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Message: <blockquote data-quote="2WS-Steve" data-source="post: 1565737" data-attributes="member: 3289">I think trancejeremy's right--the d20 bubble burst last year and now we've got several companies that didn't exist maybe 5 years ago going strong.Also, (as Ryan Dancey said) like markets usually do, it has found its own solution to the glut. Namely,  the various tiers filtering out what gets onto the shelves. In a lot of cases this solution has worked well. You certainly won't see stuff like The Foundation: a World in Black and White on the shelves (and I bought an awful lot of other crap in amongst the gems back during the first year of d20) and I've seen the quality from all the surviving publishers go up, even the ones that already started out at high quality.However, it also means that I need to go out and find an internet shop to pick up cutting edge, innovative stuff like Grim Tales, and the Lords of the Night series. and the fact that they're not getting wider distribution makes me worried that they'll stop being able to afford the time or money to put out such good material. But that's not new either--Aaron Allston is off writing Star Wars books and it seems like half the other designers are working on XBox games.Third, and to complete the cycle I'm repeating Wulf this time, I don't see a stack of unsold copies of books from tiny publishers weighing down the shelves at my local gaming stores. In fact, except for that first year, what I typically saw was a need to rush to the store on release in order to get the one copy the store ordered before it sold out and the FLGS never restocked.Anyway, I don't take offense at the way the market works. It's messy but it's what happens when you let individuals have this thing called liberty and run their own businesses. But I do take offense at these, frankly baseless, complaints leveled at the tiny publishers that they're the ones causing the glut and that they're the ones shoveling junk on the market.</blockquote>

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