Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 7078581" data-attributes="member: 907">Except they didn't survive for 10 years. 2e was published in 1989, and TSR became insolvent in late 1996/early 1997.And printers usually don't require payment in cash. Most business-to-business, well, business is handled via invoices. TSR orders the printer to print a book, the printer does so and then sends TSR an invoice. What happened in early 1997 was that the printer told TSR "Hey, we haven't gotten paid for the last few invoices. If you want us to print more books for you, you'd better pay up." And TSR couldn't, which they at the time reported to their customers as "a problem at the printer."You'll note that one of the first things Wizards did once they took over was to slow things down. Dark Sun got cancelled entirely, Birthright and Planescape had some stuff in the pipeline that got published but then that was over too (with planar adventuring moving into the core product line and other settings, e.g. For Duty & Deity for FR and A Paladin in Hell for core).There were three things that combined to bring TSR down. I guess you could chalk all three up as different flavors of "bad management", but that's a fairly useless designation.1. Splitting up the customer base too many ways with different settings and too much stuff for those settings. In 1995, TSR published about 75 RPG products across its different product lines, including multiple boxed sets. That's 6 per month. It's much better, business-wise, to publish one book that sells 50,000 copies than six books that sell 10,000 each, even if the latter leads to more sales overall.2. Too much crap, like Dragon Dice or Spellfire.3. Over-reliance on novels. Back in the 80s, the Dragonlance novels had saved TSR, so now they were pumping out novels like there was no tomorrow. But it turned out that novels sold through the book trade were less of a sure bet than RPGs sold through hobby stores - book stores buy things with a right to return unsold goods - not only that, but they don't have to return the whole books either (in which case you could try to hawk them elsewhere). No, they only need to return the cover pages, and then send the rest for destruction/recycling. For a while, Random House (TSR's book distributor) let them slide and allowed them to cover their debt for unsold books with credit (that is, instead of TSR paying Random House back in cash, they could pay them back in new books). But in 1996 Random House told TSR they wouldn't take credit any longer, and wanted actual money in return for their, well, returns. And that's what pushed TSR into insolvency.</blockquote>

Verification