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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 5299371" data-attributes="member: 22779">This does not follow.1e had nowhere near the material that 2e did.  There are more 2e hardcovers than total AD&D products.  Ok, that's an exageration and probably not true.  But, it is true that 1e had significantly less published material than 2e.  Yet, by all accounts, it was at least equally commercially successful to 2e.  At the very least.Amount of material =/= healthy hobby.Heck, look at the number 2 boys  of the time, White Wolf.  Again, fraction of books published (although they did have lots) and they managed to eat away a pretty big chunk of the RPG market.  If you were right, and more books = more players, then there's no way that White Wolf would have been able to compete.  They simply didn't publish enough to not get totally overwhelmed by TSR."Let's keep churning out crap" is a piss poor business model.  While it might be nice if everyone got a book just for them, from a business standpoint, it's a losing horse.  You simply cannot make everyone happy.  Can't be done.  Shouldn't be done either.Stick with what you're good at, make the occassional foray into some new direction, with the proper amount of research beforehand and your business should, barring catastrophe, remain relatively healthy.  Oh, and let's not forget economics here either.  The cost of pushing a book out the door (never mind those bloody boxed sets) was considerably less in 1994 than in 2004.  Distributors are a LOT more demanding and rigid.  Print costs are fantastically higher.  Shipping costs are significantly higher.  And, lets not forget that production values have risen considerably in the meantime as well.  WOTC can't get away with two color, soft cover books anymore.  They'd get crucified if they tried.The TSR model might have given fans lots of choices, but it was a very, very bad model for business.  And while the health of the business is not everything, an unhealthy business is certainly not good for the hobby.</blockquote>

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