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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 5332444" data-attributes="member: 996">Really, were there there other games in that niche that started publishing yards of setting books before 1984?  I came into the hobby in 1980, so I could have missed it, but the impression I got was that RPGs (and to a lesser extent miniatures games) were virtually a cotage industry in the 70s.Yeah, I know FASA didn't 'win' in the long run, but they had a good run, and now the industry thinks that anything less good than that is failure.  Well, at least the bigger guns in the industry seem to think that way.  WotC is a big fish in the RPG industry, but a small fry subsidiary of Hasbro in the broader toy&game market, they'd probably have to market like this even if the precedent hadn't been set 25 years ago, just to reach the kind of revenue it takes to justify their continued existance.Sure.  I was just speculating about 'how' we got here, not whether it was a good thing in any sense.  I guess the bottom line is that WotC needs to sell a lotta books.  As a community, their fans would probably be better served if they released relatively few books a year - but sold a lot of each book.  That doesn't happen, instead, they publish lots of different books, and sell each of them to a fairly small, fanatical-completist, market until they choke it - then start again with a new revision/direction/edition/whatever.</blockquote>