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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pramas" data-source="post: 1949256" data-attributes="member: 995">Yes, obviously. But D&D has always been better than any other RPG in bringing in new people and keeping them loyal to D&D only. d20 was different than D&D's previous competition in that was designed to serve those exact same fans and WotC itself promoted this compatibility. So when I said "some percentage of its captive audience", that's exactly what I meant. Folks who likely wouldn't have tried Vampire or GURPS or the latest rpg.net darling were willing to buy books they could slot right into their D&D games. Yes, they do, Mike, because people don't have infinite amounts of money. If a guy goes to a game store with $30 and he wants a new book for his D&D game, he's only coming out of that store with one book. It might be a WotC book but it very well might not be. You can pretend that the millions of dollars generated by d20 companies have had no impact on WotC, but I think that's plainly false. Sure they are, but even with luxury products people make choices. Sometimes people will go  buy up something they couldn't afford previously. Then again, maybe not. By the time they have extra cash, there could be some new shinier thing in the game store. There's nothing special about RPGs. Again, this is economics. The amount of disposible income is not infinite. If you spend money on one thing, that means you haven't spent it on something else. You are voting with your dollars. People who have good jobs may very well buy two d20 books and two WotC books on the same day, but lots of folks won't. Some percentage of those folks will never buy Races of Stone or Frostburn or whatever. That's what I'm talking about. The question is whether that percentage is significent or not. I think it is. I think if WotC sells 10,000 less of every D&D book because of competition from the d20 market at large, they are losing way more than any network effect or feel good PR can make up for. And that's really all I'm trying to say here. I'm not talking about absolutes. I'm not saying that if you buy the Advanced Bestiary, you'll never in your life buy Monster Manual III. Obviously, that's ridiculous. There are folks for whom that'll be true though, because the Advanced Bestiary serves their needs better or because they can't afford both books or because they'll have lost interest in MMIII by the time they can afford it. That number of lost sales is insignifcent to WotC in and of itslef, but multiply it across all d20 releases since 2000 and I think it's quite a different story. They are irrelevant to the topic of this thread--whether d20 and the OGL have hurt WotC in the long run. Regardless of the quality of WotC's offerings, it is a fact that hundreds and hundreds of thousands of d20 books have been sold over the past four and a half years. Sure they do, but that's not what we're talking about. Offer something WotC can't or offer it before they can. Lots of companies made money selling mass combat systems and seafaring rules before WotC got around to covering those topics, for example. How much better would the Miniatures Handbook have sold if it came out two years earlier? A lot, I bet. Mike, I'm a business owner. I don't "set it up", I just live with it. Green Ronin's products compete with those of other RPG publishers--in stores, online, and around the game table. That's just the way it is.</blockquote>

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