Wankers By The Beach now has former Microsoft executives running the company. Corporate fuckery has ensued because Hasbro, the parent company, got marked down from Hold to Sell by Wall Street and that means the ex-MS executives got told to do their Beast Rabban impression.
People are panicking despite Wankers' legal position being weaker than wet tissue paper. Those corporate coffers aren't as full as you think, not if Wankers has been keeping Hasbro afloat all these years.
Wankers is using fear of a corporate Fabian Strategy like a certain imperial officer used fear of a Weapon of Mass Destruction at one time, but Wankers may not be able to make good on that bluff.
I am telling you people that are affected to stop being cowards and prepare for lawfare. You know full well, ahead of time, what Wankers' position is; if you can't (a) pick a favorable jurisdiction and (b) craft a better argument that (c) includes Ryan Dancey's testimony under oath about the OGL and his role at Wankers in committing the company to his intention for the OGL along with 20+ years of having no issue with this, then you deserve to get wrecked because this is the easiest win that can be had. Just. Show. Up.
We're talking "Win on the first pass" levels of easy.
"But the costs!"
Go as a pauper. When you win--and you will--bend Wankers over for all that you can get. That includes a formal disavowal by Wankers of their position in a perpetual and irrevocable manner, and a forbidding of reprisal by any party by any means to forestall retaliatory deplatforming/debanking/etc.
But wait, I'm not done.
No doubt that some future corporate leadership will, despite this, get it into their heads that they can totally roll that boulder up the hill that Sissyphus can't.
What you do to prevent this is to exploit the same legal fuckery that Microsoft uses to avoid taxes and other forms of accountability legally (because they lobbied for it) against them. In other words, do a Panama Papers routine- something now available to we plebs.
(Note to the channel's owners: nothing came of it.)
You do not need to be where your business is. Neither you nor your business needs to be where you (or it) do your banking. You can use this structure to publish under OGL 1.0 no matter what Wankers says if you erect structures in the right places.
"That looks complex and time-consuming."
Good thing you have friendly folks with time on their hands, don't you?
Once you know what structure you'd need, the second step is to establish where to erect each component. Some parts you could do yourself; for others, get help. In turn, you may be asked to help others do the same where you are. (Yes, you expect to pay, and be paid, for this; this is basic Agent-Principle work.)
The end goal is to (a) keep making what you've been making as you made it and (b) get paid to do so. The consequence of this structure is that your ability to do this is complicated significantly; the benefit is that you are not bowing down to a corporate bully that's taking your lunch money and kicking you out of your house.
Or you could just give up and give Wankers what they want, but then you'd be proving that you don't value what you say you do.
Follow my lead and Wankers can go pound sand because they can't serve a publisher or storefront that they can't reach and that's what this structure is designed to do: exploit the international reach of the Internet by ensuring that where certain operations are done are No Go Zones for such actions. (Wankers, for example, will find it impossible to enforce their OGL position on a Moscow or Shanghai-based publisher.)
Wankers is hostile to you and yours. Return that hostility. Destroy them by any means necessary.
"But the costs!" Go as a pauper. - Not viable.
ReplyDeleteThe threat of Lawfare is real.
WotC can bury you in motions that you must answer or risk losing by default, and drag things out for years.
Unless you are an attorney that is willing to do this for the LOLZ in your free time, the cost of onerous legal fees can drag you down.
> Not Viable
Delete> Ignores the amount of case law proving otherwise.
Listen not to those claiming defeat before the fighting has even begun. There's a reason Gamma genocide is the preferred method.
It's also clear that Wes has not read the rest of the post. They're going to kill themselves (Wizards) if they think restricting themselves to America alone, collapsing due to economic issues on the macro end and accelerating atomization on the pop culture end, where various little sub communities uniting is the only reason thing propping up houses of cards like modern d&d and the Wizards titanic.
That said, while I disagree with the blackpilling, I do agree with Alexander's move of creating a superior Autarch alternative to the OGL. Build your own stuff, frig, build your own institutions if you have to. This should be basic knowledge if you've read SJWs Always Lie.
DeleteBradford,
ReplyDeleteIf there's another group of people, after the woke, who need gatekeeping from anywhere, are ex MS execs. They kill off innovation and live off the stagnation. They'll do the same with RPGs if allowed to.
xavier
Xavier, as I am posting this response days after the fact, events show that they are already aiming to do just that.
DeleteNot by making it impossible in a literal sense, but by throwing the medium back into the ghetto it once was confined to- and, maybe from there, choking it off entirely.