So imagine this.
Imagine you built a railroad because you wanted to move your goods around. But you don’t have enough engines to use the rails 24/7, and there’s these guys with horse drawn carriages that could travel faster and further if they got to use your rail system. Now, these carts don’t carry enough to really compete with you from a volume perspective, and it’s a good for the community, so you allow it without any restriction. And they used the rails and were able to not just support their own cartage needs, but also pick up some business from their friends and neighbors that wanted some items moved, too, but didn’t want to always pay for full on locomotive speed. Everybody wins.
With me so far? Kinda nice little story, isn’t it? Well hang on, cause there’s more.
Everything’s humming along okay, until a couple of things happen. Farmer Jenny starts hauling explosives over your rails, and a couple of small accidents lead to complaints. You have to deal with all the complaints, and the people who no longer think your rails are safe because of those accidents. You also notice that Farmer Jill, the biggest owner of horse drawn carts is organizing their schedules a little more tightly, getting a little more competitive in the market. They are even taking your customers! And turning a heckuva profit doing it. On your rails that you built.
Now, if it were me and those were my rails, yeah, I’d probably start charging Farmer Jill a toll, and remind them that the reason they were making any money was because they were using my rails. If they thought they could build their own rails and do their own thing, power to them. And I’d stop letting Farmer Jenny use the rails at all before someone gets seriously hurt. Or, she too can build her own rail system. Choosing to pay a toll and not haul dangerous items is the price of getting to use my rails.
See where the analogy comes in yet? (Slight sidebar- wtf is it about having to ‘go to battle’ and ‘declare war’ on shit? Can’t we just say there’s a difference of opinion and sit down and figure it out?) If you don’t want to read the article (I’ll get to the podcast in a minute), I’ll break it down. Wizards of the Coast has had an open game license on Dungeons and Dragons for 20 years. That’s 20 years of people being able to use their game system to create, play, modify, and sell their own content. Think about that for just a minute- that’s like Disney lending you their studio and letting you make your own Marvel movie and put it right out in the theater next to Ant Man 7, and you get all the profit for it.
Pretty freakin generous, right?
Now, the whole brouhaha is coming up from Wizards wanting to amend that license, with a draft being leaked to the public. There’s two major bones of contention here- that Wizards wants the outside content to be registered with them (so they can see to it no one’s publishing Nazis and Behemoths or Space Confederate Slavers go to Gor- modules with objectionable content that they don’t want affiliated with and potentially damaging their brand), and if the content creator makes over $750,000, they need to pay royalties on it, to the tune of 20-25%.
Cue the madness. Only it’s not madness, it’s very carefully orchestrated outrage… because the content creators that are making millions using Wizard’s rails don’t think it’s fair to have to pay that toll.
If you didn’t already, listen to the audio version of the article. Note the tugs on the heartstrings about how Wizards wants to take your world and your imagination and own it. And no one can do that! It’s not fair, it’s not right! We are victims here! And on. And on. And who’s speaking?
Linda Codega. Who just happens to earn her daily bread by writing for the gaming industry. Including all those content creators that were potentially going to need to cough up royalty payments. Maybe she has a vested interest? I find that far more likely than the idea that a professional journalist cannot maintain her composure through an interview with NPR.
And, of course, with all the outrage, Wizards walked it back. For now. The shipments will continue to run on the rails.. but ask yourself this… what incentive could Wizards possibly have to keep maintaining and improving those rails when everyone else will get to profit off them freely?
If you were a business owner, wouldn’t you let the rails do their thing and go build something new, away from the entitlement and controversy?
Yeah, me too.
Curiouser and Curiouser 