After a week of silence amid intense backlash, Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast (WoTC) has finally addressed its community’s concerns about changes to the Open Games license.
The Open Games License (OGL) has been around since 2000 and has made it possible for a diverse ecosystem of third-party developers to publish virtual desktop software, expansion books, and more. Many of these creators are able to make a living thanks to OGL. But in the last week, a new version of OGL has been leaked after WoTC sent it to some top creators. More than 66,000 Dungeons & Dragons fans signed an open letter under the name #OpenDnD ahead of the expected announcement, and waves of users deleted their subscriptions to D&D Beyond, WoTC’s online platform. Now WoTC has admitted that “it’s clear from the reaction that we rolled a 1.” Or, to non-Dungeons and Dragons, they screwed up.
“We wanted to ensure that OGL is for the content creator, the homebrewer, the aspiring designer, our players and the community – not for large corporations to use for their own commercial and promotional purposes,” the company wrote in a statement.
But fans criticized that language because WoTC — a subsidiary of Hasbro — is a “big corporation” in its own right. Hasbro earned $1.68 billion in revenue in Q3 2022.
TechCrunch spoke with content creators who received the unreleased OGL update from WoTC. The terms of this updated OGL will force any creator making more than $50,000 to report their earnings to WoTC. Creators earning over $750,000 in gross revenue will be required to pay a 25% royalty. The latter creators are the closest thing third-party Dungeons & Dragons content has to “big corporations” — but gross revenue is not a reflection of profit, so referring to these companies as such is a misnomer.
Mage Hand Press editor-in-chief Mike Hollick, who organized the #OpenDnD letter, says his business will be affected by this 25% royalty. As he told TechCrunch, most Kickstarters that raise this amount of money don’t even make 25% profit because most of the money raised goes to fulfilling orders, printing books, and paying contributors.
“Kickstarter involves a lot of small products, so your profit margins actually go down because you’re really going to offer people some dice and some adventures and a box set, and all of those individual things end up reducing your profit margins quite a bit,” said Holic. “Kickstarters don’t walk away with 80% of their money and profit. None of this is legal. I don’t know where they get that 25% beyond … they’re trying to completely crush the competition.”
The fan community is also concerned about whether WoTC will be allowed to publish and profit from the work of third parties without crediting the original creator. Noah Downs, a partner at Premack Rogers and a Dungeons & Dragons live streamer, told TechCrunch that there is a clause in the document that grants WoTC a perpetual, royalty-free sublicense for all third-party content created under the OGL.
Now WoTC seems to be bringing back both the royalty clause and the perpetual license.
“What [the next OGL] will not contain any royalty structure. It also would not include the license return provision, which some people feared was a means of stealing work. That thought never crossed our minds,” WoTC wrote in a statement. “With every new OGL, you’ll own the content you create. We don’t.” WoTC claims it included this language in the leaked version of the OGL to prevent creators from being able to “falsely claim” that WoTC stole their work.
Throughout the document, WoTC refers to the document that certain creators received as a draft — but the creators who received the document told TechCrunch that it was sent to them with the intention of getting them to sign it. The backlash against these terms was so severe that other publishers of tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) took action.
Paizo is the publisher of Pathfinder, a popular game covered by the original WoTC OGL. Paizo’s owner and presidents were leaders at Wizards of the Coast when OGL was originally published in 2000, and wrote in a statement yesterday that the company is prepared to go to court over the idea that WoTC could suddenly revoke the license for OGL from existing projects. Along with other publishers such as Kobold Press, Chaosium, and Legendary Games, Paizo has announced that it will launch its own Open RPG Creative License (ORC).
“We have no interest in the new Wizards OGL. Instead, we have a plan that we believe will irrevocably and undeniably keep the spirit of the Open Game License alive,” Paizo said in a statement. The license has not yet been published.
Dungeons & Dragons content creators are still cautious about how the OGL changes will affect the community, even if it looks like WoTC may make some concessions.
“In the end, the collective action of the open letter signatories and the D&D Beyond unsubscribe made the difference. We saw that all they care about is profit, and we’re hitting their bottom line,” said Eric Silver, gamemaster on the Dungeons & Dragons Join the Party podcast. He told TechCrunch that WoTC’s response on Friday was “just a PR statement.”
“Until we see what they put out in clear language, we can’t take our foot off the gas pedal,” Silver said. “The corporate game is to wait until people get bored; we cannot and will not do it.”
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