Interesting...Hite really seems to dislike (I wanted to say "hate"..) D20, but the numbers still show that D20-products are the best selling rpg products out there. The balloon, such as it is, may be deflating from the immense highs of the birth of the OGL and SRD, but they are still selling better that anything else on the market.
Is that because gamers can't find anything else? Hardly. I frequent several gaming stores in Mid-Missouri from Kansas City to Columbia, and all sell a wide variety of RPG products from D&D to Rifts. Y'know what most of the shop-keepers and their employees say? That their customers buy D20 because they really like it. It fits the bill for whatever they're playing without feeling like a system is shoe-horned into being a generic rule set. I do hear some complaints from those that don't play any D20 products (mostly because they have a hard time finding non-D20 groups), and they hope that "people will see that D20 crap is just that" (direct quote from a guy I was talking to).
My question is this: If D20 products are overwhelmingly crap, why are gamers buying more of them than any other RPG line? Is it that gamers simply fell into the hype of D20 and stayed there our of blindness? Once again, hardly. In my honest opinion, it's simply that other companies are rising up to meet the competition. Sure, there are several D20 products that rank down among Synnibar as the worst ever written and there are companies that still have no idea what proof-reading and editing is. However, there are a LOT of creative and great works under the D20/OGL banner. As of right now D20/OGL offers up many truly stunning products for whatever kind of game that any group would want to play. There is Spycraft, D&D (duh!), Everquest, Arcana Unearthed, Mutants and Masterminds, Babylon 5, Star Wars, Sidewinder: Recoiled, Darwin's World, D20 Modern, Stargate, Conan, Call of Cthulhu, and many others I'm likely forgetting.
What are other companies doing to try and win new gamers? Very little from my viewpoint. The only one that is truly trying is White Wolf. While I don't play any of their World of Darkness games, they are great reads that I pull ideas from for my D20 Modern games all the time. Their products this year were astounding with the "end" of the WoD. Palladium put out that Chaos World stuff. I was interested, but it was the same old unbalanced, tired material, just with new packaging. Steve Jackson...well nothing from GURPS caught my eye. (Not to say that there wasn't any quality there, just nothing that jumped off the shelf and said "Hey, pick me up and buy me!!!")
When the whole D20 idea came out I was both overjoyed and nervous. While I was anxious to see what new settings and material publishers would put out using D20, I was worried that the bandwagon would become overloaded with those that didn't have the talent or desire to put out truly good products. I was worried that all the "low-end D20 crap" would take away too much from the good that the really awe-inspiring products would do for the OGL movement and D&D in general. Thankfully that hasn't been the case. The bad apples haven't spoiled the barrel, but are constantly being weeded out, making it harder for those outfits that only seem to put out low-end crap to sell their products. All the while D20 was booming in popularity, I was hoping that other publishers would follow suit and try something similar. (It has always been my dream that Palladium FINALLY developed a system that had a hint of balance and make it open content...I know, major pipe dream.) At least, I hoped that the increased marketshare taken up by the D&D juggernaut would be met with even better products. Alas, such has not been the case. If it was, the industry as a whole would be better...
/rant off
Kane (Not an industry insider, just a gamer that loves to talk shop)
edit: Sorry about no paragraphs. Got on a roll late last night and didn't even think about writing properly!
