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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ColonelHardisson" data-source="post: 5302812" data-attributes="member: 363">The thing about this is that those competing games and settings were appealing to people, otherwise they would not be competing, and wouldn't be fondly recalled today. I don't know if TSR's demise was brought about by too many settings, but rather by way too many books for those settings. Plus, it wasn't that it was splitting the hobby, but rather it was splitting TSR's resources. This seemed to be exacerbated by TSR throwing good money after bad by continuing to pour out books for settings that should have just been one or two books or a boxed set, or at least a much shorter line of products. Gamers who might have been fully satisfied with the first year or so of releases for Ravenloft, for example, ended up seeing a huge number and variety of books that, by the end, weren't appealing to anyone.I asked this elsewhere, but as I recall, the triggering event for TSR's collapse, the straw that broke the camel's back, was the return of a mountain of books from the fiction side of things. I know that TSR produced way too many game books, but I wonder how much the fiction had to do with its demise? That is, how long would TSR have survived if they didn't have the fiction lines, or if the fiction lines had been much smaller?</blockquote>