Blurgate and the Two Year Anniversary of the OGL
Two years to the day this was published.
I also forgot to mention Blur-gate when I did my one-year retrospective.
This week we also saw new D&D electronic gambling branding (and a pretty cool pinball machine).
I think we can learn from all of these things at once. Thinking back six months on Blur-gate and on other big controversies WOTC has had, there feels like there's one central problem:
Communication inside WOTC was (and probably is) a mess. This was super clear in the discussions about how the OGL fiasco happened. It was clear at the 2023 summit. A lot of their issues like AI art, AI marketing, the Pinkertons, blur-gate – these things all make sense when you assume that different people in WOTC just aren't talking. The WOTC design team says no to AI, the CEO says "whoo boy" on AI.
Plenty of people inside WOTC knew how bad the OGL thing was going to be but someone else managed to push it outside of the building.
It was clear that the influencer team wanted us Youtubers to promote the PHB but some risk team freaked out when they saw a PDF of screenshots. That could have been a conversation before it ever left the building numerous times at numerous stages and instead, they hurt their reputation among their biggest outside megaphones.
The wrong people making the wrong decisions without talking to the right people who know what those decisions will result in accounts for a lot of the stuff we've seen. Firing their D&D creator liaison folks doesn't seem like a great way to fix this problem.
So what can GMs get from this? Expect continued chaos out of WOTC. Don't expect them to behave rationally – even for their own for-profit interest. Weird stuff is going to happen.
That said, they've done a lot of great stuff in the past two years:
But we shouldn't expect them to behave rationally. That's why I think its always good to keep an eye on them and keep our love of the hobby separate from the actions of WOTC as much as we can.
We can be fans of RPGs, we can be fans of 5e, we can be fans of D&D without having to trust WOTC to behave rationally or for the continued benefit of the larger RPG hobby.
