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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9862606" data-attributes="member: 18">Buddy, those are both "evil" goals. They're both anti-consumer, anti-choice. Any attempt "reduce competition" is a bad thing under capitalism, an objectively bad thing. There's a reason Adam Smith stressed the extreme importance of competition, and a reason the main thing he thought could harm consumers and the capitalism he was proposing was monopolies and people doing stuff like you're offering apologia for.I mean, factually, it was, at least in the short-to-mid term, a "bad" thing for RPGs in general.I'm not sure it was even a good thing for 3E in the mid-term. In the short term it clearly was for two reasons:1) It sold a lot of extra copies of the PHB etc.2) It caused a lot of RPG stores to devote huge amounts of space to d20 products, which funnelled more people to 3.XE.However, this lead to an implosion a few years later, because loads of other RPGs and RPG companies had been killed off or harmed directly and indirectly by the d20 boom (whether this was intended, I dunno, I kind of assume it was, because it was predictable), and then a lot of FLGSes suffered because they'd devoted loads of space to this area of gaming that was no longer popular, and had a lot of product they were struggling to move. I know of at least one FLGS which stopped carrying RPGs because of this.</blockquote>