DUNGEONS & DRAGONS Fans Launch D&D Beyond Cancellation Campaign and Crash The Site Following Backlash
Wizards of the Coast sure have f-ed up with their planned changes to the Open Gaming License for Dungeons & Dragons, which allows creators and publishers to use the rules and ideas of the fantasy roleplaying game in their own works. Fans and creators are pissed off and they’re fighting back.
A couple of days ago an open letter was released called “OpenDND” condemning the license rules claiming that it will "dismantle the entire RPG industry." That letter now has over 66,000 signatures. The letter asks for D&D studio Wizards of the Coast to "revoke the draconian 1.1 OGL and pledge to support the existing 1.0 OGL into future editions of their games."
We’re seeing more of a backlash as fans have launched a campaign to cancel their D&D Beyond subscriptions. So many people flooded the page to cancel their memberships that it crashed their page and at one point displayed a "500 Internal Server Error".
The D&D Beyond canceling campaign started after an email from a reported Wizards of the Coast employee leaked and was shared by YouTube and TikTok user DnD_Shorts. That email claimed that management was looking at D&D Beyond memberships and cancellations because "it is the quickest financial data they currently have.”
Popular D&D personality Ginny Di also jumped in to push back against the license changes revealing that she canceled her D&D Beyond and suggested other fans do the same. There are a ton of replies and quote tweets claiming to have done the same.
According to io9, this fan backlash has already caused Wizards of the Coast to cancel an announcement about its updated Open Gaming License for a second time this week. Sources at Wizards of the Coast say “the company is scrambling to formulate a response to backlash against the new OGL.”
The report goes on to say that "these cancellations and their impact on the bottom line of Wizards of the Coast is not negligible, according to io9's sources at the company, and has caused upper management to scramble to adjust their messaging around the situation, leading to the delays in the [new Open Game License] release."
Before this, DnD_Shorts' tweet suggested that upper management blamed the community for "over-reacting." Wizards of the Coast has lost the trust of the fans. They sure didn’t think their decision through and now its costing them.