rogueattorney
Adventurer
The producer-consumer dynamic within the rpg hobby is beyond dysfunctional, but placing that entirely at the feet of the "mean" consumer is only seeing half the picture.
Essentially - to borrow an analogy made in the comments to the article - rpg companies are trying to sell a bunch of finished paintings to a bunch of painters instead of trying to sell brushes and paints. When the painters complain, the general reply from the company is, "Your paintings suck, use ours instead." So, a big portion of the hobby thinks that their own paintings do indeed suck, another portion reacts to every new painting as if they're personally insulted, and another big portion paints over small bits of the producers' pictures and puts the end result up on the Internet with varying reactions from the producers.
The truth is, there is a much more blurry line between rpg game makers and rpg game consumers than between, say comic book makers and readers, or video game makers and players, or movie producers and watchers. Failure to admit so puts the producer at risk of alienating one's customers, while admitting so underlines the producers' own lack of importance to the hobby.
Personally, on the consumer side of things, I think that there is way too much of a conception within our hobby that in order to support the hobby, we need to support the industry by buying product. Rather, I believe gamers' resources will often be much more well-spent by contributing to community building "products" (game clubs, cons, web-sites like this one, etc.) that make the hobby more available to the community. (And I fully realize that this final point is not contrary to, and in some ways agrees with, the article in the original post.)
Essentially - to borrow an analogy made in the comments to the article - rpg companies are trying to sell a bunch of finished paintings to a bunch of painters instead of trying to sell brushes and paints. When the painters complain, the general reply from the company is, "Your paintings suck, use ours instead." So, a big portion of the hobby thinks that their own paintings do indeed suck, another portion reacts to every new painting as if they're personally insulted, and another big portion paints over small bits of the producers' pictures and puts the end result up on the Internet with varying reactions from the producers.
The truth is, there is a much more blurry line between rpg game makers and rpg game consumers than between, say comic book makers and readers, or video game makers and players, or movie producers and watchers. Failure to admit so puts the producer at risk of alienating one's customers, while admitting so underlines the producers' own lack of importance to the hobby.
Personally, on the consumer side of things, I think that there is way too much of a conception within our hobby that in order to support the hobby, we need to support the industry by buying product. Rather, I believe gamers' resources will often be much more well-spent by contributing to community building "products" (game clubs, cons, web-sites like this one, etc.) that make the hobby more available to the community. (And I fully realize that this final point is not contrary to, and in some ways agrees with, the article in the original post.)