Good grief. Did idiot pills become standard issue at WotC/Hasbro?
Actually, it looks to me like a smart move. When the OGL was first created, the thinking was that adventures didn't sell enough volume to warrant the expense of Hasbro producing them and any third party adventures would just drive players into D&D and, thus, sell more core books.
But that paradigm isn't true with 1D&D. Now the product is subscriptions to a VTT app that will handle most of the rules anyway. So the only thing to drive customers to the VTT are well made adventures that fully support all the VTT features, such as interactive maps and pre-built monster tokens, as well as the possibility of new features, such as fully voice acted NPCs. Things that aren't possible for smaller game companies to compete with.
And removing the OGL won't create a new Pathfinder as smaller companies won't have the infrastructure to create a VTT to rival what Hasbro can produce. And if a rival VTT does shows up, Hasbro can just buy it out and import all their customers.
The goal of Hasbro isn't to maximize the number of people playing RPGs, but to maximize the number of people who pay the subscription fee.
I was concerned how 1D&D would handle homebrew and 3rd party content, but this is pointing to my most cynical outlook; it won’t. It'll be WOTC’s way or the highway.
Exactly. if a company wants to create an adventure for 1D&D, they will need to sign a contract with Hasbro and do what Hasbro tells them to do, including following all of Hasbro's diversity and inclusion guidelines and get their product approved by multiple Cultural Consultants.