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Discussing TSR as if it were a publicly traded company is not accurate. That's the larger point here. As for the debt and the finer points of the deal with Random House, the debt the company accrued and the ways in which it was (mis)handled are less likely to be problems that linger as long as...

It all depends upon how the private company is structured and how the stakes are held. For the purposes of this discussion, comments about TSR's failure were built upon a model for a publicly traded company, the public stock value, and the impact of public trading and shareholder value on the...

The stakes held by owners in privately held companies are not the same as publicly traded shares. They operate in very different ways.

I didn't say you were criticizing me directly or implicitly. Again, you seem to be assuming and assigning motives with no actual grounding to do so. You claimed to know what the companies "cared about," which is assigning motive. So you will want to pick a lane there, if you think companies...

Your hasty summaries about what WotC or TSR "care about" are nothing but speculation on motive, and in this case, a reduction of complex and even competing motivations of large creative operations to the most simplistic (and caustically framed) hot take. Beyond that, TSR was not a public...

So you are speculating from the outside based on A-level theory and not any real inside knowledge or actual standing to speak to motivations and goals beyond that, but assigning worst possible and most limited motivations anyway. Got it.

Rough numbers via Data Bridge, etc. Comics is around a $10 billion dollar global business (not including related media, etc) with the manga market another $14 billion globally. Tabletop gaming, including RPGs, totals around a $35 billion dollar global business. Numbers can vary widely depending...

From 1984 to 1994, I don't believe so.* The average Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms novels were selling 100,000 copies or more (and many continue to sell okay, thirty+ years later). Ben Riggs posted some hard numbers for Dark Sun, and the Prism Pentad novels each sold several times what the...

The debates running throughout the thread on what Ravenloft as a setting or brand is supposed to be are not new. Not long after the boxed set was released and writers outside the original team (Bruce Nesmith, Andria Heyday, and Bill Connors in Games, and me over in the Book Department) started...

The Ravenloft fiction line was, initially, carefully coordinated with the game material. That changed after 1993 or 1994, but initially there was a lot of coordination. And the fiction generally far, far outsold the game material. Both Vampire of the Mists and Knight of the Black Rose sold well...

Since you are speaking to motivation and claiming special knowledge, you really should be sharing your sources.

Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back, by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow, is also well worth reading on the general subject, especially as it relates to publishing and creative ventures.

All of which speaks to how predatory some major hobby market businesses, especially in the US, have become, and how careful you have to be about boilerplate. Publishers regularly use liquidation as a way to shuck off debts while selling IP (including IP they have not paid for) for profit in...

That's a relatively new trend for publishers in the market, at least for those based out of the US. Brexit, the explosion in postal rates, and the pandemic-related shipping tangles caused many houses to more carefully consider just how their stock moved. Some places are slower than others in...

A fair number of publishers were already increasing efforts to sell direct to customers because of various long-standing and systemic problems with distribution and retail, and this latest disaster will only increase that number. The margins are much better for the publisher, but it's a...

They have to stop the bleeding, even if doing so means more short-term damage to them by limiting access to their new releases.

The damage is far more direct. The publishers all paid for these specific products to be printed, and the money that went into printing and shipping and warehousing the copies held hostage is possibly lost, with no hope of recovery. They are also directly losing out on money to be made when...

At base, TSR/Lorraine wanted DC to publish Buck Rogers comics. DC was not interested. TSR pushed—and pushed hard—for a time, for DC to add Buck to the license, even as DC was publishing the other TSR comics. Those comics were selling really well. When it became clear DC was not going to publish...

That's tended to be overstated, in my experience, but there were some specific problems. The company definitely published too many hardcovers, for example, and they got hit with returns on a couple of those, so much so they ended up remaindering the Buck Rogers hardcover in large numbers...

That ends up being a lot like overprinting some products or adding products to the schedule to game the RH deal—get money on ship faster and hope the sell-through covers you . . . eventually. It's all founded upon the hope there will be a wild upswing that covers the advance and then some. The...