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<blockquote data-quote="see" data-source="post: 7719491" data-attributes="member: 10531"><p>There are three problems comparing Asmodee to WotC here.</p><p></p><p>First, almost everything in US antitrust law is governed by the "rule of reason" and issues of market power. Which in practice means the larger your market share, the more things that will violate antitrust law; a (say) #3 company with 15% market share can do all sorts of things that would be illegal for (say) a market leader with 40%. So restrictions from the publisher of D&D are more likely to provoke antitrust issues than those of more niche games.</p><p></p><p>Second, smaller companies are much harder to successfully extract worthwhile damages from than larger ones. The bigger your market share, the higher the likely damages awarded; the bigger your company, the more likely you are to pay out the damages rather than go bankrupt. Both mean Hasbro (market cap $14.5 billion) is more likely to get threatened by a lawsuit by (say) Amazon than two-orders-of-magnitude-smaller Asmodee (implicit valuation around €0.14 billion, based on a 2013 investment); there's more likely to be a financial return on the expense of the lawsuit.</p><p></p><p>Third, it is quite likely that Hasbro and Asmodee evaluate the risks differently because Asmodee is fundamentally a European company, and European antitrust law is focused more on the health of businesses than the impact on consumers. Agreements restricting the rights of distributors and retailers and establishing minimum prices and the like are vastly more acceptable under European antitrust laws than US, and thus corporate culture is far less wary about imposing them. Add in that US culture tends to be more litigious than European, and there are lots of things a European company (especially one with few American lawyers) would be willing to tell a US subsidiary to do that a US company (especially one with a large legal department) would prohibit a division/subsidiary from doing.</p><p></p><p>Now, obviously, this is all speculative and amateur outsider estimation rather than insider knowledge. Maybe WotC could, in the case of D&D, copy Asmodee safely. But it's likely that Hasbro legal doesn't think that the health of FLGSes is remotely worth the legal risk, which would also explain why they'd prohibit WotC employees from talking about the issue.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="see, post: 7719491, member: 10531"] There are three problems comparing Asmodee to WotC here. First, almost everything in US antitrust law is governed by the "rule of reason" and issues of market power. Which in practice means the larger your market share, the more things that will violate antitrust law; a (say) #3 company with 15% market share can do all sorts of things that would be illegal for (say) a market leader with 40%. So restrictions from the publisher of D&D are more likely to provoke antitrust issues than those of more niche games. Second, smaller companies are much harder to successfully extract worthwhile damages from than larger ones. The bigger your market share, the higher the likely damages awarded; the bigger your company, the more likely you are to pay out the damages rather than go bankrupt. Both mean Hasbro (market cap $14.5 billion) is more likely to get threatened by a lawsuit by (say) Amazon than two-orders-of-magnitude-smaller Asmodee (implicit valuation around €0.14 billion, based on a 2013 investment); there's more likely to be a financial return on the expense of the lawsuit. Third, it is quite likely that Hasbro and Asmodee evaluate the risks differently because Asmodee is fundamentally a European company, and European antitrust law is focused more on the health of businesses than the impact on consumers. Agreements restricting the rights of distributors and retailers and establishing minimum prices and the like are vastly more acceptable under European antitrust laws than US, and thus corporate culture is far less wary about imposing them. Add in that US culture tends to be more litigious than European, and there are lots of things a European company (especially one with few American lawyers) would be willing to tell a US subsidiary to do that a US company (especially one with a large legal department) would prohibit a division/subsidiary from doing. Now, obviously, this is all speculative and amateur outsider estimation rather than insider knowledge. Maybe WotC could, in the case of D&D, copy Asmodee safely. But it's likely that Hasbro legal doesn't think that the health of FLGSes is remotely worth the legal risk, which would also explain why they'd prohibit WotC employees from talking about the issue. [/QUOTE]
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