Wicht
Hero
I seem to recall reading somewhere that Lorraine Williams aggressively pushed the Buck Rogers line because her family got money for each book regardless of how well they sold.
I think TSR was right to publish so much material
- Thread starter Silverblade The Ench
- Start date
I seem to recall reading somewhere that Lorraine Williams aggressively pushed the Buck Rogers line because her family got money for each book regardless of how well they sold.
Her family did indeed get money for each book. TSR under her leadership aggressively pushed the Buck Rogers line.
You would not be alone in inferring a causal relationship.
I certainly wasn't expecting you to apologize for your viewpoint.
I appreciate the link and the clarification.
--Erik
But just to also clarify, I think the reason why I brought up that note about Ryan was not to specifically criticize his viewpoint, but to emphasize that it's important to get other viewpoints, as many as you can, to portray an accurate history. The only reason I mentioned that "he's been wrong" is to emphasize that he, like many other people, make mistakes or miscalculations or don't predict everything.
Ryan's notes was taken from a company outsider (to TSR) trying to do an objective analysis on the failure of TSR, so it has a lot of good points and it doesn't suffer from a usual bias you'd find from the person who makes the decisions. But I would also think it would be prudent to hear from others, especially those who actually worked there, as well as people who would be involved such as the people who might have been buying the TSR stuff for the book industry.
I wish somebody would interview all the people (who are still alive) involved with TSR and WoTC and someday to a really good history of the company. If they could do as good a job as the 40 Years of Gen Con book, I'd buy that in a heartbeat.
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To play devil's advocate (while agreeing with the assessment that D&D's biggest boom time was clearly the late '70s and early '80s), a title-to-title comparison of adventure sales isn't useful because:
(a) Dungeon Magazine completely changed the adventure market.
(b) The number of available modules exploded.
I'm guessing, based on the figures I've seen, that the total D&D supplement market in '92 was probably pretty close to the total D&D supplement market of '82. It was just being smeared across 5x as many products.
My gut would also say that the market for core rulebooks had probably decreased. But, OTOH, there is the former TSR employee who claimed that they sold 1,000,000 Basic Sets in 1989. If that's true, then D&D's popularity was much more than an early-'80s fad that lasted for a couple of years. Its growth peaked, but that level was sustained for at least a decade.
I still maintain that the loss of a true Basic Set that wasn't a pay-to-preview product in '91 was a major problem for the brand. One which, sadly, the Essentials line still isn't remedying. Maybe some day...
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What would be a more realistic estimate?
I agree that one shouldn't infer a collapse of the adventure market from the drop in sales per title. But when sales per title fall by a factor of ten, that's not a healthy sign.
Agreed. Mainly I was getting at the OP's claim that the late '80s/early '90s was a boom time for D&D, and I don't think the data supports such a claim. The boom time was the early '80s when the game's popularity exploded. The '90s were more of a Red Queen's Race, with TSR cranking out ever more material just to stay in the same spot, meanwhile alienating fans and business partners alike with boneheaded decisions.
I suspect the number is closer to 50,000.
My best information suggests that the 2e Player's Handbook (pre-black border edition) sold less than 2 million copies over its entire lifetime. The Red Box did much more than this over its lifetime, but that was very near the end in 1989.
--Erik
rogueattorney
Adventurer
If the red box was so successful in 1989, one has to wonder why they canceled it in 1990 and went a different direction in 1991. A direction which ultimately would end in the cancellation of the D&D line by 1994.
Rank stupidity is a possible explanation.
