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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mamba" data-source="post: 9862544" data-attributes="member: 7034611">3e was pretty dominant, and ‘lowest level possible’ is not zero. That WotC then dropped the ball and released a 4e without OGL didn’t help that side-effect thoughno, it is an expected side effect of increasing the popularity of D&D, even in his telling. Here is a less selective quote“If you accept (as I have finally come to do) that the theory is valid, then the logical conclusion is that the larger the number of people who play D&D, the harder it is for competitive games to succeed, and the longer people will stay active gamers, and the more value the network of D&D players will have to Wizards of the Coast.In fact, we believe that there may be a secondary market force we jokingly call "The Skaff Effect", after our own Skaff Elias. Skaff is one of the smartest guys in the company, and after looking at lots of trends and thinking about our business over a long period of time, he enunciated his theory thusly:In other words, the more money other companies spend on their games, the more D&D sales are eventually made. Now, there are clearly issues of efficiency - not every dollar input to the market results in a dollar output in D&D sales; and there is a substantial time lag between input and output; and a certain amount of people are diverted from D&D to other games never to return. However, we believe very strongly that the net effect of the competition in the RPG genre is positive for D&D.The downside here is that I believe that one of the reasons that the RPG as a category has declined so much from the early 90's relates to the proliferation of systems. Every one of those different game systems creates a "bubble" of market inefficiency; the cumulative effect of all those bubbles has proven to be a massive downsizing of the marketplace. I have to note, highlight, and reiterate: The problem is not competitive product, the problem is competitive systems. I am very much for competition and for a lot of interesting and cool products.So much for the dry theory and background. Here's the logical conclusions we've drawn:We make more revenue and more profit from our core rulebooks than any other part of our product lines. In a sense, every other RPG product we sell other than the core rulebooks is a giant, self-financing marketing program to drive sales of those core books. At an extreme view, you could say that the core book of D&D -- the PHB -- is the focus of all this activity, and in fact, the PHB is the #1 best selling, and most profitable RPG product Wizards of the Coast makes year in and year out.The logical conclusion says that reducing the "cost" to other people to publishing and supporting the core D&D game to zero should eventually drive support for all other game systems to the lowest level possible in the market, create customer resistance to the introduction of new systems, and the result of all that "support" redirected to the D&D game will be to steadily increase the number of people who play D&D, thus driving sales of the core books. This is a feedback cycle -- the more effective the support is, the more people play D&D. The more people play D&D, the more effective the support is.”[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.enworld.org/ericnoah/interview_dancey.html[/URL]</blockquote>

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