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Message: <blockquote data-quote="King of Old School" data-source="post: 1400595" data-attributes="member: 8789">I think it's worth pointing a few things out:1) The companies and games he "championed" aren't really dead.  FASA closed its doors for business-related reasons but look carefully, pretty much everyone who worked on the major FASA products (Shadowrun and Battletech) is working for the hugely successful WizKids or for their stalking-horse Fantasy Productions (FanPro) and those two lines are still being published (in both classic and revised form, in BT's case).  Likewise, people shouldn't get too caught up in the "end of the World of Darkness" marketing push -- Vampire was and is a valuable, successful property and all that is happening is a new edition is hitting the streets later this year.  Even Deadlands (a property largely deep-sixed by business dealings that had little to do with the product) is seeing a new edition this year.2) D20 and the OGL didn't prove that "system sells," they proved what most people with good sense already knew -- that D&D sells, it's the most popular RPG in the world by far, and that you can make more money selling supplements for the world's most popular RPG than you can selling stuff for less-popular RPGs.  What the OGL did was open the market for D&D supplements up to competing companies, for better or worse.  It's a bit disingenuous to categorize D&D as a wholly generic, settingless system like GURPS -- there's a strongly implied setting in stock D&D products, the "generic medieval fantasy" typified by Greyhawk and LOTR.  If "system sells" were the proven truth of D20, then why don't similarly generic non-D&D D20 games like Spycraft and D20 Modern blow away non-D20 games like Vampire?  Plenty of people like settings, that's why FR stuff sells so well and why Conan (which is effectively a D&D supplement itself) is already gearing up for a second printing.3) The "Skaff Effect" wasn't about the sales of corebooks vs supplements, it's a statement that all marketing activity in a given game genre benefits the market leader in that genre.  In other words (to quote Ryan D.), "the more money other companies spend on their games, the more D&D sales are eventually made."  (He's specifically talking about other companies' non-D20 games, not supplements BTW.)  It's a secondary effect of the network theory.  Personally I think it's a bit of an overstatement.All (well, mostly) IMO, of course.KoOS</blockquote>

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