• glimse@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Full disclosure: I’ve never played dungeons and dragons so I’m probably not the best person to ask, I’ve just kinda followed the story after playing bg3

    My understanding is that since its creation, DnD has been “open source.” Anyone could make content for the game…like campaigns and maps and stuff and it was fine. A lot of people credited that policy with the success and proliferation of the game - I don’t know if it’s true but I believe it since a lot of my exposure to it has been creative projects.

    Last year, Hasbro (who owns Wizards of The Coast who owns DnD and Magic: The Gathering) was going to change* that policy so they get a cut of the sale of said content. Pretty much everyone hated this and it got walked back.

    • I do not remember if they SAID they were changing it, a memo got leaked, or a fake memo got leaked. So they might not have “walked it back” so much as confirmed that the policy was not changing
      • glimse@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        I dunno, a corporation taking a huge open source project and putting a pricetag on it feels kind of bad to me. I don’t care that they have a fee for licensing to big companies (which they had already) but the policy change would have been a big deal for small or independent creators

        • ampersandrew@kbin.social
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          5 months ago

          Yeah, but I’m not going to hold it against them when they backed out on it. I would not be playing Street Fighter 6 right now if Capcom went through with their initial licensing changes, but for similar reasons, they didn’t. So for now, it’s cool. In situations like this though, you just have to be ready to leave at the drop of a hat if they misbehave.

          • glimse@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Fair enough. I think it’s reasonable that people were rubbed the wrong way that Hasbro even considered it