Comments by "Crazy Eyes" (@CrizzyEyes) on "Most Delusional Company Ever" video.

@chupika6464 25% royalties is fucking massive if you're not even going to do the studio the service of promoting their work. For reference, Steam, PC gaming's biggest storefront, is well known for taking about 30%, and they will promote your work on their client application which shoves new game notifications in their user's faces every time they start it. It also has a comprehensive store system with tags defined by users so others can find your game easily. This license says you have to give WotC 25% for the privilege of doing their hard work for them and nothing else. No benefits, nothing. Another thing that didn't help: I'm not sure if it was an erroneous leak or a rumor, but I've heard in days prior that they would take royalties if your custom content made even $1. I don't know if they backpedaled on that or what, but it certainly did not do their public image any favors.
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@chupika6464 I hate it when people use the "well they're in a tough spot" argument as if the only option for any company going through rough times is to resort to extremely underhanded measures. Imagine if J.K. Rowling copied and pasted somebody's Harry Potter fanfiction, uncredited, and sold it as her next book and said it was fine because it was in a license at the back of the novels. That's how absurd the new OGL is regarding custom content. Here's a thought: How about Hasbro/WotC puts out a new product that people like? You know, the traditional way of growing a company and making money? Why not a D&D spin off board game that resembles HeroQuest? That was popular back in the day and would get more people interested in the RPG books who aren't sure if they want to commit time to writing a character and backstory, or writing a campaign. To go back to the royalty issue: No, it's still a completely absurd amount that WotC is asking. You mention Bethesda's creation kit tool for Elder Scrolls/Fallout as a comparison point. Okay, let's use game engines as a reference. Unreal engine, the biggest engine on the market used by the biggest studios in the industry, asks for a 5% royalty after your product earns $1 million in revenue. That's FIVE, the number between four and six. For a product with a roughly 25-year history and prolific status, with extremely well paid engineers backing it. I am not suggesting that they receive no royalties at all; in fact I agree with the overall notion that WotC missed out on collecting anything from Critical Role considering how huge it got. But the numbers they suggest simply don't make sense.
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@mephiles720 They can't do that. That would be like going to every single person's house who has pirated a video game you published and pulling the plug on their PC. It's stupidly impractical.
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@TheDaxter11 That was at least more understandable, although as usual for GW the strategy was executed very poorly. GW has their own service where they would debut Warhammer animations and other content and didn't want fans to make stuff that they couldn't monetize. It's still a bad idea, but at least I can sympathize with the desire to do that. This on the other hand is just beyond reasoning.
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@boianko That is not suspect at all and shows you don't really understand the history of D&D. When 4th edition came out, fans of the game were mostly furious. It was a complete redesign of the game that made it much more restricted and, for lack of a better word, "video game-y." All of the classes fit into 4 roles they made up with which suspiciously resembled the "Holy Trinity" you'd know if you played MMOs like World of Warcraft. All monsters except "bosses" had only 1 HP in 4th edition. The action economy was streamlined to the extreme -- while D&D does need streamlining of its ludicrous action economy (and Pathfinder still suffers greatly from this), this, again, made it look like a generic MMO where every class in a "role" did basically the same thing. Pathfinder was a direct result of this dissatisfaction with 4th edition and a desire for more minimally updated 3.5e rules and more adventure content. By the time 5th came out, Pathfinder had already gained steam and had a large following.
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@Kostly Your comment is a bit contradictory. People do make their own worlds, characters, and items, while playing using D&D rules all the time. What WotC has essentially said is, because you used the Player's Handbook one time while on your livestreamed tabletop game, we own your characters, world, and items that you created from scratch. You're suggesting that people need to make their own custom content to get away from Hasbro/WotC stealing their custom content, it makes no sense. The rule system is irrelevant to how almost all of these ideas are formulated. You could play out a campaign where a dwarf king wants a sacred hammer back that was stolen by a bunch of goblins in virtually every tabletop rule system ever made.
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@kdawg3484 I wouldn't say that D&D has ever been "roleplay-friendly" at least in comparison to other games. WHFRP, for example, delinates social classes, penalties or boons for interacting within or without said social classes, rules for starting up a business, rules for dealing with guilds and fees they may mandate, talents (sorta like feats) that change how you interact with people (like nobles ignoring you because you're a servant) etc. D&D is very basic when it comes to actual roleplaying. That's not to say you can't roleplay well in D&D, but the game won't help you do it. D&D is, first and foremost, a game about deciding how you can blast as many goblins as possible in a 30-foot circle which is approximated with squares, and then rolling for loot afterward. That's what the rules always focused on. It's downright tragic that so many people play D&D, because I can tell from many of their campaign descriptions that they're grating on many of the limitations of the rules and would enjoy something else much more.
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There are other D&D clones out there that aim at simplicity and don't go super in-depth on options like Pathfinder does. Many of them emulate older editions like OD&D or 2nd edition, but that's not necessarily a bad thing especially if you're new to the hobby. Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Labyrinth Lord are two of the ones I've played. However, D&D is far from the holy grail of game design, so I would say pick something else that interests you and try it. Frankly, if you line up every TTRPG rulebook and throw a dart blindfolded, you're more likely than not to hit one that is better than D&D or many of its clones.
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@Zerozsaber Sounds great buddy, I'll roll up a Brarbrarian and you can play Brizard. Maybe we'll even encounter a Breholder!
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In this case I've heard that the executives in charge of Hasbro's new monetization strategy regarding D&D were headhunted from Microsoft and Xbox. So yes, they are delusional idiots who think they can monetize D&D like a video game.
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@thomasc1270 White Wolf is arguably just as stupid, their publishing house makes so many terrible fucking decisions that literally nobody wants them. Last I heard a couple years ago, they were up for sale and nobody would buy them.
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@AdderTude No one would advocate for the "medieval artwork" though. Generally, if they had some artist they hired design a monster and print it in a book, they can claim it's theirs. It's not the concept of a dragon but their particular design idea of how a dragon looks.
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@magniwalterbutnotwaltermag1479 Funny you mention that -- the original Cacodemon design was ripped off wholesale from the Astral Juggernaut monster design which was an AD&D monster. It wasn't based off the Beholder. However, it was redesigned in every Doom game after 2 and no longer remotely resembles that. Doom was loosely inspired by a D&D campaign that the id crew were playing.
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Matt Mercer already designed his own setting and classes, he could easily just publish his own game based on a d20 and roll with that.
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@zacharyjackson1829 Hundreds of rule systems are "based on D&D rules," that's a stupidly broad statement that is impossible to enforce legally. That would be like if Nintendo tried to sue every platformer game publisher because Donkey Kong invented "press A to jump"
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@chipchipperson7304 Yes, and that is a shame, because it's totally absurd. I'd be amazed if any judge would respect that clause. Hasbro is completely relying on threats of litigation for their new license to stand.
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Not sure if you're aware but they're already doing MTX on D&D Beyond, their online storefront/service. I'm quite sure it's going to be stuff like "buy the new Bard class, only $9.99"
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Just play a different system. You only fail to do it if you give up.
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Ironically, TSR had its own issues with an overzealous legal department. However, I don't think it was because of what Gygax desired, it seemed more like they were doing "what they thought they were supposed to" and making a bad name for TSR as a result.
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@sub-harmonik Any reasonable person would have interpreted the OGL 1.0 as "This will never change ever and nothing published under this license will be touchable in the future if a new version of this license comes out." Yet WotC is trying to claim that this isn't true and they can somehow retroactively apply the 1.1 license to the 1.0 stuff. It will be a profitable day in court for their lawyers, that much is certain.
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