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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steel_Wind" data-source="post: 3280109" data-attributes="member: 20741">We disagree.  If you cannot see the correlation between the runaway success that was M:TG and the corresponding nosedive in AD&D sales from 93-96,  nothing I say is going to avail.If you don't agree that AD&D at the time and D&D in general at all times has been the primary feeder game to the RPG hobby, then I think you are just dead wrong and there isn't anybody in the industry who shares that view.This in incorrect. BioWare did exist at this time and they were working on BG1. As well, you are mistaken that Interplay had "the rights" to D&D computer games.  What they had was the right to make some licensed AD&D products, including "Neverwinter Nights 2" (yes - you are reading that right - it was called NWN2 in the license at the time) and a Planescape game.Key to the license which Interplay had was that it was only exclusive with respect to a narrow brand. It was not a carte blanche exclusive license over all of TSR's IP or even the FR - which is the license that Infogrames got when it bought Hasbro Interactive.Incorrect. Interplay continued to have the Baldur's Gate license after this point. What Hasbro sold to Infogrames related to new games. Ultimately, several years later, Interplay lost the BG license when it went under.Interplay sold NWN to infogrames at the end of 2001.You are rewriting history here completely in a way which doesn ot accord with reality. That just is not the way the way it happened at all.BG1 was a huge hit in 1998, as was its direct add-on, Tales of the Sword Coast  the next year and BG2 sold even more in 2000 with ToB extremely well in 2001.Third edition had not told a single copy when BG1 was released and BG2 was released before 3e. All of these titles were based on 2 ed and set in the FR. What the computer brand shows from 1998 onwards is that the demand for a high quality party based computer game using the AD&D brand was a license that was *extremely* valuable and which enjoyed massive sales far beyond what the underlying supposed PnP market was justifying.Third edition had absolutely nothing to do with the value of that license.  It still doesn't.Elevation partners  = the present owner of BioWare, were in negotiations with Atari in the spring of 2006 for the purchase of the D&D brand computer game license. This is what leads me to believe that at some point BioWare would have bid for it.  That is not to say that they would have got it.</blockquote>

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