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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Korgoth" data-source="post: 4384867" data-attributes="member: 49613">Mr. Ryan, your post appears to be full of revisionist history.One of the distinctions at the heart of Open Gaming was between competitive products and competitive systems. Open Gaming was meant to reduce the market footprint of the latter, but was all for encouraging the former. Yes... you read that right: Open Gaming was meant to encourage competition. Why, you ask? Strangely, even though it is no longer the Party Line, this information is available on WOTC's own website! Here's an excerpt:Open gaming, contrary to what you are saying, Mr. Ryan, was meant to encourage competition. Open gaming theorized that the more people who were actively into hobby gaming, the more revenue WOTC would harvest. Because D&D is the most popular role playing game, it benefits from the success even of competing products, because gamers as a whole tend to buy D&D stuff. A few will not, but overall D&D revenues are directly proportional to overall role playing revenues.[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]This competition also ultimately grows the D&D brand. Why? Because as the amounts of supporting products become increasingly vast, the market becomes more resistant to alternate game systems. They have enough to choose from already![/FONT] Then there's another part of the competition equation:See, rather than WOTC feeling annoyed when small-timers showed them up in terms of quality, WOTC was supposed to be overjoyed that someone else came up with an innovation that they can now incorporate for free!Dancey goes on to mention that there is even a simpler version of the game, a "rules-light" version as Tweet put it, that can be constructed. He says the game can be extended to other genres, and it could even be made diceless. WOTC might experiment with some of these things, "or other people may choose to invest the time and energy          to do so".I think it's inappropriate to blame the so-called "glut" for the collapse of hobby stores, expecially with gasoline over 4 dollars a gallon. Game stores have collapsed out of poor business sense maybe (but in my opinion anybody who orders 500 copies of "OGL Chimney Sweeps" is going to go out of business eventually anyway)... but it's as much the economy as anything else. When people tighten the belt, it obviously gets tightened around luxuries.Nevertheless, any "glut" as I assume you well know is a short-term problem. Sure... 1,000 startups come up with 1,000 different products. Most of them tank and the good ones rise to the top. That's called capitalism. In the long run, it's supposed to produce a body of superior product through an evolutionary process.And if you'll look closely at the above quote, WOTC was supposed to take advantage of that evolution as well to incorporate innovations in their own products.Myself, I think that if Open Gaming failed at all it was because too many changes were made to the core of the D&D game. D&D tried to become too much like Gurps and ended being overcomplicated and cumbersome for some people. A lot of people like lighter games and a lot of people liked the assumptions native to the older editions of D&D that were cast aside. So in a sense Open Gaming started off on the wrong foot because it stated up front that D&D was so successful because it was so popular and familiar, but right out of the gate they made changes that ended up (a few years down the road, for many of us) alienating a lot of the core audience.</blockquote>

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