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Message: <blockquote data-quote="aramis erak" data-source="post: 8999628" data-attributes="member: 6779310">The industry did just fine when D&D was essentially fallow... during the late 90s... and during the 4E to 5E gap year (or was it 2)... in fact, I'd hazard to say that the late 90's gap was what primed the industry to be able to go forward with the OGL... and 3E pretty much killed about 1/4 of commercial RPG publishers. (Both by putting them out via direct competition, and by creating the D20 glut...)The 90's gap brought us many excellent games, such as Burning Wheel, the "New World Of Darkness," LUG Trek,  a much better written Ars Magica 4th Ed, Deadlands (which lead to Savage Worlds in '03), the height of GURPS' popularity.... and I'm only scratching the surface, as a lot of little  known but excellent games were out.  Now, it did coincide with the death of WEG... but that was because they didn't learn the right lessons fast enough; Star Wars and Ghostbusters were radical successes, and TORG was a steady seller, all in the late 80's and early 90's... so they came to the conclusion that licensed games were where the money was. They were wrong. Star Wars, no matter who has the license, seems to sell and push the game to top 10 just due to the IP's fanbase (including me - but I didn't like d20 SW, so I only own corebooks). GhostBusters was a social phenomenon, and they rode that wave well. Indy was a miss - especially the Masterbook version. The later d6 version, which should have been the only version, was not reachign fans. Their other licenses were all good work, but not reaching big enough audiences; especially problematic was that the TORG/Masterbook engine was better suited for grim and gritty like Batman, and d6 more suited for Tank Girl, Shatterzone, and Indy, and neither really fit Necroscope... but TG and Shatterzone used the T/MB engine, and Bats was a d6 variant. MIB simply got lost in shuffle and probably cost too much; it was a good fit for d6, and was d6. Herc & Xena was too late in the show's life. A whole book could be written about West End Games.... and perhaps should be...</blockquote>

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