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Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)

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Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)

#151

Post by alasdair_ »

vaylian wrote: post #48

A bit more context: * Wizards of the Coast (WoTC) has been tasked by Hasbro (which owns WoTC) to drastically increase profits over a few years. * WoTC has been aggressively increasing prices on Magic the Gathering (MTG) and drastically increased the diversity of products. This overwhelmed even people who follow and produce MTG news. Wallet fatique is rampant and people are disgruntled. * WoTC releases the 30th aniver…

>The real problem is the managers at WoTC that don't really care about the games. They only care about money. I expect more bad things in the future.

WOTC is notorious for paying around 50% of the market rate and giving a bunch of free product to employees and generally convincing them that working for poor wages is worth it because of the games. I think senior management doesn't give a shit but middle management and below definitely cares about the games, they just lack the power/ ability to make major decisions.

Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)

#152

Post by trynewideas »

WotC's PDFs are untagged and convert poorly, so if you want a Markdown version, try https://srd.wiki.

If you absolutely must convert it yourself, use pdfminer, which does a good job with the columns and doesn't need a ton of editing to smooth out.

Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)

#153

Post by TimPC »

pdonis wrote: post #121
godelski wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real problem is the managers at WoTC that don't really care about the games. They only care about money. I expect more bad things in the future. The same seems to be true with Games Workshop and I've never understood this. The products from both companies have huge markups (painted cards and pieces of plastic) and I'd assume that they could actually have a far larger market and profit by concentrating on scale…

> I'd assume that they could actually have a far larger market and profit by concentrating on scale rather than treating their products as luxury items I'm not sure that's true. The actual bottleneck with these games is not money but time and interest: you have to have a group of people who all like the same game, and you have to be able to get the group together regularly to play it. There are plenty of people who a…

I left the game as I got older. At the end of the day it just didn’t make sense to spend what magic cost if I could only play a few hours a week. It’s easy to spend over $3600/year on M:TG if you want to play competitively and that just doesn’t make sense to me if I’m getting roughly 100 hours of play in. I could do far better things with over $30/hour for hobbies.

Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)

#154

Post by wolverine876 »

tptacek wrote: post #40

So this is a clean, complete win, right? Once the license controversy started, there was no reasonable ask beyond this outcome?

It's as if nothing happened, afaict. As I understand from IP attorneys who have discussed the issue publicly,

1) The SRD is all/mostly material that is non-copyrightable anyway; it doesn't matter how it's 'licensed'.

2) Partly as a consequence of that, the old OGL 1.0a - the license that they say they agree to continue to use - takes away rights that people legally have and offers very little in return (e.g., it offers rights to the SRD, which the licensee already has by law). You are better off publishing without it, in most cases.

3) For those who for some reason care about OGL 1.0a: Wizards of the Coast began by saying they were revoking the OGL 1.0a. Publicly commenting IP attorneys said that, because OGL 1.0a doesn't say it's irrevokable, that Wizards could probably do that. Now Wizards is leaving it in place, but presumably they could revoke it at any point.

IOW, nothing has changed and the licensing was a scam to start with. The SRD license is worthless and the license for which people were clamoring actually hurts their interests.

For a legal analysis that supports the above, from a credible source:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-h...

Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)

#155

Post by godelski »

pdonis wrote: post #121
godelski wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real problem is the managers at WoTC that don't really care about the games. They only care about money. I expect more bad things in the future. The same seems to be true with Games Workshop and I've never understood this. The products from both companies have huge markups (painted cards and pieces of plastic) and I'd assume that they could actually have a far larger market and profit by concentrating on scale…

> I'd assume that they could actually have a far larger market and profit by concentrating on scale rather than treating their products as luxury items I'm not sure that's true. The actual bottleneck with these games is not money but time and interest: you have to have a group of people who all like the same game, and you have to be able to get the group together regularly to play it. There are plenty of people who a…

> I'm not sure that's true. The actual bottleneck with these games is not money but time and interest: you have to have a group of people who all like the same game, and you have to be able to get the group together regularly to play it.

For campaign based games like DND and other RPGs I'd agree, but with the specific examples of MTG and 40k I highly disagree. You do not need to meet regularly for MTG (card) or 40k (miniature) style games as they can easily be played as one-offs. While RPGs have one-shots they are far less common and the overhead is quite high compared to MTG/40k (just show up with your deck/army). In addition to this, games like MTG and 40k are often played 1v1 (though can expand) and this makes the scheduling problem easier since you only need to find compatible times for 2 people rather than 3-5 (or more).

Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)

#156

Post by throwaway81523 »

godelski wrote: post #109
vaylian wrote: post #48

A bit more context: * Wizards of the Coast (WoTC) has been tasked by Hasbro (which owns WoTC) to drastically increase profits over a few years. * WoTC has been aggressively increasing prices on Magic the Gathering (MTG) and drastically increased the diversity of products. This overwhelmed even people who follow and produce MTG news. Wallet fatique is rampant and people are disgruntled. * WoTC releases the 30th aniver…

> The real problem is the managers at WoTC that don't really care about the games. They only care about money. I expect more bad things in the future. The same seems to be true with Games Workshop and I've never understood this. The products from both companies have huge markups (painted cards and pieces of plastic) and I'd assume that they could actually have a far larger market and profit by concentrating on scale…

I play chess and also follow it as a professional sport. I suck at it but it's fun anyway, it costs nothing unless you play in money tournaments, costs very little unless you play in BIG money tournaments, and as far as I can tell it seems to offer everything that video games do in terms of skill challenge, social connection, and all of that. I'm sure these expensive video games have a reason to exist but I haven't figured out what it is.

I played D&D in high school when it consisted of a few (often xeroxed) rulebooks, some funny looking dice, some graph paper, and the players' own imaginations. The current version sounds awful by comparison.

Now get off my lawn.

Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)

#157

Post by voakbasda »

gspetr wrote: post #67
voakbasda wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, trust once broken cannot be rebuilt easily. Too many companies make these kinds of bad PR moves, backtrack temporarily, and then quietly deploy their plans after the initial furor dies down. I wager that the winds here will shift back to blow against their customers soon enough. Want us to believe otherwise? An apology would only be the start; they need to swallow a legally enforceable poison pill that prevents…

>legally enforceable poison pill This seems somewhat unlikely IMO. WotC is a subsidiary of Hasbro, a publicly traded company. Measures that can be potentially interpreted as restrictive on shareholders' profits seem quite difficult to pass.

In this case, such a measure actually might help insure continued shareholder profits, by preventing a mass exodus of gamers from their ecosystem. In fact, I would say failing to take such measures might present an existential threat to WoTC, due to the trust that has already been lost.

Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)

#158

Post by Macha »

wolverine876 wrote: post #147
jron wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original author is on record stating that it was intended to be irrevocable. There was also a quote on the official WOTC website stating the license couldn't be revoked. IANAL but I wouldn't take that case to court.

The original author was an executive at WotC, with access to professional legal advice. If they wanted the license to be irrevocable, they would have put it in the license.

If we look at other contemporary licenses reviewed by professional legal advice, like the GPLv2, Creative Commons v1-3, MIT, Apache v1, they all have the same omission of irrevocable, and it was about another ten years before they released newer iterations with that magic language (or didn't, in the case of MIT).

It's also not speculation that that was the intent of the original author, they're on record from both the time of license publication as a wizards employee and recently in light of the controversy and both 20 years ago and today were consistent they meant it to be irrevocable

Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)

#159

Post by boomboomsubban »

undreren wrote: post #94
deeviant wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really don't understand the outrage on that decision What decision are you claiming people were outraged? Because the actual reason people where outraged is the very existence of the magic 30th edition in the first place. It is one of the clearest and starkest examples of a company disrespecting it's customer, ever.

Also the fact that WotC has promised over and over that these cards would never get reprints, not even non-tournament legal reprints.

As of at least 2016, I'm not checking older ones, non-tournament legal reprints have been acceptable under their reprint rules. https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/official-rep...

Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)

#160

Post by ksplicer »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #156
godelski wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real problem is the managers at WoTC that don't really care about the games. They only care about money. I expect more bad things in the future. The same seems to be true with Games Workshop and I've never understood this. The products from both companies have huge markups (painted cards and pieces of plastic) and I'd assume that they could actually have a far larger market and profit by concentrating on scale…

I play chess and also follow it as a professional sport. I suck at it but it's fun anyway, it costs nothing unless you play in money tournaments, costs very little unless you play in BIG money tournaments, and as far as I can tell it seems to offer everything that video games do in terms of skill challenge, social connection, and all of that. I'm sure these expensive video games have a reason to exist but I haven't f…

Videogames are expensive when you are young. It might be more expensive than chess, but it quickly becomes one of the cheapest hobbies of most adults. It's sure cheaper than going out drinking an extra night each week.
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