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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JohnRTroy" data-source="post: 5249988" data-attributes="member: 2732">My own take is a little complex.Do I think that there should be one or more major players in the hobby and industry, yes.  Without a large player, you can't get the games into mass market stores, and we need at least one or more archetypical games to get the young people exposed to the hobby and/or maintain a loyal audience.  TSR (then WotC), and other large players helped enable this for all of us.  So much so that I feel if Wizards failed as a company, it would be pretty detrimental to the hobby itself.Do I think there should be one dominant game system?  No, absolutely not.  I wouldn't mind, for lack of a better term, an oligopoly where you had 3-6 big ones and dozens of little ones, and that's kind of how the game market was in the 1980s and 1990s.I believe a good market has alternatives.  I'm glad we have Pepsi as an alternative to Coke, I am glad for instance we have OSX and Ubuntu to be alternatives to Windows, and I'm glad we have Android and Blackberry to be alternatives to the iPhone.   Market domination can then lead to stagnation--it took years for Web technology to improve once Microsoft dominated the market after Netscape retrenched.  One of what I consider the detrimental side effects of the OGL was the fact that it replaced some of what I'd call the "big players" with those who went after the D&D market.  While a lot of people claim there was more "innovation" and that it "inspired creativity", I see that coming at a sacrifice of the different systems and made the market even more dependent on the D&D teat.  Somebody mentioned how games like Deadlands, 7th Sea, etc, all jumped onto the d20 bandwagon.  Then, all WotC had to do was "sneeze", and we get 4e which is completely different, and the d20 market is not good--we have maybe a few major players.  It's like the Irish Potato famine--the country became so dependent on one crop when the health of that crop was threated, it caused a crisis and starvation.</blockquote>

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