Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cergorach" data-source="post: 9862961" data-attributes="member: 725">No I understand, I ran a webstore from 2000-2007. My primary focus was D&D, quite a bit of D20 I could get and to a lesser extend other RPGs (in the Netherlands, Europe).Even before the OGL was published in October 2000, things were pretty dire in the TTRPG landscape. TSR went bankrupt, bought by WotC, which in turn was bought by Hasbro. Games Workshop had long ago pulled out of the TTRPG market. FASA was already winding down and would close asap (a few products in 2000). White Wolf was still active with their WoD, and was very active on the D20 side. Target Games went belly up in 1999, WEG went bankrupt in 1998, GDW went bankrupt in 1996, ICE went bankrupt in 2000. Dream Pod 9 already went into decline in 1999 (commercial failure of the HG2 computer game), but around here that already happened a lot sooner as I was able to buy most of HG at dump discounts because it didn't sell.And that's not even mentioning the huge amount of TTRPG distributors that went bankrupt in the second half of the 90s.That's not even talking about the (not so) FLGS going bankrupt at the same time. Those that were successful and stayed in business went for the primarily popular publishers, with only tiny selections of very niche TTRPG products. Those that did go for less known games and TTRPGs eventually went belly up, in most cases at the end of the 90s. The store where I picked up oodles of cheap Heavy Gear was such a store.Not all stores are the same of course, when I went to the Orc's Nest (UK) in 94' the size and variety of options was HUGE, as was the depth. I don't know how that store looked 5 years later or today, but extremely different from most game stores in the Netherlands. I do remember that getting anything outside of what sold well at the time was extremely difficult, often time consuming and very expensive (and with less margin for the store owner).But as you already said, outside of mainstream stuff, it was extremely difficult to get, had to import stuff myself, extremely slow and expensive. I even had to set up foreign business banking accounts to even consider getting such stuff. And even then the demand was extremely low, if you were looking to make a living on that, not worth it in retrospect.And as you said, the Internet wasn't where it is now, the big PDF sellers didn't even exist yet (RPGNow 2001, DTRPG 2004). Amazon already existed, but wasn't selling much RPG stuff yet, and if it was, it was mostly mainstream publishers. I mostly ordered from amazon.co.uk at the time, which required a credit card, which most people at the time in western Europe didn't have (hence the reason I started my webshop). So the only way new publishers could get into selling stuff at that time was via traditional distribution channels, which by that time were a LOT more risk averse due to the many bankruptcies in that branch.With RPGNow (PDF sales) their bestsellers were mostly D20 titles, they even tried to reach out to other publishers but they didn't want to enter the PDF market due to concerns of piracy or dangers to their print sales. Never realizing that most of the rest of the world couldn't get their print products...So please tell me which new publishers started in 2000 before WotC released the OGL in October 2000?It did lead to a whole lot of PHB sales. But it also lead to a bunch of other consequences he didn't mention at the time, to us or the WotC/Hasbro management. OGL titles like SpyCraft, Stargate, WarCraft, EverQuest, Babylon 5, Armageddon 2089, etc. And eventually to Pathfinder. All things that didn't require a PHB...What some people seem to forget is that Ryan Dancy was already part of AEG before WotC bought TSR. Ryan Dancey was part of the team that made the acquisition possible by WotC, they brought the deal to WotC (which also bought Five Rings Publishing). AEG did very well with D20/OGL products during it's peak... He went back there a decaded ago (when they were already out of the RPG business). He worked for the computer game arm of Paizo, on the Pathfinder MMO, Pathfinder which wouldn't exist in that form without the OGL... Ryan Dancey made money on the TSR sale to WotC, from the FRP sale, worked for WotC, made his future bed with the OGL, and after being fired worked almost a quarter of a century in the gaming bed he made.Let's say Ryan Dancey was tired after a decade of working at AEG, and was interested in working in an AI focused company instead... What better way to gain noteriety to be hired by an AI focused company? I also wonder is he was fired 'for cause' at AEG or if he left with a nice severance package, which you don't get if you quit...No! Not convenience, necessity. The US is just lucky they inherited English from the British. If instead they inherited Dutch as their main language, the default western language might still be English due to the British...As for Spanish in the US, I suspect that's more due to more 'recent' imigrants in the southern part of the US and their US born children learning the language from their parents then anything else. As there is also no major movement to learning the French of their northern neighbors...We get quite a few US tourists here that wonder (loudly) why people of European country xyz don't speak American or accept dollars. How many tourists from European based countries would ever dare say that? We've also got quite a few US immigrants (they like to call themselves expats), some try to learn the language (to much amusement from the local population), some don't.It isn't about 'moral superiority', it's about arrogance. The arrogance of thinking that learning another language isn't a necessity when dealing with other countries and people of other countries.</blockquote>

Verification