D&D General The $150,000 Question: How TSR Learned It Was Dying (And Why I Was in the Room) by Ken "Whit" Whitman

Yeah, I was going to mention GW doing gangbusters pumping and dumping customers, but someone beat me to it.
Also, TSR put out a LOT of adventures in 2E - the problem was they weren't "generic" but had big banners tying them to different campaign worlds. If you didn't play XYZ campaign world, you didn't pick it up. 3E, under WotC, was probably the edition that had the fewest adventures put out; most adventures in that time came from 3rd party publishers.

Stormonu said:

Yeah, I was going to mention GW doing gangbusters pumping and dumping customers, but someone beat me to it.
Also, TSR put out a LOT of adventures in 2E - the problem was they weren't "generic" but had big banners tying them to different campaign worlds. If you didn't play XYZ campaign world, you didn't pick it up. 3E, under WotC, was probably the edition that had the fewest adventures put out; most adventures in that time came from 3rd party publishers.

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Depends how you count Dungeon Magazine.

Lanefan said:

All that says is that you need to plan your sustainable business model based on those long-tail numbers rather than on short unsustainable sales bursts.

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Survive in a market that is no longer yours, the way, say a Green Ronin does today, possibly, but you are not going to be a major player in it, just one of many small companies eking out a living…

The long tail does not look like you are in a position to keep the employees you needed to create the products for the short tail burst.

So you need to keep churning out material with them that you hope will also have a short sales cycle in which it recoups the investment, followed by a long tail that is not enough to keep the lights on.

Have some missteps along the way, where you do not manage to recoup the investment, and you are out of business or have to drastically downsize to survive. Maybe the company can squeeze by on new print runs of old material, but the ability to create new material will be drastically reduced and the market dominance is over.

MGibster said:

In the early days, long before Whitman arrived, I think there was a little bit of resentment from Gygax and TSR in general towards other companies producing RPGs. i.e. These companies dared to compete in a market created by TSR with their inferior imitations of D&D.

I'm not a market analyst, nor am I an expert in RPGs marketing. It does seem to me that there's a shelf life for D&D for the majority of people who play it. That doesn't apply to most of us who participate on this message board. Quite frankly, we're weirdos in many regards (in the best possible way). I think most people play D&D for a few year and then they move on to other things. Those of us who have been playing for decades are probably oddities.

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It is true that some people only play for a few short years because they play in high school and college, after that life gets in the way. It sort of happened for me - there were several years after college I didn't play because I never really found a group interested and I was busy with career and what-not. It wasn't that I burned out though, it was just lack of opportunities. But there are still a significant number of people who continue to play for years on end as adults, especially those that don't have kids or who's kids are older and more self-reliant.

In any case the argument that you have to retain customers in order to maintain the business is just silly because a major target audience will always be high school and college kids. Those customers will buy all those books and modules you can just keep printing years after the work on them was done. It's not the only target audience but the idea that you're going to "run out" of customers simply makes no sense. People who have played a long time only need a module or two now and then. I assume it's one of the reasons WOTC bought DndBeyond to maintain a revenue stream from long term players since modules will never be as good a return on investment as the core 3 books you can sell for years to new players.

MGibster said:

In the early days, long before Whitman arrived,

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Reading this sentence is so weird for me, because TSR was around for 20 years before Whitman started with them, and he stopped a year later. In the TSR lifecycle, there isn't any before-Whitman or after-Whitman timeline. His employment there was largely non-eventful during his tenure, at least in the context of what he was involved in. I.e., he's not a catalyst.

Sacrosanct said:

Reading this sentence is so weird for me, because TSR was around for 20 years before Whitman started with them, and he stopped a year later. In the TSR lifecycle, there isn't any before-Whitman or after-Whitman timeline. His employment there was largely non-eventful during his tenure, at least in the context of what he was involved in. I.e., he's not a catalyst.

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I'd also say that his role as a onetime TSR employee is hardly definitional to how any of us know or interact with him*. It seems odd to see him drag this out and pretend it gives him great insight into the downfall of the company. I mean, I get it, it gives him an air of relevance that lets him try to lure in gullible newcomers to the online fandom (Pundy has been doing the same with his hot minute being a forgettable playtester with WotC). Still, I can imagine even those who interact nicely with him responding to 'I remember my time at TSR, and...' with 'wait, you were never... oh, wait, that's right, you were for a brief moment.' This all seems really weird except as a reminder to people that he was there (briefly), as having a hot take on how TSR fell doesn't really lend itself directly to anyone trusting him in his latest scheme.
*Not just as a fraudster and schemer, I just mean I mostly think of him in terms of Knights of the Dinner Table, the Ralph Bakshi work, Traveller, Convergence, and poor quality print shop work rather than TSR.

Willie the Duck said:

I'd also say that his role as a onetime TSR employee is hardly definitional to how any of us know or interact with him*. It seems odd to see him drag this out and pretend it gives him great insight into the downfall of the company. I mean, I get it, it gives him an air of relevance that lets him try to lure in gullible newcomers to the online fandom (Pundy has been doing the same with his hot minute being a forgettable playtester with WotC). Still, I can imagine even those who interact nicely with him responding to 'I remember my time at TSR, and...' with 'wait, you were never... oh, wait, that's right, you were for a brief moment.' This all seems really weird except as a reminder to people that he was there (briefly), as having a hot take on how TSR fell doesn't really lend itself directly to anyone trusting him in his latest scheme.
*Not just as a fraudster and schemer, I just mean I mostly think of him in terms of Knights of the Dinner Table, the Ralph Bakshi work, Traveller, Convergence, and poor quality print shop work rather than TSR.

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I am 100% convinced all these stories are coming about because he's trying to give his new business venture credibility. I don't think it will work, but whatever. Also, while I am no fan of Ken and his previous grifts, his one post about Margaret Weis definitely put him in the camp of people I don't like. The whole "I said these bad things to her because I have adult ADHD, and that's what living with ADHD is." He basically made the "I did horrible things, but it's because I have autism" argument.

I have always had ADHD (back then it was just hyperactivity), have been officially diagnosed as such, but never in my life have I said something to someone like he did and blamed it on ADHD. Millions of people have ADHD and don't behave like he has. Ticks me off, to be honest.

dbolack said:

My memory MAY be faulty here, but I thought he was running as an agent in front of Lightning Print in its "Oh ((&^ we have to expand fast" days. If so, the Lightning Print QC was REALLY bad for a spell due to understaffing and training up vs the rush to get things done.

Source on the QC: My Lightning Print rep at the time.

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I don't know about that, but he founded and ran Rapid POD for a number of years (2004-ish to 2007, IIRC). It was one of the first POD companies targeted at RPG publishers.

jdrakeh said:

I don't know about that, but he founded and ran Rapid POD for a number of years (2004-ish to 2007, IIRC). It was one of the first POD companies targeted at RPG publishers.

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Yeah, I remember being approached several times over the years by Whitman about Rapid POD.

Morrus said:

Rapid POD.

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That's a name I haven't heard in a long, long time.