NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Sigil" data-source="post: 1689048" data-attributes="member: 2013">I didn't say that was the reason that GAME COMPANIES exist.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> I said the purpose of a RPG publication - i.e., the tangible book (or e-title) itself is to aid roleplayers in entertaining themselves.  This is correct.  Which means the gaming product - the book itself - is supposed to aid role-players in enjoying themselves.  If it accomplishes that purpose, it will (hopefully) make money for the company that produced it.  If it does NOT accomplish that purpose, the company will die because no one will want the book.In other words: (a) game companies want money, (b) role-players want to be entertained.  The game company creates a product with a purpose of entertaining the role-players.  The role-players give the game company money.The product, in this case, serves two goals - (a) it makes money for the game company and (b) it entertains the role-player.Kind of a chicken-and-egg thing, no?Well, it's not.  I will posit that you can have successful role-players without any gaming companies (example 1: Arneson & Gygax circa 1973).  But - and this is an important point - you can't have successful gaming companies without any role-players.  Thus, the "highest purpose" of a publication (the thing itself, not the company that created it) must be to enhance the enjoyment of the role-players, else the entire thing falls apart because the gamers stop spending money and the publisher collapses.You may not agree with that, but that's my opinion and I'm sticking to it. Because you can have a gamer without companies but you can't have a company without a gamer, the "highest purpose" has to serve the GAMER, not  the COMPANY.  Now, I'll grant that most of this is lost on modern corporations, which think of people as "consumers" but they fail to realize that with few exceptions, people are not forced to consume, and if you don't deliver ENOUGH quality, eventually, they'll stop buying and your company will slowly asphyxiate (it may take a long time, but it will happen).  Not to wax political here, but I think this is a problem endemic to MOST industries today - they've forgotten that "the customer is always right" because you can't continue to run a company if you run off all your customers.  Isn't philosophy fun? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />--The SigilMaybe I'm just old-fashioned that way, but my proudest moments as a RPG Writer have been when I've read e-mails that said, "I used X and it was just great!  We did Y and Z with it and it was so much fun!  Thanks for putting out your product, I appreciated it."  While the money is nice, I just sink it back into RPG products anyway... but the praise... that's what makes me all mushy inside.  And if I ever start worrying about the money, that's the day I close my "virtual shop" because this is a labor of love for me.</blockquote>

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