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It is not the same. D&D fans can of course shit on WotC and Hasbro, but they would still be D&D fans in the end of day even if changes were not reverted. Fans can't just go and become fans of "free and open source D&D".

Individual people are weak and not rational. Majority will always continue to pay for entertainment companies products and bring money no matter how bad they treated by said companies. Think of Disney or Electronic Arts games.

Unity Technologies is a B2B software and service provider. Their decision to do a rag pull under 10,000+ of businesses will force everyone in industry to diversify. Unity not going under anytime soon, but now every single CEO and CTO in gamedev will be doing research on alternatives simply because pricing Unity come up with is not viable for a lot of games.



It's a lot easier, I think, to switch from D&D 5E to Pathfinder 2e than it is to switch from Unity to Unreal/Godot or whatever. The stakes are a lot lower, that's for sure.


Yeah you can switch to Pathfinder, but you wont just forget about D&D existence and there still gonna be tons of friends unaware of drama who prefer D&D. Like there is still tons of Star Wars fans who continue bring money to Disney even though they might hate the company.

At the same time gamedev business is still a business and Unity is now unreliable supplier. Today we are lucky, but their ToS and fee changes could literally kill my company overnight in slightly different circumstances. Businesses that not mitigate risks like this go bankrupt really fast so no one sane will ever trust Unity after this rug pull.


The stakes are lower and I think that's why these companies get away with it with consumers. Many consumers will never know as long as it doesn't hit them with a paywall. But when serving other businesses, they know and will NOT forget (because they will literally be hit with a paywall).


You're talking about the consumers, and you're 100% right in regards to them. But you seem to be equating D&D fans to the game studios, and I see that as a false equivalency.

Consumers of Unity games == consumers of D&D

Companies based on the OGL == Companies based on Unity license

WotC/Hasbro == Unity

D&D consumers =/= companies based on Unity license

In both cases, a large corporation (WotC/Hasboro, Unity) captured the space with promises that their platform would be free to use in perpetuity. In both cases, smaller companies were built around this garuntee; they naively thought that in perpetuity meant in perpetuity. In both cases, these smaller companies that popped up grew the large corporations to what they are today.

In both cases, the corporation tried to sneakily revoke the older agreements to trick these smaller companies into a terrible deal. In both scenarios, the corporation displayed rent-seeking behavior and proposed changes that would destroy the companies that helped them become what they are today.

> Fans can't just go and become fans of "free and open source D&D"

Not sure what you mean by this, but my friends and I are and always have been fans of "free and open source D&D" because that's literally what D&D has always been. That's why so many were angry with the OGL changes; thats why the OGL changes got dropped. And, once Hasboro tipped their hand, many did transition to free and open source tabletop games that respect their third party creators and consumers alike https://www.polygon.com/23587624/non-dnd-dungeons-dragons-og...


To clarify my analogy: D&D == gaming, WotC/OGL == Unity, Pathfinder == Unreal. You can still work in the "gaming" domain, but switch from Unity to Unreal. Similar to how some D&D tabletop studios are switching from OGL to Pathfinder while staying in "D&D" domain.




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