A few questions about using OA in a commercial product

[jedidia]

For a detailed rundown of all this, in full formal legalese, you can see our Terms and Conditions page, although it sounds like you've already read it

I have indeed, though apparently I failed to grok the most important part:

they can contact the Managing Board (Rynn, Steve, and myself are all members) and the Board can grant them permission to use the ideas/concepts/whatever.

That's great, I totally hadn't realised that. Knowing that there's a central authority to negotiate with pretty much alleviates all concerns I had.

Applying the above to what you've described so far, I see a couple of ways of approaching this. In no particular order:

1) You explicitly set the game inside the OA universe (making it OA Canon compliant as part of that), and market it as such

It would definitely take that direction, though I'm not sure about an inclusion in the title, mostly for aesthetic reasons (long titles... ugh). But that's details of minor concern for a time in the hopefully plausible mid-future... So far this thing doesn't even have a real name yet

If the game takes off and becomes a multi-million dollar franchise

Ha, I wish!

Hope this helps

Yes, this helps a lot. Thank you very much!