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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eyebeams" data-source="post: 1687921" data-attributes="member: 9225">Scuttlebutt here and there (I know, I know . . .). I also took the time to crosscheck high and low public estimates by Ken Hite and (where available) Ryan Dancey over the past 3 years. You end up with a plateau and a net decline. 2001-2002 are steady (well, there's a 5% drop, or so, but that's too small to count given the variability in the numbers), then 2003 divebombs about 20% (maybe a bit more; Hite seems to have been off in 2002, but opyimistic estimates go from 104 million to 75 million in the 3 year period; I'm being *more* optimistic than that). This is not so bad, since 3e sales in 2001 will probably artificially boost figures, but 2003 is certainly telling. Even 3.5 doesn't seem to slow this deflation. This is just RPGs.My hypothesis is that 2002 was probably the year stores started to see that, say, Green Ronin and "Dude with a Ripped Copy of Pagemaker Games Co." ought not to be thought of as equals when it comes to stocking shelves and 2003 is the year that distributors, blind idiot gods that they are, started to actually figure this out.D20 was not a failure by any stretch of the imagination, but looking longitudinally it seems to have made the general decline wavier, not necessarily smaller.</blockquote>