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Message: <blockquote data-quote="trollwad" data-source="post: 1588062" data-attributes="member: 19187">claiming that those who are defending some of gygax's points view him as a god is tilting against a straw man since none of us have claimed such powers for him.  which tsr business strategy?  the gygax strategy or the blume/williams strategy?  you should care about who mismanaged tsr because it offers evidence as to which strategy was unsustainable, the avowed purpose of your statement!clearly, neither one of has access to tsr/wotc's financial statements BUT Ive read the financial statements of hasbro, mattel, many publishers, marvel entertainment group (both pre and post its own bankruptcy).  Based on such, oversimplifying greatly, read a book called Comic Wars (the saga of marvel's story) for the sense of the strategic issues confronting a mature niche business like TSR/WOTC.  My point is that in both cases, 'professionals' took over the businesses, undertook short-term measures which greatly boosted margins and free cash flow (in marvel's case, it was price hikes, in tsr's it was overdiversifying and adding too much overhead to hit another home run creatively with 2e etc.).  However, both Perlman in marvel's case, and Lorraine Williams/Blume in TSRs, had contempt for their customers and ended up alienating them.  Trying to hit the next "creative home run", both businesses added way too much overhead and 'creative talent' undertaking dubious projects rather than supporting their core customers with proven talent (monte cook, sean reynolds, gary gygax in one case; stan lee in the other).Wouldnt it make more sense to offer other incentive compensation (royalties, options, etc.) to retain proven talent like sean, monte and gary rather than having them leave and keep all of the revenue that they are generating by using TSR/WOTCs intellectual property?!!  Arent these guys worth a lot more than the scores of names that you see on the wizards website?  If you look at someone like Warren Buffett, who has made a career out of buying mature businesses, allocating their capital very stingily and running a lean overhead outfit with key creative and management talent retained and incentivized with incentive comp (no options but a ton of incentive cash), you see what seems to me to be a much more successful means of running a mature business than fitful licensing schemes, a huge talent exodus, and no stable low margin cash flow stream (modules).Just my 2 cents!   <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=":)" /></blockquote>

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