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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 5251262" data-attributes="member: 80487">"You must do business in just the way that would have kept the D&D business from coming into existence in the first place" is how it looks.If you're not part of the latest WotC-D&D's profits, you're part of the hobby's problem. Actually, you're part of the problem if you just spread things around too much. A rising tide is supposed to keep the one boat higher than the others, remember?It's necessary for the "technological future", whatever that is!It's just looking a bit screwy to me.No, I have a cogent observation that destruction of whatever non-D&D entity gets too big is necessary to keep D&D in place as the "one dominant game". If that fails, then you won't have "one dominant game".I think the particular circumstance to which I actually referred has a lot to with "the Dominant Game". No matter which came first, dominating hen lays eggs from which more dominating chickens hatch.Does Chaosium advertise in the new Dragon? I don't know, because I have no incentive to pay the fee to read the new Dragon."There is no Pravda in Izvestia, and no Izvestia in Pravda." It's not about "print". It's about how freedom of the press is for those who own one, and how nothing succeeds at shutting out the competition like success at shutting out the competition.It's about how that's ALL that is! It is not success at serving the wider -- the competing community in any way.So, yes, the triumph of the One True Way is grand so long as one happens to  consider it the OTW.Otherwise? Well, it's not exactly a self-evident historical imperative. If scarcity of (just for example) bat guano drives the price high enough, financial capital will tend to shift from less profitable enterprises. There may be limiting factors in the inconvenient fact that real material wealth -- such as living bats -- is not as instantly and arbitrarily malleable as entries in account books.Demand for bat guano is, however, not infinite. Neither is it by bat guano alone that man lives. Put simply, the profit from selling bat guano is just a fraction of all possible profit.What, after all, is the argument for the practice of making such different "editions" of D&D? The argument is that there is a finite market for D&D, and at some point an edition has sold all there is to sell at the desired profit margin. It is necessary to sell something else -- but that something else must be labeled "D&D".Hey, WotC is in the business of making up curious game rules! If they decide to sell only in months beginning with J, M or N, then so be it.The rules, rather obviously, do not apply to anyone else at all. In fact, nobody else is allowed to sell a D&D RPG at all.What is it that WotC mostly sells as "D&D"? From what I have seen, that is mostly books. There are a lot of books that are not D&D. Then there are plastic figurines. The same Chinese companies that make them probably make many other items. Now we have the online subscription service. I'll bet some others of those turn a tidy profit.Hasbro, of course, wants to make a lot of profit. WotC was publishing Diplomacy, last I looked -- a game that has changed very little in 50 years. I rather doubt that there's a super profit margin on it. More probably, a merely respectable margin is acceptable when that's all there is to get. Hasbro's infrastructure is better set up for making boardgames than for smuggling cocaine.So, what happens if the D&D-edition cycle gets really and truly not profitable enough? Hasbro drops it.I guess the company could just lock it in a vault, but an unused trademark lapses. More probably, I think, the choice would be to squeeze a last few drops from it in a sale.It's all good for Hasbro! The company is not in the "role-playing game" business. Absolutely the only reason something is "not profitable enough" to a globe-spanning mega-corporation is because something else is more profitable.So, apparently what's good for WotC -- which, I think, is not really "micro-managed" by Hasbro (to the extent that D&D may be but rarely a blip on the radar upstairs) -- is a group of people combining the qualities of (a) being ready for yet another round of Edition Churn (with Power Creep! and Dude, Where's My Canon?); and (b) being unwilling to buy anything else that Hasbro might offer, which could facilitate enlarging and overlapping market shares.If that is to be the majority of role-play gamers, then I must say our demographic must indeed be limited! Most of the people with whom I actually play D&D would have to be excluded.</blockquote>

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