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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DanMcS" data-source="post: 1238946" data-attributes="member: 6530">Not just the d20 market is clogged with product.  There are probably <a href="http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/encyclopedia/index.html" target="_blank">more</a> <a href="http://www.homebrew.net/games/" target="_blank">games</a> <a href="http://www.rpggateway.com/Systems/" target="_blank">than</a> <a href="http://directory.google.com/Top/Games/Roleplaying/" target="_blank">ever</a> available now.  But I think you're wrong about one thing- diversity isn't being driven out.  Price is.  That's what I kinda wonder about.Software is about 10 years ahead of the RPG industry, I think.  Used to be, you could sell basic software and make a good living off of it.  Web browsers sold so well that Netscape produced quite a few wealthy employees from stock options, and eventually got bought out for a huge amount of money by AOL.  Can anyone picture paying for your basic web browser now?  Software is so cheap to distribute, once produced, that it's hard to give it away now.  What people will generally buy, software-wise, is high-performance stuff, server software, databases, things like that.  Software companies make their money off of support contracts now.  There's not much software margin built into the dirt-cheap desktops people buy now, for instance.  Most of the price for a home user is hardware.What's the analogy for RPGs?  High end products continue to sell.  Wizards, for instance, has gone completely to hardback, full-color, big sourcebooks, because those are the most profitable.  White Wolf seems to be doing OK, and they've been doing big hardback core books for years.  Whether those are the equivalent of "hardware" or "performance-critical software" is up in the air, don't take my metaphor completely literally <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><a href="http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?threadid=87734" target="_blank">Adventures</a> may be starting to have trouble competing with the free alternatives, though.  And there's not as much profit margin in paperbacks, so we've been told.There's no RPG-equivalent of software support contracts, so that cash cow doesn't exist to keep companies afloat.What I worry about in the industry is that smaller for-profit products/producers may be eventually completely driven out.  Nobody buys text editors any more, and in 10 years, nobody will buy adventures or small sourcebooks.  Small RPG designers may have to get day jobs, because all the slightly-lower quality but free material that's starting to be available will force them to go to either high-priced hardbacks, or out of business.There won't be a lack of diversity, because once you stop worrying about making a product with mass sales appeal, you can put your wildest ideas on a page and someone will download it.  But there will be a dearth of small, for-profit publishers.</blockquote>

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