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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mamba" data-source="post: 9862661" data-attributes="member: 7034611">I disagree. If you agree that, as Ryan said, the problem with the proliferation of systems was the resulting industry wide low sales because no one had the pull to attract enough new customers to TTRPGs for the hobby to survive, then the consequence of that environment persisting would be that many of them go out of business, and probably sooner rather than later. So as someone who likes other systems, you would not want to stay in that environment either (even though your solution as to how to get out of it might differ).In turn having one large player in the market that does attract new customers to the hobby at large, even if initially to their own system, would benefit the market overall, including the competing systems (the rising tide idea).Also, you still put the cart before the horse with your 'if you want to increase PHB sales you should drive other systems from the market', Dancey is saying the reverse. WotC selling more D&D books (the best course of action for this was having more products for D&D through the OGL...) indirectly will reduce sales of competing systems over time, as they cannot keep up with the network effect that is working in favor of D&D due to its position in the hobby.He mentioned this just before the part I quoted"Here's the logic in a nutshell. We've got a theory that says that D&D is the most popular role playing game because it is the game more people know how to play than any other game. (For those of you interested researching the theory, this concept is called "The Theory of Network Externalities")."and picks it up again in the part I quoted"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."</blockquote>

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