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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...

Right. The context for the book returns matter a lot. They are not the cause of the failure. The returns are a result of the core business failures. For folks who don't know: TSR had a deal with Random House going back to Gary's days. Random House distributed TSR products to the book...

From what I saw, Lorraine and the parts of TSR upper management who had come into the company from "the business world" didn't understand the customer base. Some showed disdain, some confusion, many condescension. I disagree on a core philosophical/ethical level with the destructive way Lorraine...

Quite a lot of what you say about Lorraine's tenure at the company is excellent and needs to be said, repeatedly, especially about the misogyny underlying some of the criticism aimed at her and the ways in which critics use different standards for the pre- and post-takeover company. More than...

TSR was very much a trial-by-fire sort of workplace, where you were challenged quickly and expected to step up and learn multiple jobs. Anything that might be connected to your formal role and then some, really. In Books, editors handled the usual proofing, copyediting, and story editing, but...