But a former WotC high level exec has said on social media that in his opinion as a lawyer WotC has gone too far here and will likely lose any legal challenge. In his view, WotC can create new rules for their license going forward, but cannot unilaterally and retroactively take away the OGL 1.0 license from anyone who's been using it for years to create their own content. I'm guessing Paizo is currently having a bunch of lawyers going over these very issues before they will comment.
Makes sense. You shouldn't be able to retroactively revoke an agreement, especially when the agreement had the words "perpetual...license." I guess the muddying factor here is that there was never a signed agreement between two parties, just a statement from one saying "it's fine to use our stuff." At least Paizo has gotten big enough to be able to fight back.
Originally Posted by kanisatha
But regardless, just the very act of WotC trying to do these things makes them huge a--holes. In fact, in their own public statements they acknowledge that they could potentially have a PR problem from all of this. So they know what they're doing is wrong. But they're looking for a way to get away with it. [...] So at a minimum, WotC cancelled these games but didn't even bother to tell those studios about it first, and made it so they learn about it from the press. I hope the entire gaming industry will now blacklist WotC/Hasbro from all future ventures.
Yup.
Perhaps this is part of the new trend for companies to initially put out something absolutely terrible -> public gets outraged -> company "fixes" their problem and is thus looked on more favorably than they would be had they just released something decent originally (my conspiracy theory regarding the Sonic movie.)
Alternatively, it's part of the trend for companies to try to do things as shittily/greedily as possible, and will only backtrack if public outrage is high enough (e.g., NFTs).
