There's definitely a degree to which controversy IS free advertising, but by '84 D&D sales were tanking by comparison with those boom years, and while some of it was no doubt market saturation and the challenge of people learning to play, the satanic panic does seem to have done real damage too. I think Gygax did pretty well in his famous
appearance on 60 Minutes in '85, but Ed Bradley and company elevated Pat Pulling's nonsense and Thomas Radecki's fraud to equal status with reality, on one of the most watched shows in the country, and gave those lies an unwelcome appearance of credibility.