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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tyler Do'Urden" data-source="post: 7881208" data-attributes="member: 4601">Hindsight is 20/20.Having been a manager or consultant with five small businesses/startups now, I know just how easy it is for everything to go wrong, and how many different culprits there can be. Building a business that ALSO creates a new industry or leads innovation in an industry is really, really, really hard.D&D caught lightning in a bottle, and it's no surprise they had no idea what to do with it or how to deal with it. For all her faults, Lorraine Williams actually seems to me like a very competent business manager who tried to run TSR like a fairly conventional book publishing firm - which, on the surface, it probably looked like to her. And I must say that her leadership did make some good contributions to the hobby - for one, the D&D Black Box - which is still to my mind the paradigm for an RPG starter set - was her baby. And the expansion of AD&D into many different campaign settings - while ultimately a business mistake - lead to the creation of much beloved product. Despite what she may or may not have thought of gamers (and really, what gamer hasn't had contempt for his own kind on occasion?), I can hardly call her the devil.But games aren't conventional publishing, and the dynamics of the field were unknown at the time. Dancey made a really, really good point - they didn't really even try to understand the sea they were swimming in. So, creativity and competent management aside, they were sunk by a lack of data.I also think it's easy to forget, in our information age, how different business WAS just thirty or forty years ago. As I commented elsewhere, the vertical integration of a company like TSR seems absurd in today's world of process outsourcing. 300 people? What were they all doing? Today a company with their output could be run by a dozen.But it was a different world. There was no process outsourcing. Working with remote freelancers was a much more difficult proposition. Automatic feedback wasn't available. While you could easily get books on accounting, finance, marketing and legal matters, you couldn't get instant, up-to-date guides in a few keystrokes like we can today, nor did everyone in 1980s Lake Geneva have a buddy with an MBA and time on his hands. You couldn't run an empire from your computer - you probably didn't even have one, and if you did, it was only a tool to help you make a few processes quicker or more accurate.A young Gary Gygax today would probably grab a few friends, set up a kickstarter, and that would be that. He wouldn't even need to build a company and get into those weeds to begin with. Peter Adkison was already building WotC in a different world than Gary - the early dot-com Seattle startup world had much better tools and a lot more expertise than Gary ever had available to him, from multimedia desktop publishing computers to experienced businesspeople from the computer gaming industry - not to mention that hobby gaming itself was a few decades more mature. Magic: The Gathering stood on the well-worn shoulders of TSR.So naturally, I cut these guys some slack. Being the first to market ain't a picnic, and everything is done by the seat of your pants. After working for five tiny companies, I've now "retired" to an admin job with one of the country's largest companies... it certainly pays much better, but I also miss the excitement of trying to build something new. So I get it. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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