Hasbro surrenders on the D&D OGL.

I’m as surprised as you are.

At first glance, this absolutely looks like a surrender on Hasbro’s part with regard to D&D OGL content. They’ve made it clear that they’re junking OGL 1.2 (and its stealth hi-we’ve-installed-a-kill-switch provision):

  1. We are leaving OGL 1.0a in place, as is. Untouched.
  2. We are also making the entire SRD 5.1 available under a Creative Commons license.
  3. You choose which you prefer to use.

…which I guess is what happens when 88% of survey respondents (presumably the most motivated ones) inform you that they don’t want to publish game material under your new license. Remember: Hasbro isn’t in the sourcebook business. It’s in the ruleset business. And as long as D&D is the dominant game system, business will remain very, very good. I guess the company realized that there was a limit to how far they could go on that. So, everyone: nice job making them back down.

Well, at least for now.

Moe Lane

PS: Does that mean Hasbro still might come back later to try to take another bite at the regulatory apple? Absolutely.

7 thoughts on “Hasbro surrenders on the D&D OGL.”

  1. I take this to mean that someone there actually realized they were about to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.

    I wonder if they were seeing a drop in actual market activity by players as well.

    1. There was a campaign to mass-unsubscribe from DnDBeyond all at once last week. Looks like it helped make the point.

  3. They’re going to try again. All they have to do is wait a few months because they think that folks won’t be paying attention.

  4. Having already transferred the 5e SRD to the Creative Commons, their (already shaky) legal grounds for revoking the old OGL are gone, so they can’t try this exact thing again. They *can* release One D&D under a different license, though. They’ll probably be cautious about doing so, given this response, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some differences to the license it’s released under.

    I’ll keep working on my 2d10 RPG just in case, though (https://www.donaldscrankshaw.com/search/label/2d10).

  5. They’ve still taken damage.

    In particular, they made the fact that they’re run by a bunch of soulless lizards who see their playerbase as obstacles between them and the money in the wallets of said playerbase *blatantly obvious*, and a lot of people didn’t like that. Utter and abject surrender is probably going to be enough to let them mostly recover, but they’ve already poured a *significant* number of players into the hands of competing systems, and the ORC is now very much a thing.

    Basically, prior to this whole chain of events, they had a *casual* dominance of the market… and now it’s not nearly so casual. Also, importantly, every single third-party publisher who lived through this has had a Significant Emotional Experience on the matter, of the sort that adjusts future decisionmaking.

    I don’t actually know what Paizo’s numbers are looking like right now, but I do know that they’re very, very good.

Comments are closed.