Agent Cooper wrote in Wizards Leaked OGL:Maybe I don't understand this issue, but I do not get the big hue and cry over it.  The royalty payments to WOTC don't even start till you've made $750,000 selling under the OGL.  $750k.  If you are making that much creating D&D material, you are living what I would assume many on this board would consider a dream life.  And you're making all that cash without ever having put in any work on the core rules, which is the heaviest lift in the design process.

I get I'm in the minority, but it sounds like one set of millionaires fighting over money with another set of millionaires, with everybody reeeing about "corporate greed."  But who's corporate greed do they mean?

As far as the online platforms and micro charges, nobody at Wizards has a gun to your head to participate.  You have 7 editions of D&D in print out there to play for free to your hearts content once you buy the core books.  And about a million other TTRPGs on top of that.

Granted I have little skin in this game, I've stuck with 3.5/Pathfinder and never invested in any of the new editions.  WOTC doesn't pay my mortgage, I don't care what they do.  

I would like to see the game continue to thrive and grow, however.  I think restricting the OGL is probably a bad move in the short term.  But I don't understand all the sky is falling panic about this.

But what do I know?

Agent Cooper wrote in Wizards Leaked OGL:But what do I know?

20 years ago in order to make the rebooted D&D successful WoTC released an open license to entice people to make content (including games) compatible with D&D. This was because TSR's litigious practices had been one of the causes of its demise. It worked and D&D became a big success again.
In the 20 years since lots of people have created lots of content that incorporates varying amounts of stuff from the D&D SRD, and there is lots of IP that could have been created without the SRD, but instead has D&D terminology and/or phrasing scattered throughout.
Not only was the SRD released under this license, but other unrelated games were released under the same license and so have been unwittingly infected.
This is true of an awful lot of games and modules, often ones with only a tangential relationship (or no relationship) to D&D.
In particular some companies instead of creating rival systems to D&D made broadly compatible ones so that there was easy passage between systems - this was the express purpose of the license and benefited both WotC and the other companies.
Now Hasbro is doing a bait and switch, and all this content that could easily have been created without any SRD material (like everyone used to) is infected with it, and even if this does not happen immediately, no-one now trusts them not to attempt at some point in the future to claim both eye-watering royalties and intellectual property rights to all of this material.
This isn't something that only affects retro clones. For example, a game like DCC could easily have been done not under the OGL with only minor changes, but to stop players having to play the terminology guessing game they kept the terminology the same, so have been snared.

So unless you only buy WoTC, Chaosium and Palladium books you'll no doubt have stuff with the OGL in the back, and none of this is likely to ever be reprinted in its current form, as no-one would be foolish enough to take that sort of financial risk.

aia wrote in Wizards Leaked OGL:I they can't  be applied to past contents, do i understand correctly? (E.g. a module issued 3 years ago under OGL 1.0a can't be invoked as wotc content only because today is in force a different licence)

sauromatian wrote in Wizards Leaked OGL:Would a legendary land of the imagination work? If I incorporate in a mythical in-game kingdom where the rules of physics & basic human decency do not apply, it seems like IP law wouldn't either.

sauromatian wrote in Wizards Leaked OGL:
That describes the start of every small-press effort.