There's nothing quite like standing on the edge of a large hole in the ground, looking down and going, "oh wow, they're still digging". In the case of Hasbro/WotC, apparently this is their new parttime job.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, or haven't heard yet, a quick recap; Wizards of the Coast, the subsidy of the Hasbro toy company responsible for your childhood, came under a lot of fire for accusations of money-grabbing recently for one of its staple brands, Magic: The Gathering, and is now apparently trying to do the same with its other staple brand, Dungeons and Dragons.
How, you ask? It's simple; WotC is apparently redoing its "Open Game License", a decades-old agreement that allows game punishers to use some DnD rules in their own supplementary products. This license is widely considered to be one of the things that helped explode the Kickstarter market, and has helped grow DnD into a household name over the past ten years. Every cool unofficial DnD product you have seen in your FLGS, every indie-published adventure, every DnD podcast/stream... All of it is made possible by the original OGL.
And now, WotG wants to revoke it (a thing they may not be able to do), and put in place a new agreement, which, according to new leaks, includes such hits as "give us 25% royalties if you have a successor Kickstarter" and "we can reprint your work without paying you whenever we want :)". Yeah, I am not joking about that last one; they want to introduce a worldwide royalty-free right for themselves in this new version, which means anyone who publishes under the new OGL 1.1 license will be agreeing to let WotC reprint or reuse their work at any point, without paying them any royalties. There are other things in there, such as owing WotC a certain percentage of sales after you make $750,000 (and no, it doesn't come out of your profits), having to destroy all your product if you get your license revoked for some reason, and having to register with them.
At the moment, OGL 1.1 hasn't been released, through they have announced they will - all of this is coming from leaks that happened over the last week. The obvious answer as to why seems to be 'money grab', but I won't lie - as a DnD player myself, I don't think I want to be throwing money at them right now. Given how much AI is stealing from artists right now, such a huge company (ya'll are coming out with a MOVIE for crying out loud) wanting to screw over small time content creators is just awful. What's your opinion on it?
That loses them more points than if they'd said nothing at all, honestly, in my books. People's struggles to be accepted into the community should not be used as a weapon.