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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fearsomepirate" data-source="post: 8193330" data-attributes="member: 7021420">I knew it was going to be a massacre, predicted it way back when.In a typical market, the market king only permanently loses its spot when it angers & alienates customers by abandoning its brand identity long enough for somebody else to take the crown. Generally speaking, and this goes 10x more for entertainment, so the brand that establishes the market defines it and wins by default. We say "fantasy tabletop RPGs," but really, a more accurate description of how the market is perceived by potential customers is "D&D and its clones." Essentially, any given "fantasy RPG" is building its success off D&D's brand identity. With 5e, D&D returned sufficiently close to its established brand identity and produced a sufficiently high-quality product to firmly reestablish its position as market king. It didn't matter how good PF2 was, even if they produced some abstractly perfect set of rules, the market is built on D&D's brand identity, and 5e's good enough that there isn't really an opening for somebody else to appropriate it.If you want to make money on par with D&D, or better, then you need to introduce a hobby game that is sufficiently unlike D&D to generate its own identity. Two examples of this are MtG and WH40K. You could probably succeed with an RPG by tapping into the zeitgeist at the right moment...VtM did well back in the day, but of course, White Wolf mismanaged its product, so edgy goth vampire stuff didn't really survive the 90s.I personally think the popularity of the MCU and, a bit before that, the Hunger Games and the Walking Dead created openings the way Tolkien did in the 70s, but nobody really took advantage of it.</blockquote>

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