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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wulf Ratbane" data-source="post: 4384870" data-attributes="member: 94">We're still not at an agreement yet over whether or not GLUT means "crappy product" or "more product than the market would bear."Some people say GLUT and mean the former: All this crap clogging the shelves. That is a specific indictment of quality. We'll call this kind of product crap-glut.Some people say GLUT and mean the latter: Supply outstripped demand, independed of quality. We'll call this kind of product good-glut.Again, it's possible to produce quality products so prolificly that you cause a glut. And yet, that's not the way most people use the glut epithet.I mean, prolific pretty much = glut, no matter how good the product is.Well, let's try to put a number on it. What percentage of the TOTAL d20 product supply in retail distribution came from "high quality" yet "prolific" 3PP? I rather facetiously suggested 95% above, but I'm willing to run through the exercise a bit more rigorously.If you were running a game store, how many dollars would you invest in proven-but-prolific good-glut vs. unproven crap-glut?I would be VERY surprised if even the most inexperienced game store owner invested more than 10% of his rolling capital outside of the "Big Names." The lion's share of his investment will be in WotC product. And then Sword & Sorcery, Mongoose, GR, Necromancer, FFG, etc. all the way down the line until we finally hit some of these publishers (that nobody ever names) with products (that nobody ever names) that is clogging up the shelves. What percentage of his capital investment is going to THAT kind of product?And we're only talking about his RPG investment, here, which should be a fraction of his total store inventory.So we may not have a firm number here, but I think at this point you should have a pretty good idea of the amount of investment in crap-glut.When folks talk about the GLUT, what they generally mean is, "Really crappy products from little crappy publishers that nobody wants to buy from utterly ruined the retailers." The supposition is that this stuff was uniformly bad AND purchased in such quantities that it was capable of bankrupting the retail store.I think that's a load of horseshit.Well now we're getting a little closer to specifics. I recall AEG and FFG in that "pamphlet adventure" space. Do we have a specific scapegoat, at last?Can we finally specify the glut canard as, "AEG and FFG ruined the market with pamphlet adventures that did not sell, but the retailers were powerless to stop purchasing month in and month out?"I think not.I don't think anyone will ever specify it, because they are all pointing their fingers elsewhere looking for a scapegoat.If the retail game industry is capable of being brought to its knees by an infinite army of monkeys cranking out RPG doggerel, I hardly think you can point the blame at the OGL that "empowered" the monkeys.</blockquote>

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