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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 8604890" data-attributes="member: 19857">I don't think it was a very bad deal - they thought very carefully about it before pulling the trigger and sent folks out to do a complete audit of the books and the inventory to make sure of what they were buying.  I'm pretty sure that Adkinson saw the value of the D&D brand and saw how TSR had been squandering it and thought he could get $25M + a good ROI over the course of a few years owning the brand.  I'm sure a 3rd edition was on his mind at the time too to push things along in that respect also.Hasbro's interest in Wizards was about Magic the Gathering and Pokemon (that they lost the Pokemon license so soon after Hasbro bought them is one of the interesting footnotes about the whole acquisition to me).TSR had no shot of climbing out on their own - their choices at the time of the deal were a) take the money or b) declare bankruptcy and sell off IP piecemeal to raise the money to pay to their creditors.  TSR was well and truly cooked by the time the deal was made - they had reached the point where they were so in debt that they literally could not get their books printed and shipped to be able to pay off the debt.  I remember months of no TSR product at all in '97 when nobody seemed to know what was going on.Without the buyout the most likely scenario is that all of TSR's assets would have been sold off to different companies - you could have different companies owning Dark Sun vs. Ravenloft vs. Forgotten Realms - and some other company could have owned the actual Dungeon and Dragons game.  Many of the companies buying them up would likely not have been tabletop game companies - I could see Interplay or some other video game company buying the D&D IP for their video games and then discarding the tabletop game as "not relevant to today's gamers" in 1997.  It's doubtful that any other tabletop game company could have afforded to buy all of TSR's assets - Wizards was in a unique position of being very cash rich because of Magic the Gathering.  I doubt the next biggest player at the time (probably White Wolf) would have been able to afford it.</blockquote>

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