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<blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7783734" data-attributes="member: 6873517"><p>Yeah, and Gary for all his flaws, seemed to be a fairly savvy businessman. Still, it's a very difficult thing to scale a company up from small to medium sized and, from what I've heard of folks who run companies, one reason it's so hard is that you're always only a few bad decisions away from disaster, especially if your expenses are high, which, evidently, was what happened at '90s TSR. </p><p> </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I think it's really important not to let hindsight bias creep in. TSR certainly made a number of bad decisions and seemed to have truly messy internal politics, but that can often describe many organizations. I do suspect that being owned by Hasbro provides a lot of external discipline that, being privately held, TSR clearly lacked. However, 4E rollout was pretty nasty and I suspect that by 2011 the powers that be in Hasbro were more or less saying "do or die". A priori it's hard to know that 5E would be as much of a success as it has been. I doubt, for instance, that anyone was thinking about streaming live play seriously then, for instance. (To be clear, I actually don't care about all the social media hype and the like, but I'm pretty old skool and part of a demographic that WotC doesn't really care about.) The real test of an organization is during a downturn, though, so... we'll see how it goes when that comes.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Jay Verkuilen, post: 7783734, member: 6873517"] Yeah, and Gary for all his flaws, seemed to be a fairly savvy businessman. Still, it's a very difficult thing to scale a company up from small to medium sized and, from what I've heard of folks who run companies, one reason it's so hard is that you're always only a few bad decisions away from disaster, especially if your expenses are high, which, evidently, was what happened at '90s TSR. I think it's really important not to let hindsight bias creep in. TSR certainly made a number of bad decisions and seemed to have truly messy internal politics, but that can often describe many organizations. I do suspect that being owned by Hasbro provides a lot of external discipline that, being privately held, TSR clearly lacked. However, 4E rollout was pretty nasty and I suspect that by 2011 the powers that be in Hasbro were more or less saying "do or die". A priori it's hard to know that 5E would be as much of a success as it has been. I doubt, for instance, that anyone was thinking about streaming live play seriously then, for instance. (To be clear, I actually don't care about all the social media hype and the like, but I'm pretty old skool and part of a demographic that WotC doesn't really care about.) The real test of an organization is during a downturn, though, so... we'll see how it goes when that comes. [/QUOTE]
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