NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JustinA" data-source="post: 3700413" data-attributes="member: 51618">Didn't we already have this revolution? Did Mark Rein*Hagen hack Dancey's blog or something?Mongoose appears to be the new Palladium: Online communities are filled with people who swear they've never seen a Mongoose gamer, and yet Mongoose is -- almost without a doubt -- the most successful company to emerge in this industry in the last decade. They run dozens of profitable game lines, and continue to expand their range of offerings at a rapid pace. And they're doing all this during a time period when most of the industry is in a period of severe retreat.I, personally, haven't seen anything to convince me that they've meaningfully improved their offerings from the early days of the D20 license when they churned out virtually unedited schlock as fast as they could secure time on the printing presses. I consider their success to be predicated entirely on clever branding and saturation distribution of mediocrity. More recently they seem to have extended this strategy by securing popular, well-recognized licenses and then using those licenses to continue churning out their mediocrity.Although, like a stopped clock, they're right some of the time: Amidst all the garbage I've seen from them, they've had a few really good Mike Mearls supplements, for example. On the other extreme, though, this is the company that produced a first edition of the Conan RPG so dreadful that it was completely unusable. But its a testament to their channeling of P.T. Barnum that they managed a customer relations coup by offering anyone who bought the flawed first edition the "unbeatable" opportunity to buy a copy of the second edition at the same price point that they would sell the books to their distributors (in other words, at a price point that guaranteed them full profits from the second edition). And they were widely thanked throughout the many fan forums for their generosity!(I wish I could convince my customers to buy a pre-alpha copy of a product at full price and then buy a copy of the final release all over again at full price. And thank me for the privilege.)But, as much as I may look at the quality of their offerings with askance, there's no questioning their success.And let me be honest: As much as I may mutter under my breath about the failures I see in Mongoose as a company, I'm taking notes on what leads to their success.My hat's off to Matt and everybody at Mongoose. Bravo and keep up the good work. (And hire an editor.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> )Justin Alexander<a href="http://www.thealexandrian.net" target="_blank">http://www.thealexandrian.net</a></blockquote>

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