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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JohnSnow" data-source="post: 2415894" data-attributes="member: 32164">No it's not. It's just one that product elitists don't like to hear. All other things being equal (price, availability, and so forth), superior products win out. Marketing can help one product, of comparably equal quality, outsell another with less marketing. However, marketing can't sell garbage or make people buy things they don't want. It just doesn't work - the public isn't that stupid. Well, some of them are, but not most.What you're saying reminds me of all the film critics railing that "Hollywood blockbusters are terrible movies" and then being astounded when they actually do well at the box office. The general public doesn't care about your subjective quality standard. They care about theirs. And for lots of people, an elitist's idea of "terrible" is "good enough" or, more accurately "what they want."I grant D&D benefits from having less expensive books (economies of scale) and superior access to the supply chain and marketplace. On the other hand, it got its vaunted position somehow, and TSR wasn't exactly a moneybags company with lots of cash to devote to marketing. It was YEARS before you could buy D&D books at general bookstores. Obviously, with as many books as it has, D&D's not exactly trying to compete on price.The Big Mac/Prime Rib analogy is false because there's a price differentiator in addition to one of taste. I, personally, don't happen to like Big Macs, so I don't buy them - matter of taste. Assuming Big Macs and Prime Rib were equally priced, I'd expect Prime Rib to outsell Big Macs, but maybe people actually prefer hamburgers to slabs of beef. RPGs have no such price differentiator, and even if they do, it favors single book games - not D&D. So yes, given comparable price, or a pricing structure that skews towards its competition, one must conclude that either D&D is considered "better" than its competition by the majority of its target market or that it has superior access to said market.Generally speaking, high-quality products with broad appeal eventually increase their sales. If they don't, they're either being mismanaged, or they're actually niche products. There can be perfectly viable niche products, but that doesn't mean they serve the needs of the majority of the market.All subjective content has to be judged this way. It's the only objective standard available. Insider Awards are about labelling "best" from a quality point of view by combining lots of people's subjective standards about "quality" and trying to come up with a consensus. For artistic efforts, this is commendable.</blockquote>

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