Ah, yes - lots of airy assumptions, very little hard data, we must be talking about the YA market!
I'm not being snarky, here - most people speak from ignorance here, including people in the business of bringing books to children, which is where I get this attitude. I once asked a buyer for a certain Megabookstore how she distinguished YA books from juvenile and adult books, and her response was "Trim size." You can't make this stuff up.
The basic assumption, that the YA and children's market is a real thing rather than a convenience for the venues purveying culture, is a difficult one to get past, but if you can get past the map to the territory and review your own experience, you'll find that that "the young people's market" is as illusory as "the young person." D&D, like most science fiction and fantasy, like Catcher in the Rye and Ayn Rand, is already a YA product. What I mean by this is, first, that all these works are suitable for and spontaneously discovered by people whose brains are in the final stage of growth, when learning is natural and easy, when issues of identity and potential are intensely personal, when experimentation is the order of the day. The point at which this stage begins varies with the individual. Everything varies with the individual.
The notion of the juvenile market is older, but even more artificial, and people are even more confused about it because they are less aware of their confusion. Many works that modern audiences associate with childhood - Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, fairy tales - became so associated by accident, from the tendency of children to reach out and absorb anything of interest from the mass of the mundane and boring world presented to them as "reality." Others got this status due to an association of children with certain types of material - children like animals, so Bambi must be a children's book. The notion that children are, or should be, or can be, consistently educated, protected from distressing material, or maintained in a state of pristine innocence by their literature flies in the face of reality and is only maintained by adults by a determined effort to avoid understanding the books that children read. Complex ideas and tragedy are staples of the juvenile market, and nobody knows what any kid is learning from it. Nor should they.
That the juvenile market sector is a lucrative one is evident from the number of advertising dollars spent attracting the attention of young people to toys, clothing, junk foods, movies, etc. The publishing industry, however, has consistently failed to exploit it effectively. The publishing industry is full of marketing idiots. It's not the fault of the product - juvenile and YA literature, in the sense I discussed above, maintains a standard of quality which leaves modern adult literature gasping in the dust. (And I don't just say that 'cause I write the stuff - it took me years to make the attempt to write for children because I didn't think I wrote well enough.)
RPGs are already suitable for children and young adults, as demonstrated by the number of people over the decades who discover them spontaneously at about 13. Having adults introduce them is counterproductive, as one of the delights of becoming a young adult is to start making your own discoveries, independent of adults. As with reading books or watching TV, younger children who see their parents doing something will absorb the activity as normal and desirable - but most children RPG spontaneously, too. It's called "make believe" and they do it fine.
Positioning one's company to take advantage of the natural affinity between young people and RPGs is a complex problem and may or may not be best addressed by targeted marketing strategies. Creating new and targeted product would be certainly redundant, given the suitability of existing product to the existing market.
