Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast shocked the role-playing game industry today with the revelation that anyone wanting to publish material for the new Fourth Edition of D&D, expected out in June of this year, must forgo open licensing entirely as part of their new Game System License.
With the launch of the third edition of the game years ago, Wizards had sponsored an open licensing scheme. This license, called the Open Gaming License, or OGL, was a kind of open source license designed for game publishers. The result was an explosion of third party game companies supporting D&D and also establishing their own separate game lines. Many of these companies became quite large and successful, notably Paizo Publishing, Green Ronin Publishing, and others. There are open gaming products covering every genre under the sun – science fiction, horror, wild west, and anything else you can think of.
Now, however, Wizards has stated that any company hoping to publish products for their new edition must agree to discontinue any current open licensed products and produce no further open products at all – Dungeons & Dragons related or not. In a phone conversation about 4e licensing with Clark Petersen, president of Necromancer Games, a company representative explained this policy and was adamant that it was not going to change. A number of companies are leveraging the OGL for their independent games, for example the pulp game Spirit of the Century; the gaming community adopted the OGL on good faith and more than 90% of the openly licensed games in existence are using it. This “poison pill” clause means that in exchange for any further involvement with the Dungeons & Dragons game line, a company must abandon any past OGL products and vow not to produce any more.
In response to questions about this policy, Scott Rouse, D&D Brand Manager for Wizards of the Coast, says that “We have invested multiple 7 figures in the development of 4e so can you tell me why we would want publishers to support a system that we have moved away from?” Linae Foster, Licensing Manager, also notes “We understand the impacts this license will have on the 3pps, fans, community and industry in general. We respect that companies will need to make the decision that is right for them and their supporters.”
It seems to me that this is the equivalent of Microsoft telling people “if you want to make and sell software for Windows, you can’t make any Linux/open source software either!” Though this move might be legally shaky, especially in the EU, side players in the small RPG industry are often only a couple people strong, and Wizards is owned by Hasbro, making any challenge to these terms doomed from the start. (The buyout of Wizards by Hasbro is likely the source of this change of heart away from open licensing; events like the Scrabble/Scrabulous lawsuit have Hasbro trying to define and expand their scope of IP control.) Some of the more well-established game companies are rebelling anyway – Paizo Publishing, which used to publish Dungeon and Dragon magazines under license from Wizards, had already declared their intent to stay with the open prior version and develop it moving forward instead, effectively “forking” the D&D code base. But even they admit this is effectively a niche play.
This also appears not to be limited to publishing companies, but also to individuals wanting to put content on their Web site or other venue. When asked about individual licensors, Scott Rouse replied that yes, individuals would need to fill out a GSL license agreement and send it in to WotC to participate. Some ten or so years ago, TSR (the original company, which was bought by Wizards and then Wizards by Hasbro in turn) liked to send out “cease and desist” legal threats to people posting D&D-related content on their Web sites. Will we see a return to that? By the letter of the law as much as it’s been revealed to us, some guy on their Web site putting up 3.5e related content and 4e related content at the same time is subject to the same limitations…
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This is making me strongly reconsider my plan to buy the 4e books when they come out.
Folks reading this might wish to note that Wizards staff haven’t explicitly confirmed that the exclusion will happen on a whole-company basis rather than by product. Neither have they denied it, but in fact are sitting on the fence about what is in the GSL.
OK, this is totally ridiculous if it is so.
What is to keep a company from creating a “wholly-owned subsidiary” that publishes 3.5 OGL material while simultaneously releasing GSL 4.0 material? Nothing. But that doesn’t make it right.
C’mon, guys, this is like when White Wolf tried to license any instance of their tabletop games. Give me a break!
I guess what bothers me is the misunderstanding of ‘open’ and making money. The guys at Techdirt can talk about that more intelligently than I can.
I was thinking that I’d look at the Action! System or some other system, but the post on Microlite20 is very interesting. I remember our 1e and 2e games running for hours without a 15 rule timeout. (Then again, we had a house rule against what we called the misanthropic didacts. They could argue a rule only twice during a campaign setting. Unfortunately, this turned into a discussion about what counts as ‘argue’ and what counts as ‘discussion’. ) In the end, the group paired down to three of us that just let the DM make on-the-fly decisions.
Those were so much fun.
Anyway, it sounds like the GSL is not really open and that’s a shame.
And Action! was released under the OGL (as is Microlite20), meaning that the GSL is intended to stomp them out as well. Any company that touches 4e won’t be able to touch Action! (unless the furor over this ridiculousness causes Hasbro to cave in).
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From a business standpoint, they need to churn the market and get everyone buying 4th ed. materials. The question is, will they provide a decent grace period for 3rd parties to make the transition before they have to choose 4th ed GSL vs. 3.5 OGL? If they do that, then I can support their decision.
To me it’s not a moral choice but a business one. I don’t believe that OGL came about because of a desire for peace, love, and understanding but because they saw that a big content ecosystem had business value. Now the right business move is to take care of the people who make you successful: the gamers and the 3rd parties and that you do that by allowing a reasonable transition period. For example, the following deadlines seem reasonable:
6 months: deadline for releasing any new content under OGL/3rd ed – this is long enough to finish any in-progress materials.
12 months: deadline for selling any content exclusively for OGL/3rd ed – anything sold in 3rd ed must also be produced in a 4th ed version to stay GSL compliant
24 months: End-of-life for 3rd ed/OGL support if you want to be eligible for 4th ed/GSL
None of these force people to abandon 3rd ed but the last one makes people make a final choice but by then, most of the players and 3rd parties will move on so they will be highly incented to make the “right” choice from WotC’s perspective.
Mark
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i am about to release a new table top game myself and i need better understanding of the gaming license, but i wanted to use the older 2nd or 3rd edition rules can anybody help me with information concerning this or what would be the best action at this point.
The OGL only applies to the 3e-derived rules, but many people have made OSR retroclones of other editions using it, like the 2e retroclone “For Gold & Glory”.
also i was wondering, who would i need to contact at wizards of the coast in order to find out about possible other avenues on releasing my game, can anyone help me?
Just contact their customer service. Be aware that their answer will be “No.” http://ww2.wizards.com/Company/Info/
thanks mxyzplk that was helpful and yes they said no, but i just got my copy rights and somehow, some way, i am going to get this game of mine out so that people can enjoy it, just look for it on the stands, it is called The Fantastic World of Mymph.
They declared war on gaming when they sent cease and desist to everyone who supported 3rd and 3.5 the minute they rolled out 4E. They have done everything they could to strangle 3.5 from then on
I feel we had a DejaVu in January 2o22… Just this time turned out worse for WotC. Congrtatulations on documenting this back then, so we can understand it now! Would you want to answer a question you reported about 15 years ago?