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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5605504" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 237: Mid 1997part 8/8The current Clack: No surprise that this column is also very out of date and laughable in light of events. TSR experiencing substantial growth over the year?! I don't think they were being entirely honest in their reporting. That or it's the old story of expanding profits, but new expenditures exceeding revenue, resulting in spiralling debts even as they technically succeed. Other companies have been suffering pretty badly as well. The blame is laid upon the distributors as much as the public. They've been taken in by the CCG craze, and are only carrying the biggest items, leaving the others to rot, which hurts diversity quite a bit. Once again I wonder what history would have turned out like if CCG's hadn't been invented, or didn't wind up appealing so strongly to the same demographic as RPG's. If they weren't competing for shelf space, might TSR have survived? In any case, it would have been someone else than WotC that bought them if they'd still killed themselves through poor management and 3e would have been a very different beast. So I think this proves that you can't believe everything you read here, and that the explosion of CCG's did make a real difference to the RPG market. Very worth noting indeed. I don't think it'll surprise you to hear that this issue is an absolute mess, with huge amounts of the articles stuck in different time zones, and the whole thing having the air of someone who's just woken up after being knocked out and trying to stagger their way home on automatic. That said, it still has two absolutely brilliant articles, and it's fair share of ok ones, so it doesn't feel wasted either. They've still got plenty of people sending in material, some of it quite good, and a fully built up infrastructure. They're not in a bad position to make a recovery, unlike far too many companies. Let's see how they pull it off.</blockquote>

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