I wrote the first version of this piece in May 2024, right after Wizards of the Coast walked back the OGL 1.1 changes. The original reporting below is mostly untouched, because it held up. Here’s what’s happened since. Three years on, the short version is: it got worse before anyone tried to make it better.
The OGL Fight, in Brief
The Open Gaming License has let independent publishers build D&D-compatible content since 2000, without going through Wizards of the Coast first. In late 2022 and early 2023, WotC tried to rewrite it. The new terms proposed royalties above a revenue threshold and approval rights over third-party content. Worse, the language raised real fears about invalidating agreements creators had already built businesses on.
The backlash was immediate and it was loud. Over 15,000 survey responses came in, something like 90% opposed to any change. People cancelled subscriptions. Creators threatened boycotts. Weeks of sustained public pressure followed. WotC caved. OGL 1.0 stayed in place, the SRD 5.1 went under Creative Commons, and the company promised more transparency going forward.
Third-party creators had already proven what they were worth before any of that happened. Kobold Press built Midgard into one of the richest settings outside official D&D. Goodman Games kept old-school adventure design alive through Dungeon Crawl Classics. MCDM Productions wrote the stronghold-and-followers rules WotC never got around to. The license made that possible. Wizards didn’t have to ask for it.
The fight also pushed some of the biggest names in the space toward building their own systems, so they wouldn’t be dependent on WotC’s terms again. MCDM’s own game. DC20. Critical Role’s Daggerheart. All three exist partly because that trust broke once already.
Sigil: A Very Expensive, Very Fast Collapse
Project Sigil was unveiled at GenCon 2024 as WotC’s answer to the virtual tabletop boom: a fully 3D VTT, pitched hard at Baldur’s Gate 3 players. That was a strange bet from the start. What made BG3 work wasn’t that it rendered in 3D. It was Larian’s writing and systems design. WotC seemed to learn the wrong lesson from someone else’s success.
Alpha landed in September 2024. Full release came in February 2025, with a limited feature set and a rough reception. Bugs. Usability complaints. A tool that didn’t do enough yet to earn the ambition behind it.
Three weeks later, WotC laid off roughly 90% of the Sigil team. Senior writer Andy Collins. VFX artist Eben Bradstreet. Community manager Chung Ng. Gone, along with most of the people who’d built it. Dixon Dubow, the D&D Creator Relations Manager (the person third-party creators actually talked to) was let go in the same round. That detail matters for what comes next in this piece.
Sigil limped along afterward, officially alive but effectively frozen. Wizards has now confirmed development is over for good. The servers shut down October 31, 2026. Anyone who bought a Master Tier subscription in the last six months gets a six-month credit. That’s the whole payout for an idea that got a GenCon keynote sixteen months earlier.
What Replaced the People Who Got Let Go
Here’s the part I’ll just lay out in order. The timeline does the work on its own.
March 2025: WotC lays off most of an internal creative team, including the person who managed third-party creator relationships. Later that year, Wizards announces an expanded slate of official third-party publishing partners for the D&D Beyond Marketplace (Kobold Press, Free League, MCDM, Ghostfire Gaming, Hit Point Press, and others), plus new official Forgotten Realms adventures written by Kobold Press. The stated reason, in the coverage at the time, was simple: the internal team couldn’t keep up with demand.
Wizards never said the quiet part out loud. Nobody in that position ever does. But an internal team got cut, and the resulting gap got filled by licensing the work out instead of hiring back in. Make of that what you will. I already have.
The Union
The most concrete answer to how the fallout actually landed happened this year. Magic: The Gathering Arena staff at Wizards of the Coast filed for a union election with the NLRB in April 2026. They voted June 2nd. It wasn’t close: 79 to 16, about 83% in favor. United Wizards of the Coast (UWOTC-CWA) announced the result on June 23rd. WotC accepted it.
The organizing drive cited pay, return-to-office mandates, mandatory crunch, and layoffs. It also cited fear of AI displacing creative and development work. That fear is the same one every artist I know has been sitting with for two years now, just voiced this time by people on the inside instead of freelancers on the outside.
What This Actually Means for Fantasy Art
I make my living drawing the characters people play at these tables, so here’s the part that’s mine to say. None of this is unique to Wizards. Cut the internal team. Route the work outward. Let “third-party partnership” do the PR work that “layoff” can’t. That’s the pattern at every publisher with a big enough back catalog to license instead of a big enough budget to keep paying the people who built it.
For working artists, that shows up two ways. The direct way: fewer staff positions, more piecework, harder competition for licensing slots that used to be full-time jobs. The quieter way, and the worse one: growing pressure to accept AI-generated art as good enough, because it’s free and a layoff isn’t.
A union vote at a Magic the Gathering studio and a freelancer drawing someone’s tiefling bard look far apart. They’re not. Kobold Press didn’t need a licensing deal to make Midgard good. MCDM didn’t need WotC’s blessing to write rules worth using. Neither of them needed permission. They needed the work to be worth doing, and they did it anyway.
For Anyone Who Actually Made It This Far
Not many people read a three-year retrospective on licensing drama and a dead virtual tabletop all the way to the end. If you did, you’re exactly who I wrote this article for.
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