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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vocenoctum" data-source="post: 4384656" data-attributes="member: 2477">Personally, I think the timeline went like this:3e released, happy friendly, bring your 3rd party!A ton of stuff followed, clogging shelves and selling, but then stopped when consumers learned that a lot of it was crap. As consumers became more educated and looked before they leaped, gamestores and distributors reacted slowly and were stuck with product.Then, WotC decided to ramp up production of their own. Rather than a book here, a book there, they started making 1-2 books a month. Now the glut was even worse, as folks focused on the WotC products and prominent third party's went their own way.D20 died, except for the pdf market.There was another guy with race books, but they were some oddball size and thus evil. I think he joined a cult and preaches about the end of days now, or something. <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'll disagree here, I think you're forgetting a lot of the early adventure folks and such. They may not have lasted forever, but their impact on game shops was a lot longer than their business lasted.And no, I don't mean there were 100's, and I'm not talking about Mongoose's prolific space filling. There was a lot of real junk that is probably still on shelves.I think you're focusing a bit too much on the companies that became prolific and had quality products. These guys suffered as much, if not more, as WotC from the gameshops investing money & space into crap.Another part of it was that very few of the companies "dabbled" in a product line. They went full blast into making little pamphlet adventures and cranked out 30 of them before someone said "hey, is anyone buying this on a retail level?".I really figured more of them would go the "imprint" way. Jade Ronin, Inc a subsidiary of GR, who cranks out high quality 4e stuff and can be cut from the tree as needed, with little to no effect on the main company.Again, if it's worth the time/ money/ trouble for them to do so. I don't really see GR as being that big on D20 anymore anyway.The stupidest slap to me was the GSL's "can't publish early" thing.</blockquote>

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