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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 8781903" data-attributes="member: 907"><a href="https://www.rpg.net/columns/briefhistory/briefhistory1.phtml" target="_blank">This</a> is my source. It's a pretty good explanation of the rise and fall of RPGs at Wizards. If Wizards had sought to kill the market for RPGs, they would not have spent any effort in trying to find good homes for their RPG portfolio when leaving the RPG market – they would just have canceled the product lines and left it at that.Adkison was not a particularly good businessman. As <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160304015212/http://www.peteradkison.com/blog-entry-2-wizards-of-the-coast-equity-distributions-part-1/" target="_blank">he explains it himself</a>, when founding Wizards he didn't know the first thing about business. He got better, but whatever business success they had in the early days should probably be credited to Lisa Stevens. At the time of the sale to Hasbro, Adkison owned about 4% of the company – and he worked himself up to that figure, because his "advisor" when forming the company didn't inform him about "founder's stock". And of course, there's the famous "<a href="https://www.salon.com/2001/03/23/wizards/" target="_blank">Death to the Minotaur</a>" article about how Wizards was run in the early days, which does not really show competent leadership. Adkison was a so-so businessman who lucked into two great decisions/deals (Magic and Pokémon) and a whole lot of bad ones. Fortunately, the magnitude of the good ones vastly overshadowed the loss from the bad decisions.I'm almost entirely certain that I've read an interview with Peter Adkison (or possibly Ryan Dancey or Lisa Stevens or someone else who was fairly high up in the Wizards business hierarchy at the time) where he said that buying LUG was a fumble on Wizards' behalf because they hadn't gotten Paramount to sign off on the license being transferred along with the purchase. But it's not easy finding stuff from the early 00s online, particularly when you don't know exactly where they were to begin with.I did find this quote from Designers & Dungeons: "Though the Last Unicorn Star Trek license was due to expire at the end of 2000, Wizards hadn’t bothered to negotiate with Paramount about an extension; they just assumed that they’d get it. Now Decipher was announcing that they’d licensed the rights to all Star Trek gaming — supplementing a CCG license they’d held since 1994. Wizards tried to negotiate with Paramount afterward, but it was too late. More than a dozen Star Trek supplements Last Unicorn had in process were never printed."Given that LUG had so many products in the pipeline, it would seem that they had at least gotten an unofficial go-ahead from Paramount about an extension, but whether Decipher just offered a better deal or whether Paramount objected to having Star Trek under the same roof as Star Wars is perhaps better left to historians.</blockquote>

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