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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8370360" data-attributes="member: 82106">Right, mid 90's TSR D&D was pretty stale, at least in many people's view. So WW came in with a rather new style of gaming and meanwhile TSR was buying a knitting company or something, and banning people from doing playtesting, lol. Even so, TSR did respond pretty effectively with things like Spelljammer and Planescape. Note that both TSR and WW ended up going down, lol. WotC revitalized D&D, and WW Storyteller has kind of drifted for the last 20 years, with the company pretty much out of business. So I'd say D&D kind of won that round...And yeah, Paizo is a weird case. WotC pretty much CREATED them, handed their print magazines to them, AND let them interpose themselves into the customer relationship. This is a real business no-no. Its fine to outsource, but you NEVER let the service provider build a relationship with the customer, that's always BAD, like "why are you working for me anymore?" bad. So WotC got what they had coming to them on that one. The Paizo people just very wisely and systematically took what was given and built it into a nice business. Still, PF is a wart on the side of 5e. It got moderately popular in 4e days, still has a relatively big following, but their market share is pretty small. Seems to me their business model is "cater to a small cadre of very active fans who spend a good bit" and leave the mass market to WotC.</blockquote>