Ideas for GURPS Community Licensing
 

I branched this topic from What GURPS needs... now.

Yes, there truly is a lot of material that GURPS can use.

The bottleneck appears to lie with the availability of company resources or the aversion to high, market risk.

One solution appears to be opening up some kind of licensing for the community to absorb these risks.

I have been thinking about potential ways to make this more palatable to SJ Games in protecting their intellectual property.

What if SJ Games instituted a Tiered Community Conformation Scheme.

Tiers.

1. SJ Game Source Products
2. SJ Game Authorized Community Products (conforming to rules and style)
3. SJ Game Rules Compliant Products (conforming to official rules)
4. Community Products (least conformity)

It would be important and mandated as part of the licensing that each tier use a special logo or trade dress to indicate its fidelity to the SJ Games GURPS standard.

Obviously the closer you get to the top of this list the more "official" the product is. This would seem to help protect the intellectual property by allowing SJ Games to control the "legitimacy" of products that use GURPS rules.

It seems to me that there are three significant attributes (taken into account in the list above) in conforming to SJ Games standards.
1. Official rules adherence
2. Presentation style
3. Writing style

In order to ease the burden on company resources, could appointed boards of community members or MIBs voluntarily review products (of tiers 2 through 4) for conformity and then assign the appropriate tier badge?

Re: Ideas for GURPS Community Licensing
 

A simple question I'd ask is who edits and reviews community products to ensure such thungs maintain the high quality standard, both in writing quality and informational accuracy, that Steave Jackson Games is known for. This sort of thing demands dedicated SJGames staff, and hopefully appropriate playtesting and peer review to revise and test the products.

Now that said, nothing stops you from writing your own material as long as you don't reproduce copyrighted material or claim to be official. If you want to retain any roghts, just don't post the material on this forum and declare the license under which you are publishing.

Others can better speak to why SJGames doesn't take up your suggestions, probably.

Re: Ideas for GURPS Community Licensing
 

Other companies allow 3rd Party licensing and it doesn't diminish people's view of the quality of the parent companies' work.

If SJGames does all the play testing and peer review and quality control...then it is an SJGames product.

The suggestion is allowing for more 3rd party products. There is already precedent of third party products through Powered by GURPS...the suggestion is for ways to encourage more of such products.

Re: Ideas for GURPS Community Licensing
 

It works fine when you're a juggernaut behemoth monstrosity of a company that would hardly notice a quality failure any more than a giant would notice a gnat.

SJGames is not a juggernaut behemoth monstrosity of a company, and GURPS is not even a sizable portion of whatever size metaphor you want to give to SJGames. Quality failures wouldn't be gnats landing on a giant, they'd be bears landing on a mushroom cap.

But not-fully-in-house "Powered by GURPS" didn't go very far. And I've read GURPS Prime Directive. Ouch. I still have some residual blindness.

Re: Ideas for GURPS Community Licensing
 

There are companies other than Wizards who allow 3rd Party Licensing.

Apocalypse World is younger and smaller than SJGames...just made by two people, and their Powered by the Apocalypse has been great. And there are others who aren't behemoths that have done well including FATE.

Re: Ideas for GURPS Community Licensing
 

Apocalypse World itself isn't just smaller, it's *tiny.* They're overshadowed by their derivatives, and about as susceptible to quality control problems as WOTC, because they're not the target of attention.

FATE is a free game (Kickstarter notwithstanding). It can afford to not care about quality control. And like Apocalypse World, it is overshadowed by its derivatives, though not to the same extent.

Re: Ideas for GURPS Community Licensing
 

I would definitely support any effort towards improving community/3rd party licensing rules around GURPS. I think it would strongly improve GURPS' presence on the market, the same way video games with user created content support and mods are generally doing better than video games without any of that in terms of player engagement, sales, etc.

I'm not sure we about the "levels", however. Those would require some kind of investment from SJG to proof read, review, etc. community material in order to give those seals of approval, and I don't see that happening.

I can't think of anything else at this point besides just convincing somehow SJG to let people publish GURPS stuff on Warehouse23 or (oh my!) other stores like DTRPG. GURPS logos and official styles can be forbidden, and instead some alternate templates/logos can be provided so those products are never to be mistaken for "official" ones...