 🙂
They wouldn't care regardless of understanding: All of the original gaurd who hoped to put out a great product have either died, left, or both at this point.
The 80's weren't kind to WoTC
Most people at the top who make decisions on big corporations don't have any idea what a good product is. This is for videogames, card games and apparently DnD as well
it's been said before but they don't care what fun is. shareholders hired accountants to top positions to maximize profits and those accountants are gonna do that the only way they know how, through accounting. it's happening in every industry, from video games to physical games to the airline industry. look up the public letter the southwest airlines pilot's union VP penned to Southwest Airlines where he explains how accountants kept being hired to top positions for over the decade and all the dumb policies they put into place over the decades to maximize profit and how that is what caused the horrendous Southwest airlines meltdown end of year
'Fun' is the thing they wish they could force us to have the way *they* want so that they can monetize every kind of 'fun' there is to have.
I've been watching a lot of your older content lately, and I gotta say that you look so much happier and confident in your new videos. Keep up all the good work, thank God for you!
They didn't walk back anything yet. They said they will walk it back, but until they actually present a new license, their words are empty. Trust has (again) been broken when it comes to wizards and the OGL, and for many creators it would be irresponsible to rely on them again for their livelihood. Which is why a lot of creators are looking to contribute to the new ORC license, who's framework promises a license that requires a lot less trust to rely on.
The new-new OGL leaked and... yeah, it's the same shit as 1.1 but it gives you six months of time to fix things instead of nine days, that's it
A couple important things that imo deserved a mention. WotC can't legally take away the old OGL 1.0a and people are prepared to fight it in court if need be.
Also in response to this, Paizo has started working on their own license cslled the ORC, with legal protections from the future.
Yeah. This license would be irrelevant if not for their illegal attempt to "deauthorize" the OGL 1.0a even though it doesn't have a method for that and was explicitly established and sold to others as irrevocable by the company.
The revolt amongst the DnD community to this shit should be a lesson to other gamers.
I think this happened BECAUSE we've seen this shit in videogames and the TTRPG community were like "no, we lost that battle once, we're not fucking losing it again!" since WotC/Hasbro are looking to turn D&D into a 'live service' type deal with microtransactions out the wazoo through D&D Beyond.
Gamers only care about the next toy in line. They found out f-ing gave money to 45 and Mitch McTurtle via FNAF and sided with the donor.
@@MK_ULTRA420 DNDBeyond has seen a sharp reduction in subscriptions, major content producers have threatend or already announced they are moving platforms and the community raised such a shitshow that fking Legaleagle made a video about it. What more do you think tabletop gamers should do? Firebomb the cars of the Hasbro and WotC execs?
@@MK_ULTRA420 no. We asking for and intend to receive, all of Wotc and Hasbros corporate heads ousted publically. Complete purge. All of them. Anything else, we keep tanking their precious IP and Brand's profits til its worth negative amounts of money.
@@MK_ULTRA420 yea... that's what people are most annoyed with. Not being allowed to be sexist anymore... not the fact that content people've worked hard on could just get stolen by WotC and then sold on while WotC could still demand a quarter of any revenue you made past 750k.
WotC and Hasbro need to understand that DnD is as big as it is because of the OGL 1.0 and the freedom it gave. That'd the only lesson here: corporate greed is bad for everyone involved.
Let's talk about their "rolled a 1" comment.
Rolling a 1, traditionally, doesn't mean you just happen to do a shitty job that day. The books make it pretty clear that what you roll determines external factors you couldn't predict, and your stat is your ability to compensate for these factors. Rolling a 1 doesn't mean your ranger forgets how to track targets, it means that tracking is impossible under these conditions.
With this in mind, them thinking they just "rolled a 1" means they think they were unlucky to get this reaction.
DnDShorts posted an indepth breakdown of the statement Hasbro made. At first glance it does seem good but it's not actually a win for the TTRPG community and many have already expressed they won't stop hounding Hasbro until the original OGL gets reinstated
I'm surprised you missed the part at the end of the official statement where wizards said something to the tune of "the community took a "win" here but just so you know this is just the beginning and in the end we hope that both the community and wizards of the cost can win" they aren't going to change a thing just gaslight there way into getting all the money
I had that exact Zilla toy as a kid. I'm pretty sure my dad threw it away when I wasn't looking because the roaring drove him crazy.
As a dad: completely understandable and possible. The trick is to kill the speaker, though.
Had to comment because I can’t stop reading the Vampire Survive bestiary entries without hearing your voice reading them. You’re an icon Steph, keep standing up for every zombie used as cheap labor!
Oooh I've been looking forward to your take! WotC got so much backlash and so many D&D Beyond subscription cancellations, their landing page supposedly "crashed". Seeing them get hit where it really hurts, does put a smile on my face!
It's still down. They straight up RobinHooded the unsubscribe button.
@@alaeriia01 Then I hope they get a flood of credit-card chargebacks.
I mean I like Beyond because as a disabled gamer its much much easier than using a character sheet and rolling physical dice. But god fuck Wiz/Hasbro. And I was thinking of getting a sub to make more characters lol
@@DrownedInExile They're still at the "angry emails" stage. I suspect chargebacks are next on the list.
It's possible so many people tried to cancel their subscriptions it crashed their website
That pony thing is horrifying me... The first wink was a legitimate jumpscare
I must say, Steph, your natural hair is lovely! I hope you feel more comfortable showing it off more in the future, it looks awesome!
Same
Don't they have a massively receded hairline, though?
@@purebaldness You don't?
@@bleakautomaton4808 not massively, but enough so that I wouldn't think it was a good idea to grow my hair out in spite of my fivehead
Firstly, thanks Stephanie for covering this for us! I'm glad that this has become so huge and our community has been aided by several non-D&D and TTRPG pundits for maximum effect. Talk about not splitting the party.
Second, the incredible thing is that Hasbro--being the megacorp that they are--could have easily just made D&D a better product overall by improving the quality of their supplements and adventures, even hiring some of the writers and designers that worked on 3rd party supplements. But of course, WotC wanted maximum payout with minimum effort, and here we are. Shouldn't have been surprising considering WotC's CEO came from Microsoft. They grossly underestimated the difference between video games and tabletop while simultaneously overestimating the RPG community's tolerance for bullshit.
Slight correction: Gizmodo weren't the first people to publish parts of the OGL 1.1. The RUclips channel Roll for Combat leaked parts of it a day before Gizmodo after verifying it from several sources.
(no slight against Gizmodo but I do want to point out the small sources that were actually doing the initial work. Gizmodo did confirm everything posted by Roll for Combat and was able to add several passages.)
That's true, although Roll for Combat also posted a bunch of misleading bullshit clickbait on Twitter and haven't had the same inside sources as Linda Codega at Gizmodo. If not for Linda Codega, few people would have believed them because they seemed so sketchy about things. (For example, falsely claiming that Knights of the Old Republic was published under the OGL, which is not true and which anyone with two brain cells could have looked up on the internet if they somehow hadn't figured it out already.)
Wizards of the Coast to their customers: "You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it."
The new OGL thing is beyond disgusting. Basically giving them full ownership of absolutely everything, and letting them claim any money you make off things as they own.
"We can change this at any time and you can take no legal action against us" is never something that should be in ANY contract. EVER.
As one individual in the crowd, thank you. This is a subject near and dear to me, and it initially felt like no one would concern themselves with the problems happening in this hobby. D&D and RPGs are, after all, still the redheaded stepchild of the gaming community, and our budget is shoestring. So to see the rest of the community stepping up is heartwarming.
Legal Eagle did a really through explanation of what the legal implications are. Another good source of info for interested players.
He just reposted another legal site's BS misunderstanding. It's not about who owns mechanics, it's about having your work stripmined, repackaged, having a label slapped on it, & it being resold back to you.
@@SodaPopBarbecue Yeah. I like Legal Eagle, but he admitted this wasn't his wheelhouse, and his video missed a lot of really important context and details.
Surprised to see you cover this! But glad you did. I think the only thing you missed was a leaked email between WotC executives that basically said D&D players were an "obstacle" to them making money, and also anonymous insiders confirming that the OGL changes were solely from the C-suite of executives and none of the D&D development team was consulted about it. But both those facts are so predictable and anyone could've guessed them to be fair, and mostly are just further proof of the kind of corporate greed you already covered. All in all, great video!
Hearing about this reminds me of when Bethesda first started monetizing mods. They started putting paid mods into Skyrim, got called out on it and eventually rolled it back. Then they reintroduced it under the Creation Club and have managed to keep it going as such ever since. I see this story, and I just have a horrible feeling this kind of money grabbing by WOTC is going to come back again, just wearing a different suit.
I hope not, but unless corporations suddenly become satisfied with getting some money rather than all of the money, I'm not going to hold my breath.
That is why Paizo and other 3rd party publishers are currently developing the ORC license, while smaller developers are moving away from having anything that WotC have actually copyrighted in their games.
Imagine giving modders the opportunity to get paid. So evil
@@godqueensadie Ah yes, a one-time payment to the creator, with the content created being fully owned by the company, who then proceed to take 100% of all profits from selling it. You're right, that's not evil at all.
Corporations will never be happy with some of the money. And I won't be shocked if they win in the long run with fuckin over the D&D community
Paid for mods isn't nearly as bad as you think. I quite like the idea, personally. The only problem is that it's only applicable to mods that they make.
I thank Yongyea and Sterling for covering this on their channels. This story needs to hit other non-tabletop channels. It would be amazing if Angry Joe could cover this too. In fact, I would love an Angry Rant.
Corporate Commander is at it again, ruining Magic the Gathering and now D&D...
The wording on the new OGL sounds like a wannabe dictator wrote it. They can claim the work of a third-party for themselves and they can do whatever they want with it forever, without any say from the original artist / creator. That's some brutal Legalese right there.
Wow the D&D OGL 1.1 stuff even made it to this channel! That is great! I really appreciate you helping to get the word out on this to more people. WoTC and Hasbro must be stopped.
You do know that almost no one's affected by OGL 1.1, right? Like, if you do DnD stuff on youtube or a podcast and you just get Patreon donations for it, you don't have to report anything or pay them a thing. Contrary to the reporting on it, the actual OGL 1.1 explicitly says that's fine and exempt from that.
@@TheYpurias Almost nobody except most of the content creators we watch because they make stuff for D&D and use the OGL 1.0 and WoTC is trying to force OGL 1.1 which is quite bad.
Honestly I think you did a really great job covering it, especially since it isn't your wheelhouse. It's one of those very complicated topics that has a good barrier of understanding. As a fan of you and D&D it was a really fun episode to see you make. And you covered it well and I appreciate your messaging with it, not everyone is in the "never forget" camp and it's an important lesson. They even tried it for 4th edition, crashed and burned; created their biggest competitor (relatively) in Pathfinder.
And it's a shame because the OGL lets creatives build the D&D brand in ways that WotC can't and won't. People can explore ideas, themes, and genres that would muddy the brand WHILE encouraging people to invest and maintain investment in the core brand. Got a sick new 3rd party adventure? Buy the character options by WotC to play in it. Got a new character option that your DM approved? Encourage your friends to play a new WotC adventure. Or hell your DM bought 5 books to use all the ideas to inspire their homebrew world.
The change to the OGL is absolutely a videogame issue as well because you have games like Solasta: Crown of the Magister that use the OGL.
won't Baldur's Gate, KOTR and Pathfinder (and related videogames like wrath of the righteous) also br affected?
@@Klaus-bm5ek they have their own contracts. OGL is there to say what you can freely use some of the rules of D&D (the ones in the Source Reference Document) and WotC won't mess with you. It does not cover their copyright (anything original, like settings, spell names, races and so on) since you cannot copyright game mechanics. So the OGL can be freely ignored, if you rename everything, but that's a lot of work. Hence the OGL saying "The text in the SRD, which is copyrighted, can be used in your book. We allow that, you can copy the rules as we wrote them."
You can still make 3rd party content and never use anything in the SRD, you just have to rewrite the rules of D&D with your own words and if you do then the OGL has no effect on your creation. I'd suggest LegalEagle's video for an explanation why the OGL is just convenient, but can actually be safely ignored.
@@Klaus-bm5ek Baldur's Gate and Knights of the Old Republic are/were licensed through Wizards of the Coast and will be unaffected. The Pathfinder video games absolutely would be affected, though. (Except it's important to note that Paizo, who owns Pathfinder, has stated that they'll fight this in court if forced, and it's pretty clear the law is strongly on their side here. Wizards of the Coast can't just decide to tear up the OGL 1.0a. And a lot of Paizo folks were actually Wizards of the Coast folks first and were involved in drafting the OGL, so they're expert witnesses as well.)
I've been waiting for this. Knew it was right up your alley, and your voice was echoing in my head. "Not enough to make the money, they have to make ALL the money."
Some extra things to note I heard others mention. They included an option to change anything in the OGL at their will at any time just needing to give 30 days notice, meaning they could put the worst things back in once people aren't paying attention. Their stand against NFTs goes against them trying to make their own NFTs last year, and they already had the option to deny people using the lisence so they didn't need to change anything if they really did care about pushing back against hateful content so its blatantly just an attempt to garner support.
Hi all!
I wanted to pop in with not only the perspective of a local game store owner, but also a potential solution.
First off, to start, I've been running my store for a little over 2 years now. Not a very long time, but plenty enough to watch the slow decline. Both in the quality of products as well as the corporate greed exploding into what it is today. One of the things WOTC is notorious for is massively underprinting, and creating a false scarcity as well as "fomo". This is most evident with Magic the Gathering. They're simultaneously notorious for OVERprinting.
One of the biggest issues we're experiencing as a store is, right now I can pre-order a grand total of 5 different magic the gathering sets. For those of you who don't know, this is the equivocal to 5 different call of duty games releasing within the time span of 4 months. 1 is a "remake of an older game" and the rest are "new". This is flooding the market. Not only that, but there are around 5 different types of boxes per new set that I can order, each of which is "catered" to a specific audience (akin to store-exclusive preorder bonuses).
Not only this, but what USED to be exclusive to us (local stores) are now being sold DIRECT FROM WOTC On Amazon. We are now DIRECTLY competing with the company that makes the game that was made specifically for hobby shops.
With this, my point is, it's damn near impossible for ME as the store owner to keep up with the sheer tsunami of items being released. How do they expect the average customer/player to keep up with it? How are we supposed to know what's in what set when there are so many things releasing at once that lists of cards coming out each month overlap? How are local ma&pa stores supposed to compete with the prices that Amazon has when the very company we buy from is undercutting us?
As I mentioned before, though, there is a potential solution. Right now, the execs up at Hasbro are looking at 3 total things.
1) DnD Beyond subscriptions
2) How well Honour Among Thieves does in theaters
3) Sealed MTG sales
If we cancel subscriptions, boycott Honour Among Thieves and stop buying sealed product from WOTC, HASBRO LOSES WOTC. This isn't speculation either. It's a direct piece of information from the investors. They WANT to spin off WOTC into it's own company instead of being under Hasbro. Right now, the investors think Hasbro having WotC is the best thing for the company and will make them more money. It is up to US to prove them wrong.
We can fight this.
When I was in college we didn't have the books and just role-played with a few 20-sided dice, it's ridiculously simple. We didn't even use character sheets. We just said "I'm the fighter, so I'm good at fighting," and another person would be the wizard and good at magic, etc. So they'd tell me (I was the GM, but it feels kind of silly to even call it that) what they were gonna do, and I'd tell them what they had to roll, keeping in mind that if it was something their classes were traditionally good at they got a better chance. The wizard didn't even have spells, he just made them up as he went along.
Yeah thankfully D&D as a game can never really be controlled by it's copyright holders, because it is all just roleplay and personalized stuff. There is nothing they can really do to stop players from making their own shit and playing, we will just not use the company's content or not pay for it if we want it. That's why the OGL was perfect, it allowed them the good will to monetize their "brand" while still letting people make their own game. But of course the suits at the top don't understand that and want to try and grab as much money as they can, and so they have killed the good will they've had for so many years.
Ha, my friend group in middle school did the same. Not because we didn't have the books, but just because we couldn't be arsed to learn the rules.
Stealing the Rogues Handbook was a staple.
@Manuel Vilar Tfw everyone gets together but only the Rogue has their book 🥷
been a few years since i've seen this channel. can't say the new look is entirely suprising. Grats on finding yourself
In a way this IS a video-game issue as well because a few games have been made using the OGL and two games (Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous) use rules from Pathfinder 1e, which also uses the OGL.
Also Knights of the Old Republic!
You can't copyright game rules. They don't need the OGL, and this should be the reminder that we do not need to be tethered to it.
@@Korvmannen It's not that simple, sadly. Check commentary on the LegalEagle video by people that work in the industry.
@@ChaoticTabris You mean SLAPP suits? Even if they manage to shut down fan content with it, it doesn't mean they have the law on their side.
@@Korvmannen but if the end result is the same, does it actually matter if the law was on their side? There is no punishment coming their way, and they got what they wanted. A few consumers like us might be going "oh Hasbro you did a naughty, the law wasn't on your side," but that's all that will happen.
If you don't believe me look at what happened when Games Workshop simply published its intention to look at fan made animations to see what was in breach of their terms. It didn't need to send out many cease and desist letters, as most fan content shut-down pre-emptively. It didn't matter to the content creators that they were safe under British law, they still retreated at the perceived threat.
One of the people I saw cover this pointed out one clause in particular. The clause says that the updated OGL can be rewritten at any time, in any way, for any reason with little warning or discussion. They mention specifically that if the new final version of the updated license includes this clause, than NOTHING that WotC has 'walked back' even counts. With that one clause, the company can effortlessly put everything back the way the 'drafts' had it, if not worse.
Just to add on about the bit where WoTC can take all your stuff and use it without telling you.
If you scroll further down, there's a bit where if your content got them into legal trouble (you know, the one that they took most likely without your input in the first place and published it somewhere in some form) , you're liable to pay them for THEIR legal fees.
I was wondering how The Jimquisition would cover this. I was not disappointed. Thank you for another entertaining and informative episode. 🙂
The team running Magic: the Gathering into the ground: "Oh thank God. Somebody else at this company can take some heat for a while."
Thanks for covering this topic. I hope you will do one about the A.I. art - an atrocity committed against creativity.
This move to "Not benefit" competitors is probably gonna be the largest driving force to create more competitors even with the walk back. People who otherwise wouldn't have been are now planning for when they try this again.
Thank you for doing this. As a fan of your channel for over 5 years and watching video games reviews of games I will never play while meeting up with my group to play dnd every week I appreciate you brought light to this issue.
I'm glad you covered this because there was indeed adjacence to the video gaming space. That bit about Wizards having a "nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, sub-licensable, royalty-free license to use" everyone's content feels like it was cribbed from the Warcraft 3: Reforged EULA.
(Remember WC3:R? I was actually excited for it when it was announced since I'd never played any of the old Warcraft games and thought this'd be good to get into. Shame how it turned out.)
The tie into video games goes further than that. This ties into video games directly because the entire point of this wasn't about money. It was about getting control of the IP and removing all 3rd party content. Why? Something else that this entire thing is tied to: One D&D. One D&D is a new version of D&D focused around a virtual table top version of D&D that Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro is currently developing. Straight up a video game version of the game. The point of this new OGL, that is now at 2.0, was not to get any money from other creators. It was to force other creators into such a bad spot that they couldn't create anything. Taking the money was just the way they tried to do it the first time around with the 1.1 revision. With the 2.0 revision they straight up revoked the ability to create anything 3rd party that wasn't written content on paper for the table top version. Why? To force players to play the VTT (virtual table top) version of the game. Why were they trying to do this? So that Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro could nickle and dime the player base with mircotransactions like what has happened to most of the rest of the video game industry. They can't do that if there is 3rd party content out there being made and they cant force players to play the VTT version if the players want to play 3rd party content instead.
My sources:
Flutes Loot's OGL 1.1 and One D&D VTT video (Watching this one first is critical because it clearly sets the stage with the background story of what is actually happening and what WotC and Hasbro's goals actually are with this entire thing. The rest of the videos after this is just breaking down what is going on and why using the same sources that the great Stirling did with a more knowledgeable and familiar mind on the subject at hand.)
DND Shorts' Wizard's Desperate Response and Exposing Every Lie videos
LegalEagle's Dungeons and Dragons video
Dungeon Craft's Episode 300 and 301 videos
In those videos there is one table top game designer that predicted exactly what was going to happen and why, one lawyer, and then a number of creators that have a good grasp of what actually is going on thanks to having access to lawyers who are helping direct the legal responses of a large group of DMs and creators, including many of the companies named in Sterling's video.
The whole line about "we just want to get to know you" while basically requiring ALL D&D creators to share their earnings is what worries me the most. Sure, most creators won't be affected immediately, but who's to say the numbers won't change as part of a "new strategy" from corporate? You know they'll do it eventually...
I was hoping this was going to be an episode, but I avoided messaging cause I figured it was already a flood in the mailbox
One other point that's really significant, probably the most significant, is that the OGL 1.0a was repeatedly stated to be irrevocable by Wizards of the Coast and the specific people who wrote it, and doesn't have any revocation clause. Wizards of the Coast presented it as a two-way contract where they and third-party companies benefit, but now they're trying to break the contract even though that's a violation of the agreement.
So it's not like they just made a nice license and then decided to be mean with their property. They made a binding agreement, other people built companies on that binding agreement, and now they're trying to pretend it's not binding on their end.
Seems like there's never someone in room asking, "But what if this *announcement* makes us lose money and look bad?"
They get fired as soon as they ask.
*insert meme of that sensible guy being thrown out the window*
@@Celphied13 Exactly what I was thinking
They know it will blow over eventually. Like Steph said, it's like loot boxes and other microtransactions. People will get tired of it and stop talking about it, and the company is free to take its ball made of shit and run to the hills with it. Just because this game is pencil and paper doesn't mean this shit hasn't happened countless times before, and these companies know that.
They did. That's why they added the NDA, to try and stifle communication with the community.
"easily bagged with a bottle of coke and some positive attention."
i felt this hard
Oh my God I remember those terrible Ghostbusters toys. I wasn't allowed to have them because "they looked too much like guns." Friend had em. That goofy yellow piece constantly fell out and got lost.
I'm glad the community and content creators are fighting back. I got into D&D during the pandemic, haven't played a ton, but learning another game won't be that difficult.
100% I'm glad you are covering this. I'm not a TTRPG person myself, but I have many friends who are, and this kind of crap trickles downstream. We all gotta have each other's backs against cAAApitalism.
@@MK_ULTRA420 Yup, same.
Thank you for sharing your Godzilla with us, it has enriched my Jimquisition experience.
I know you probably didn't enjoy being badgered into covering this topic, though it is appreciated, and if it helps; this directly affects games too. There are (supposedly) remakes of Star Wars KOTOR and KOTOR II in the works; both of those games used the Star Wars D20 ruleset (essentially a variant of the D&D 3.5 rules), which is OGL content. Hasbro's little kill order here covered a lot more forms of media that just us simple nerds playing with pen and paper.
Well, the interesting thing in in all of this is that Hasbro is kind of trying to pull a fast one there (at least, based on what a few lawyers have said on the subject). The rules structures can't actually *be* copywritten/require a license/w/e, only the actual, like, setting flavor stuff. This is actually sort of an issue with the old OGL (IE: Some of the things they specify you can use are things they don't actually have any legal ability to stop you using), but since it was much more broadly permissive anyway it kind of didn't matter, but basically, if you're just utilizing the process/structure of d20, they, uh, can't *actually* do anything unless you're quoting their books word for word. Custom variants of the rules sets, based on previous judicial precedent, never needed a license in the first place.
Though I suppose people have semi-recently been given reason not to trust the reliability of judicial precedent...
@@thaddeusgenhelm8979 Indeed - It's not whether WotC would actually win if they took someone to court over this (they very soundly wounldn't), it's the *threat* of being taken to court and loosing all your money in legal fees that would intimidate smaller publishers, a good scheme to chase them away from the common ruleset.
@@liesandslander Which honestly makes it even more scummy, in my opinion. It's one thing to pull a Nintendo and be way overzealous about stuff you theoretically have legal standing to mess with (which is still bad, obviously), but basically trying to intimidate people into giving you money without even the grounds to do so feels more like a scammer, or nuisance litigator, move than something any respectable company should be doing.
Insert obvious joke about how... Not shocking corporations acting less than respectably here is, I suppose.
The most outrageous part is that that 25% they asked for was GROSS REVENUE not profits! It's completely insane, for some businesses it might aswell be a cease and desist!
I loved the look at a different aspect of gaming! It might just be me who'd watch a hypothetical video on this, but there is an older story of Hasbro being a bit shite in gaming. There was a time when Hasbro was cool with My Little Pony fan made content, and then one day it wasn't. It resulted in a fan made My Little Pony fighting game getting scrapped and turned into a new IP, the pretty good and amazingly punny "Them's Fightin' Herds".
I'm a little surprised you didn't bring up how WotC basically tried to gaslight us in their statement, but considering your not immersed in the whole TTRPG sink hole, I'm grateful that you've been willing to bring light to this issue to a potentially wider audience. Thanks Steph
A few other points of note;
- OGL 1.0a (the original version) shouldn't be revocable, and at its time of writing, was intended to coexist along side any newer versions made. Tho due to some legal precedent over the 20 years between it's conception and now, there's a loophole that WotC are leaning on to go backsies.
- WotC waited over a week to make their response, and made it on a Friday in the hopes it would skip the news cycle for the wider industry. Baically trying to wait out this storm in the hopes we will all just forget. Standard corporate garbage.
- sending out the "draft" of OGL 1.1 to creators was an attempt to fear monger them into signing up early, as it came with NDAs and a 15% royalty for early adopters. They weren't drafts at all. The OGL 1.1 was fully intended to be implemented, and there are likely some poor souls who signed onto it in the weeks before it leaked to the public (something WotC very clearly didn't want for very obvious reasons).
- one of the newest Execs at WotC is a lady who previously worked at Microsoft, and she described DnD as "under monetized", which has spear headed a bunch of horrible changes set to come to the game in its next iteration. Woman is straight up trying to treat DnD like a video game.
Ultimately, The TTRPG community is not the DnD community. They are not the stewards of the hobby we love, they are just the latest hottest thing to be a part of it. If need be, we can and will revoke the welcome here that WotC seems intent to overstay. Paizo and numerous other creators have expressed both a willingness and a means to fill the void left by OGL 1.0a with a new open source, open rpg creative licence (Google ORC License for more info), and/or take up arms on the court of law to defend the OGL 1.0a. If WotC want to burn DnD to the ground, there are plenty of ships on these waters to swim to.
This needs more attention.
The Gaslighting is what made me sick....
They haven't walked back the 30 day notice to change the OGL how every they want after once the new one is effect, from what I have read. So even if they walk back all this nasty stuff then they could theoretically just then say "Oh we are changing it in 30 days" and boom back to how they wanted it originally.
My actual reaction to the dino toy was "OMG, IT'S A RAWR"
Absolutely the best advertising for GURPS and MUCK that they never had to pay a dime for.
im so happy big creators like JSS are putting light to this issue.
the only thing that truly stops big companies is bad publicity and losing money
Thanks for covering this JSS, after what i saw them do to magic i knew they would be back for d&d since thats wizards 2 cash cows.
On the plus side, WotC botching this AND MTG led me to some delightful channels-and I don’t even play MTG.
I love how the topic is D&D, but that one clip shows dice over a player character sheet of a Polish version of Call of Cthulhu TTRPG. 😉
If you covering this doesn’t endear you to people and prevent further subscription losses, I don’t know what will. Thank you for all you do. ❤
@Buzás András if that’s true then it’s sad. I admit it was an odd adjustment period for me at first, but after hearing the daily misery that Abigail Thorne was in before she transitioned...why would anyone want trans people to go on suffering?
This is very strongly reminiscent of the updated EULA that launched with WC3 Deforged (or Warcraft 3 Reforged, for Ctrl-F enjoyers). The original game had a permissive license for fan-made content, and some of that content turned into an entirely new and entirely lucrative genre, so Blizzard wanted to close that barn door in an attempt to bring the horse back.
It's not coming back. That horse has sailed.
I was just checking out the channel literally like 20 minutes ago wondering where this gem is and here it comes!
There was also an internal q & a detailing how WotC and Hasbro actually felt about their customers; gatekeepers to THEIR (Hasbros) money. It basically goes down from there the lack of respect and so on.
Join us next time for another episode of Stephanies Heaving Toy Chest! (I wouldn't mind a little pinball review! With gameplay!)
Steph! I thank god for you almost daily, but when you called me a nerd with that voice, I was SO close to breaking the glass on the emergency pitchfork.
Love you lots, but I’ve never felt so called out in all your videos. 😅
Sterling calling me a nerd might have awakened something in me.
I was confused about the dragon memes I kept seeing. Thanks for the update, JSS!
Eeeyy. A suprise to be sure, but a welcome one to see Steph cover the OGL shenanigans.
(read this when this post is 2 weeks old)
Congratulations for reaching 800k!
I actually have a soft spot for Zilla, since Godzilla was the 2nd movie I've ever seen and I had a Zilla action figure as a kid. It was a stand-in figure for anything dinosaur or dragon related and it was indeed Zilla that got me into the rest of Kaiju stuff. I can't say it's my favorite itteration of Godzilla, but it's for sure one of my Top 5 because of sentimental reasons
The movie wasn't amazing but the late 90s Godzilla animated series based on it is honestly fantastic. It took a design I already liked, retroactively improved on the movie and had dozens of cool original monster designs of its own.
The soundtrack was also awesome❤
@@PatDavis1989 Yesss I loved the animated series as a kid!!
Agreed, fantastic cartoon
It is heartening to see gamers unite to defend their self interests in tabletop gaming. And it seems to have had an impact too.
I wish we saw more similar coordinated resistance efforts (boycott, subscription cancellation, etc) against some of the "questionable" tactics from the video gaming world.
Steph, you're doing this, and that's great. GW has been doing this kind of thing for a while now, and I've asked you a couple of times to look into it. Hopefully, you can have a go at them, too.
1:05 Honestly I thought you would have pulled out a bust of Jeremy Irons from the D&D movie that has a button you can press and he'll repeat one of his insane lines from the movie.
God if that really exists… I have feel like I hallucinated that movie.
You did not mention that there is an extra layer to the story that Pazio, who is owned by the former Wizard stuff who does the OGL now in response to this is now releasing there own version called ORC.
Was curious if you'd be putting out a piece on this, considering the similarity to our favorite triple-A publishers. Glad to see you have!