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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RyanD" data-source="post: 2415843" data-attributes="member: 3312">In 1999, sales of the core books for D&D had dropped to around 25,000 units, or roughly 10% of their historical high points (to that time), and had been declining precipitously for nearly five years.Furthermore, at the beginning of this period of RPG decline ('94-'99), book stores had not begun their contraction (from 5-6000 stores mostly in malls, to 2-3000 stores mostly big box), comics had not experienced their biggest dieback (from an estimated 15,000 stores to 5,000 stores, a significant percentage of which stocked RPGs).  And the economy as a whole during this period was more robust than it had been in a generation, with customers in the core target demographic experiencing a five or ten fold increase in available disposable income.Note that this decline took place in a market where RPG sales were a larger "slice" of the gaming industry than it is now, large enough to be material to the ability of retailers to surive in the business, so be strict economic rationalism, this slide should have been perceived as extremely dangerous to everyone involved in the industry, and an assumption could be made that people on all levels of the system were working hard to reverse the trend.During this time, the D&D publisher (TSR) produced an immense amount of product, aimed at all segements of the audience, including innovative new player acquisition products, new core rules material, numerous campaign settings, and large amount of "varient" gaming materials to stretch the envelope of what "D&D" meant.If "more available" and "name recognition" were the factors that drove RPG sales, then D&D would show a continuous upward sales trend.  It did (and does) not exhibit that trend.If the hobby gaming industry (that is, people who play complex tabletop games for fun) showed sales cycles where all games declined and all games rose as a group, then you could plot RPGs on that cycle and attempt to say that changes in the overall sales of D&D are cyclic.  It does not.  In fact, during the time the RPG segment collapsed (from a height of approximately $50 million in annual publisher revenues to less than $10 million), one new and one old segment of the US hobby game market exploded (CCGs from $0 to $50 million, and tabletop miniatures from $10 million to $30 million).(In fact, had CCGs and Warhammer not exploded, hobby gaming would be a dead industry right now - the retailers and the distributors could not have survived on RPGs and wargame sales.)So the  view that D&D will and did succeed due to factors beyond the control of its publisher is clearly just unsupportable.</blockquote>

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