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The problem with the licensed RPGs can be tied to the long approval processes and also the short licenses now being offered by companies such as Hasbro and Disney. When it takes, at the very shortest, eighteen months to get your game written/illustrated/edited, printed, and into distribution and...

If you don't understand why most mid-tier and large game and comics publishers had to work with Diamond/Alliance in some capacity, you should talk to more publishers in the market. Those same retailers who complained about Diamond and related companies often had to keep working with them, too...

The facts and your posts all say otherwise.

As we are not in a courtroom and no one is formally or even casually accusing Diamond of criminal malice, this is nonsense and just more straining to deflect any criticism of them. This is not the flex you seem to think it is. The linked article quotes the complaint, which is also available...

An action can be malicious without meeting the court definition, just as it can be unethical without being a crime. Again, they have clearly acted in ways that maximize the chances that their failure will damage their business "partners." This is either malice or incompetence. As for the...

There are book remainder houses that pay pennies on the dollar for stock being blown out, typically because a publisher closes or the publisher's license with an author or licensor ends and they can no longer sell a title. This stock ends up at Half-Price Books or on the remainder/sale tables at...

There were plenty of decisions made by Diamond along the way where they could have spared their business "partners" the damage they are causing now. That was either malice or incompetence on their part. There is no real third option.

When I look at the post from me you quoted, I am seeing the post I quoted and replied to. Not sure why you are not.

Again, this is excusing predatory behavior. There are non-predatory businesses, of course, and companies can act ethically--here, Diamond only had to not set up their "partners" to get burned as they went down. If you can't see that, that's on you.

No, but you are waving off predatory business behaviors as quotidian and excusing businesses passing off damage on to their partners as they fail. Happens in tabletop, of course, among the worst of the predators. It's always ugly and inexcusable.

No, I see predatory business behavior resulting in companies that try to operate professionally getting screwed. Again, there was plenty Diamond could have done before the meltdown to prevent shifting their failure on to businesses operating in good faith with them. There's no excuse for...

And there was plenty Diamond could have done before the wheel locked to protect their "partners" from the smash-and-grab being run on them now. They own this. This may be "business as usual," but that doesn't make Diamond's role in this any less repulsive.

Diamond is hardly opposing Chase in all this. They are the face of the smash-and-grab.

When hobby games distributors Wizards Attic and then Osseum went under in short succession in the early 2000s, burning their clients and leaving captive stock hostage at hostile warehouses, they drove some good publishers out of the market; I was working with one of them, Green Knight, who owned...

Great choice.

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...