> I could understand
> closing some monsters entirely and opening others entirely, but the
decision to
> hold onto the names of everything strikes me as bizarre.
White Wolf may be looking to make a sort one-way street from D&D to their
product line, by creating a number of interrelated and cross-referenced
products for the "Scarred Lands" that, through product identity
restrictions, keep other publishers from creating products that would be
easily used in that setting -- and consequently bring repeat customers to
White Wolf D20 products (which of course can use that product identity).
(Computer savvy types please provide on cue appropriate analogies to
Microsoft versions of Java, browser incompatibilities, and whatnot.)
Keeping other publishers from referring to your monsters by name may seem
bizarre (wouldn't those references be, in effect, ads for your products?),
but not if your whole point is that you want no other publishers associated
with your products...you want to fence off your market to protect it from
the chaos of wide-open D20 publishing, in which you are potentially
permitting others to profit more from your ideas than you do yourself.
Of course I don't know what WW is thinking, but this is an alternative to
the "they just don't get the philosophy of open gaming" hypothesis. After
all, they may get it, and not like it, but see this as a way to profit from
it anyhow.
It's an interesting business choice, and it's one that makes considerable
sense if you are one of the largest game companies and have built in
advantage in terms of marketing and familiarity -- you can grab what a
larger company, WotC, is giving away, without really having to pay it
forward to other publishers (who are your competitors).
In the end, the market will decide. I'd like to think that more-open
products will be more rewarded, in the long run, by the practice of network
externalities; and that developers and gamers who might want to share their
materials under the OGL will turn away from over-product-identitied branches
of the D20 tree, while other more fertile branches flourish. That belief
has certainly driven the Atlas Games approach to D20 materials so far.
(OGL/D20 collections of monsters next year, ten years, 100 years from now,
in any language, may all freely reprint verbatim the monsters from "Three
Days to Kill," for example, calling them by their given names and
referencing our module in their copyright section; if White Wolf stops
making their monster book, it will be gone -- unless, say, someone OCRs all
the stats, gives them new names, and publishes them or gives them away for
free on the web...which could happen now, of course, and wouldn't do a lot
of good for WW, but would be a huge boon to all the OGL developers looking
for new critters.)
On the other hand, White Wolf might simply build a strong, proprietary
subset of the D20 market with rabidly loyal fans who wouldn't think of
looking at someone else's product, because they already know it's not going
to build on the brand of D20 that they're playing; and by defending that
territory they've marked White Wolf may generate more profit than they would
otherwise.
Interesting. Not sure how else to evaluate it, at this point. Should be
interesting to see how it works out.
-John Nephew
President, Atlas Games
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