This feels a bit detached from the world. All companies are "greedy". Acting like WotC is special in this regard is strange. I am sure if you look at the companies from which you buy stuff in your daily life, you will find companies being much much more greedy than both WotC and Paizo.
No, what I'm doing is
acknowledging reality and the world.
At the end of the day, Wizards could have grown their business more sustainably without destroying the community built up around it in search of a faster buck. They did not make that choice. Instead they made ridiculous profit projections and then looked to try and make them a reality. That's greed. Maximizing profits in the short term without thought of the cost in the long-term is
exactly that.
And who cares if other companies are greedier? That doesn't suddenly excuse
this. The problem we have is that whenever someone does something like this people say "Well, it has to be this way!" and just normalizes it further, rather than saying "We shouldn't have to accept this". We successfully push back against these things and then self-neuter it by excusing the behavior with "Well, they were just doing what they had to".
No, they didn't. They were making profits and growing before they did this just fine. It was the desire for "
too much, too quick" is what did this.
Paizo and WotC show their greed in various ways. Paizo's pay for artists and freelancers are known to be quite low in the industry. Why? Because of greed. WotC show their greed in other ways. I am not sure one is "better" than the other. Why? Because they are both companies. Granted WotC is a publicly traded one of the sort (or part of one anyway), and thus their greed might be more open and clear (which actually might not be a bad thing IMO).
This is just a whole bunch of whataboutism. Yes, Paizo can do greedy things. Who the hell cares? We're in a thread that is about Wizards.
Obviously you do yo and fight "the battle". But if what you want in life is to push back on greedy companies, there are much much much better places to spend your time than the company that makes a dragon game (cloth companies, Apple, etc.). I know you can be concerned about more than one thing in life, but man it feels so "partisan" and PF-fan like mentality.
I can do multiple things at once, amazingly enough. There are multiple companies I try not to do business with when I can because of their ethics problems. Acting like it's impossible is just sad.
Also being angry at greedy, industry-harming actions is a "PF-fan" thing? Like, I didn't make this partisan and I criticized Paizo when they did stupid s****. It was only them unionizing that got me back to them. The only people mentioning Paizo are the people who don't want to talk about what Wizards did in the first place.
So, this doesn't hang together well at all.
Traps work due to the element of surprise. Traps are easily avoided if they are "screamingly obvious". If I put up an electric fence with signs saying, "WARNING: 40,000 VOLTS!" that fence is not a trap, it is a hazard.
I mean, colloquially a trap can just be a decision where you are harmed by both outcomes despite it seeming benign, which is what I assume the intent was.
Putting up something harmful, but screamingly obvious, is not an attempt to destroy, it is an attempt to scare away.
Wizards didn't put up a warning sign, though. I mean, I thought we were getting away from overwrought metaphors, but the area they are putting the sign up on was occupied safely by a bunch of people. The OGL wasn't a sign, it was an ultimatum to people to either get the hell out or abide by new, very strict and disadvantageous rules.
