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You may find this interesting: http://www.rampant-books.com/mgt_amazon_sales_rank.htm Amazon is in the Long Tail business. Sales rank outside of the top 1,000 items or so tells you little or nothing about sales by unit volume in other channels. In fairness, I'll react to this data and raise...

I'd just like to clarify that in the context of "do most people care about game systems", I'm not arguing that given a world-wide competition on a level playing field to determine "what the one game will be" that D20 would win. I'm just stating the fact that since most people play D&D or a D20...

I would speculate that this translates into less than 1 copy sold per week. Ryan

I stand corrected. Thanks for the clarification - want to give proper credit for such a seminal work. Ryan

Ghostbusters is generally credited with being the design that introduced the concept of target numbers as a metric of difficulty, and a die mechanic to determine success or failure vs. that target number. It was, I believe, Greg Costikyan's first commercially published game - there's a lot of...

That is an inaccurate statement. D20 games do not de facto require levels, or even character advancement to tap the D20 player network. I suspect what you mean here is "when the DC is so high that characters without enough bonus to the die roll to be able to successfully complete the action...

Master tools was a child of many fathers, many of whom had fundamental disagreements about the desired end state. By the time I was asked to help with the project, massive amounts of money had been spent, but little usable code had been produced. It was a huge opportunity missed. That said...

Games Workshop found the same thing. In practice, they don't try to teach stores why GW wants them to do things, they just structure a system that forces stores to do the things GW wants. If a store gets railroaded in this fashion, it often finds long term success (with careful management of...

As you can imagine, most of the stores that have evolved to this point have no interest in discussing their internal systems with competitors, so I cannot provide names or sources; which were provided to me in confidence. I suspect that if you look for the more successful stores in your local...

I've done extensive analysis of this issue, both in abstract, and in terms of actually investing in retail stores. If the store uses a computerized POS system, and tracks its inventory on that system, and the buyer intelligently sets order points and target levels, and the POS system is...

Basic D&D as a product was always a good seller for TSR, but after its initial peak, it never represented a competitor to AD&D in terms of unit sales -- just comparing sales of the PHB to the various D&D products, the AD&D PHB consistently outsold them. Sales of D&D products tended downward and...

As I mentioned in my blog, it's a spider-sense thing. I can't tell you what, when, who or why, but my instincts are screaming that something is coming. And no, it's nothing I'm involved in at the moment; that prediction has nothing to do with me. Ryan

That data is inaccurate. There was a year where more than 1 million D&D boxed sets were sold, but it wasn't 1989. 1979 is more like it. It was an exception to the trend. The data may be in error, or it might represent a 1 time mass market sale of some kind. The data we had from TSR's old...

I absolutely believe that. If someone came up with a concept as compelling in 2007 as Vampire was in 1991, I think it would be successful regardless of what game engine it used. I think that if someone could come up with a compelling new kind of marketing that reached the millions of people...

I'd like to see a game that you can play either on the tabletop, or on the computer. Ideally, you could move characters back and forth between the tabletop and the digital realm, but that might be impossible. You should certainly be able to use one unified toolset to create adventure content...

Roughly 20%. You can read all about it at: http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/gaming/BreakdownOfRPGPlayers.html Ryan

I made a really bad decision. I discovered that the GAMA board of directors was using email list management software that published their correspondence to a public website, and after making that discovery, I monitored that list (i.e., I read their private email) without telling them that it...

If they take no action, WotC will let the above become truth. Today, it is not truth. WoW has a lot of players, but there's very little brand equity in it; it mostly means "a MMORPG". D&D, over 35 years, has a vastly wider audience, across a wide demographic, a diverse psychographic, and it...

I honestly don't think WotC's R&D group believed the changes in 3.5 were as big as they actually were. Part of the problem with R&D is and was that they for the most part are not into min/maxing PCs. (They spend most of their days working on monsters and NPCs, after all). While running Living...

I do not think the cut in your orders was a 3.5 effect. I think that 3.5 happened to coincide with the <pop> of the D20 bubble, as retailers realized that they couldn't just order 1 of any thing "D20" and expect it to sell. Once that bubble popped, I think a lot of retailers canceled >all<...