Things to take into consideration before publishing on DMsG
Mike Myler articulated my thoughts on this better than I could.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike Myler
DMs Guild, You, and what it means for D&D and RPGS:
1) You do not retain ownership of your content, when you publish it there it becomes Intellectual Property of the DMsGuild. Review the contract and identify how many rights of ownership you keep (hint: it's 2 very minor parts).
2) There is no incentive for real publishers to do stuff there because of #1 and because they take 50% of gross instead of 35%. The margins on publishing are already way too tight to give up another 15% especially when it means it can be sold nowhere else at all, which cuts out revenue from places like Open Gaming Store and Paizo.com. It is really hard to make it work for local game stores using the regular model, and this 50% stuff literally makes that mathematically impossible (and btw it's illegal because your friendly local game store is not DMsGuild).
3) Whatever value being able to use D&D art had, that's evaporated because all of DM's Guild uses it so the "wow" factor has been stripped away.
4) Because they "take writers from DMs Guild", there's a "notice me senpai!!" attitude that dropped the price floor from out of everything. Not only are your sales hit by that 50% take, you can't sell products for anything approaching a fair price (in this, your only venue).
5) There's more to this (WotC abandoning major conventions, dropping forums, having FB groups "moderate" the fan community, bumbling Adventurer's League and handing it off to a third party; the list gets upsetting) but basically Hasbro is terrified of another Paizo happening (ie: another company making a better version of D&D then outselling them for 10 years the way Pathfinder did after 4E fell on its face) and they can't NOT address it because the way US law works (you can copyright game text and terminology but not mechanics, and the d20 3.0 & 3.5 System Reference Documents make it theoretically possible to transfer material between editions under the Open Gaming License).
Their solution to that has been to point everyone to the "official D&D Marketplace" and make that marketplace as hostile as possible to anyone that could become a future competitor. Even WotC's partnering publishers have few if any products on there, I suspect as a gesture made for their work on core line adventure books.
Raising the industry with one hand and slapping at it with the other.
I'm posting this because of a logo clarification that they just made earlier today. The ONLY logo you can have on your cover is the DMsG logo.
https://www.enworld.org/forum/conten...Product-Covers
Edit: About Fantasy Grounds. "FG logo is allowed on FG titles, we’re going to add a section to the FAQ linking to the FG section of the FAQ and clarifying that."