I find these things all the time online, things that are just stupid, but they don’t warrant an extended response, nor are they in the wheelhouse to make a video about. I want to say something but it’s hardly worth my time to do so.
This is one of those things which will probably blow up into a full-length response, but there you go. Details below the fold.
So this showed up in my Reddit feed today. The link to the whole discussion is here, but I’ll quote the initial bit.
I’m gay, but WotC is not my ally!
They can site all sorts of reasons why they want a new OGL and I, as a member of the LGBT community, refuse to accept the idea that they did it to prevent harmful material anti-LGBT content in the industry.
First off, there’s a lot of background behind this that most people won’t understand. Wizards of the Coast (WotC), the company that owns Dungeons & Dragons, in the past week or so, has ruffled a lot of feathers by attempting to change the gaming license that it’s had with fans for decades, into something designed solely to give them money for work they didn’t do. Under the new agreement, supposedly since the final version hasn’t been released, they will be able to take things they didn’t produce, claim it as their own, monetize it for their own benefit, steal characters that use “names” that they own in online games, shut down or take control of online podcasts or YouTube channels that stream people playing their game, etc. It’s been a mess and legally, there’s a lot of questions whether they could do any of this if they wanted to. That’s a matter for lawyers, not bloggers though, so we’ll skip past that.
What has come up is that the new license gives WotC the ability to shut down people who, according to recent statements, use their game to produce hate-filled content. They say “When we initially conceived of revising the OGL, it was with three major goals in mind. First, we wanted the ability to prevent the use of D&D content from being included in hateful and discriminatory products.” This raises a lot of questions, but it isn’t what a lot of people would like to think that it is. It doesn’t make WotC your friend. It’s pandering to the modern “#metoo” nonsense, whereby a company tries to distance themselves from socially unacceptable content that would harm their brand, by pretending they’re on the side of marginalized, downtrodden minorities.
They are not.
The only thing WotC cares about is money. It’s all any company cares about. In fact, given the fact that company insiders have revealed that the executives consider anyone who disagrees with them an obstacle between them and the money that they consider theirs, that just so happens to currently reside in your wallet, proves that conclusively.
No company gives a crap about you or your cause. It’s all a marketing ploy. It’s just an excuse for them to spend once month a year sticking rainbows all over their products so that you will go and buy more of it. That’s it. If you thought that they cared about you, you’re stupider than I thought.
Of course, this produces a massive discussion about how terrible WotC is, they’ve made a lot of enemies in the past couple of months, because they’re somehow part of a grand conspiracy to wipe out pro-gay material or some crap like that. Yes, if this was the 1950s, they’d probably do that because it would harm their bottom line to allow it to exist at all. Today though, it’s unlikely, but these morons can only think in terms of their feelings. They don’t know how business works. They don’t care about businesses making money so they can continue to produce more product. In fact, they tend to oppose that because these closet communists are morons. They just want their fee-fees coddled and that’s not how the real world works.
This is why these people are such laughable jokes. No company is your friend. They are all only concerned with their bottom line. Welcome to reality.