The Business of Games

The Open Gaming License sort of mixes Open Source and Creative Commons-style licensing with the roleplaying industry. Think what you want of it, but it definitely helped ease the way for POD/POCD and PDF sales. I found a good op-ed piece over on the Pinnacle forums where Shane Lacy Hensley posits that the OGL has destroyed the game industry. By extension, this includes everything d20 as well. You can read some good insights from a traditional publisher's standpoint.

In the same vein as traditional publishing, I stumbled across a great/horrible doom-and-gloom, 21-page dirty laundry thread over on RPG.net called "Insane Tales of the Gaming Industry." This is a small industry, mostly of amateurs. You can hear some scary stories if you dig.

To end on a high note: USA Today, that paragon of journalism, has an article on the creators of Cranium. There's a bit of the Trivial Pursuit road-to-fame story here, but you know I'm envious of these guys. There's some good ideas to take away from this story; in fact, all of three of these have nuggets of knowledge to assimilate.