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Message: <blockquote data-quote="darious777" data-source="post: 3283015" data-attributes="member: 34926">I have to agree.  It was stated earlier that without WotC Enworld would not exist.    That's true but for a different reason than stated - I still remember when TSR was semi-jokingly referred to as They Sue Regularly (aka T$R).  This newfangled internet thing was perceived as a major threat to their IP and TSR sent out voluminous amounts of Cease and Desist letters to websites, causing fan backlash.  (I even remember hearing about the TSR chatboards had put in macros so that anyone typing in T$R would instead have something along the lines of The Great TSR show up instead).  Blaming M:TG for the demise of TSR is like blaming the death of a 3-pack-a-day smoker on second hand smoke.  Sure - technically there was a contributing percentage - but 99.44% of the damage was self-inflicted.  For one look at the pre-M:TG problems at T$R, you might find value in the 2004 Gamespy articles.  <a href="http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/538/538848p1.html" target="_blank">http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/538/538848p1.html</a>  The end of the Mazes (part II) article starts on the rumored problems and the Wizards and Tyrants (part III) article discuss things rather thoroughly. Even if you don't buy into the Gamespy version of things, I know that I am not the only one who stopped buying 2nd edition products because they were just... so... bad.  And I was the kind of obsessive they-could-do-no-wrong fanboy that would fit right in at any MacWorld conference - but even in rabid loyalty there was only so much I could take.So.. no M:TG....  no company has the financial ability to soak up the phenomenal amount of financial debt TSR had accumulated.  DnD fades away, sold off piecemeal for pennies on the dollar at bankruptcy court, only to become a footnote in a VH1 1980's retrospective.I could even make an argument that without M:TG saving DnD, game stores themselves would have died out.  It basically boils down to the fact that game stores run on a razor thin profit and if you take away their biggest seller not 100% of the sales would translate into other game lines.  DnD is, for a lot of people, the ONLY rpg they would play.  Permanent loss of sales off of the top + already thin profits = dead store.Dead stores are not very likely to be replaced by new ones.  When a store dies the majority of the customers tend to just.. fade away and spend their discretionary funds on other hobbies.  (Take this for what it's worth - just something I "heard" on an industry forum I had brief access to while researching opening my own store - but at least empirically I've certainly seen this to be true).  Fewer game stores = fewer gamers = harder for the remaining retail and manufacturers to achieve sustainable profit margins = fewer game stores. . . etc. etc.Basically it becomes the death spiral we are in now, only back in 1997 before the internet was ubiquitous enough to reasonably pick up even the portion of the slack it can today.(reading ahead - I just learned about how GW handles things - the preceding does not take that into account.  But GW is a personal blind spot for me.  I'm still continuing an old local game store's boycott of GW over it's bypassing-the-distributor and strong-arming-the-retailer tactics.).  Now - I am of an old enough age to greatly appreciate a bit of "The grass was greener/The light was brighter/The taste was sweeter/The nights of wonder" nostalgia.. but I can't follow it through in this case.  Long before M:TG came along, TSR was dead from self-inflicted wounds.  They were just in the process of bleeding out at the time M:TG came along.  Oh - and according to the Gamespy article - Interplay did have some rights to DnD computer games, along with several other companies.</blockquote>

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