4E SRD and OGL announcement at WotC.
This is interesting.
We all know, if we are honest, that the 3E OGL led to the producton of a lot of useless crap. That’s the nature of the market; in a real market, there will be some crap, and it is exactly this fact that allows the best products to rise to the top. This is why only a handful of the d20 companies are still in business. This isn’t to say that every d20 product from every defunct company was crap, but rather that the companies that did survive did so, to a large degree, because they produced quality products.
The new phased OGL does a couple of things. It prevents companies from rushing through development to try to be first to market. Even the paid, Phase One OGL members can’t release until August 1. Everyone else will have to wait until 2009 to release their products. In general, this should mean more playtesting, more quality editing, and less crap.
Is WotC trying to cash in on these d20 companies that it has, by default, created? Perhaps. But my guess is that we’re really not talking about that many companies who are going to invest in Phase One. Twenty companies, for example, would mean $100,000 for WotC, which is a relatively small drop in the bucket, in terms of 4E product sales.
I’m betting that the companies that do go for Phase One wind up attracting a lot of the quality developers. I don’t doubt that we’ll even see some joint ventures for Phase One, with folks from a variety of camps contributing under one Phase One license.
For me, I like the idea of 2009. It gives me a good six months to put together materials and get them to all of the various editors for consideration.
