Bad-Faith and the OGL

The real reasons why I'm ditching the Open Gaming License.

Today I opened up Mastodon and saw that someone had commented on a conversation I’d had with another creator. He has marked down all of our OGL material and will be removing it from sale at the end of the month, something I decided to do over a week ago. We don't have the time or energy to deal with the rapid changes and what they mean for our future business.

The commenter posted a copy-paste paragraph from Wikipedia stating that the new OGL will require creators to post a logo on their work and pay royalties on sales over $50,000. Aside from the fact that the information was already out of date and inaccurate, it was followed by a comment along the lines of “Is this what you’re upset about? No wonder you’re so mad.”

Now, it’s difficult to grasp the tone and intention of an internet comment, but this just felt snide. It was like, what’s the big deal, you need to do a small thing like add a graphic and pay royalties over an amount most small creators will never earn. The question was dismissive, asked to make a commentary rather than gain understanding. Feeling that it was simply the start of a bad-faith argument, I blocked the person and moved on.

Back in the early 2010s, I started a small publishing company to produce third-party content. At the time I was in business school, and created it to serve as a learning laboratory. Using the Open Gaming License removed a lot of obstacles and handled a bunch of things that I didn’t want to deal with so that I could get straight to the heart of the experiment. I wanted to apply the things that I was learning in my classes, conduct some research, and use the results in papers.

What I learned was that while there were benefits to using the Open Gaming License, there were also drawbacks. Customers had expectations of what an OGL product was, or should be. They were fine with products that existed within certain parameters but didn’t respond to things that pushed the boundaries too far. The point of the OGL was to allow creators to make things that felt familiar, and if a product began to feel unfamiliar, it was ignored or rejected.

As a creator, this began to feel very limiting. I shut down that business after graduation, and began Lightspress Media as a fresh start, applying everything that I‘d learned. I have earned a modest living doing this since 2016, which is a feat in this industry. Because of that, I’d like to think that I know what I’m talking about. I am a professional; this is my livelihood.

There was only one OGL product line left in my catalog. It was an experiment, the result of a shower thought about what would it look like if I took two disparate game systems and smashed them together. No one paid much attention to it until it was marked down and I announced it was being discontinued, after which FOMO set in, sales went up, and I began getting compliments on it.

I’m not ditching the OGL out of petulance, which is what some bad-faith actors might have you think. The decision was made initially because it wasn’t a popular product line, didn’t generate significant revenue, and could lift right out of my backlist. The time it would take to sift through the new OGL and determine what I’d need to do to bring that small product line into compliance, or even figure out if it could, wasn’t something I had time for. To make a living in tabletop roleplaying means you need to grind and work under a very tight production schedule. A major swerve creates delays and costs money. That’s not something people want to hear, because it goes against the idea that this is literally all fun and games, but that’s reality.

What’s more concerning to me isn’t just what’s happening now, but what could happen in the future. Yes, they backpedaled and as of this writing will allow existing material under OGL 1.0a to continue being sold. However, it still revokes the license, meaning no new products can be produced under the old license. It means that creators currently working with the old license cannot continue to build on their existing body of work. No one can use material created under the old license. It kills off a lot of foundational work.

For the people screaming that they can’t revoke the license, you need to understand that they don’t have to. Maybe it is illegal. Someone would have to sue them to find out. Most small creators can’t afford to challenge a major corporation in court. If I got hit with a cease-and-desist order, I would have to back down. The cost of hiring a lawyer, and spending time working on that lawsuit rather than creating new things to sell, would bankrupt me.

There’s also the matter of distribution. They don’t have to go after small creators. All they need to do is talk to DriveThruRPG, Kickstarter, and Amazon, with whom they have tight business relationships, and ask them to stop carrying material created under OGL 3.0a. For smaller outlets like Itch.io and Indie Press Revolution, who I don’t think they have a relationship with, they can lean on them to not deal with old OGL products. Small creators are effectively shut out of the market.

Even if this doesn’t come to pass this time around, it could in the future. Someone thought it was a plausible idea before they backed down and started making revisions with fan input. In a few years, another CEO could decide to revisit the idea, but not back down. They could continue to make incremental changes, a death by a thousand cuts, until they slowly get what they want without the backlash from making several huge changes all at once.

From a business standpoint, I switched away from producing third-party content because I wanted more control over my own destiny. I didn’t want to have to rely on the goodwill of the company that owned the IP, the feelings the fans had toward the game, or the general idea some folks have that third-party publications are inherently inferior to “official” material. I’m shedding the last vestiges of OGL products for the same reason. The license has ceased to be an asset and now represents a risk.