2WS-Steve
First Post
Voadam said:As the market leader I always thought the benefits for WotC of having fairly compatible game stuff out there outweighed the numbers lost to those who only went for the third party niche games exclusively.
The losses to WotC here are people starting and ending with these 3rd party complete in themselves d20 games or people who try a 3rd party variant like True20 and never go back to WotC D&D stuff (assuming they would not have moved instead to a completely different nond20 system like GURPS, WoD, etc.)
The original belief was actually that all RPG stuff out there, including incompatible systems, helps drive the market leader's sales -- that's it's good for the market leader if there are smaller companies out there servicing the niche RPGers and keeping them playing RPGs rather than switching to video games or hanging out in pubs.