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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 4983358" data-attributes="member: 80487">I agree that "the end of the gaming renaissance" is just nonsense as terminology.The RPG biz was already slowing in the late '80s. RPGs were (apart from D&D in the UK, perhaps, when GW had that) not the hot sellers for Games Workshop, and when Citadel Miniatures took over the synergy was sealed. Fiction lines (Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms) seemed as I recall to bring in the big bucks for TSR, but I don't know the numbers. Judges Guild lost traction partly because of losing the TSR licenses, I think, and partly because JG's cheap production fell out of favor. They had been selling a lot at one time, with a "scatter-shot" approach; if one product fell flat, another might be a hit, and none too many eggs were in one basket.There was a time when the really small press couldn't even match that. Even "cheap" was expensive unless you were doing runs of thousands. You needed a big capital investment up front, and you needed margins profitable not only to the retailer and distributor but to you (or at least return enough to keep the loss down to your budget for a hobby).Advances in "desk-top" publishing, and in commercial printing, now allow us more easily and less expensively to turn out a final product that would have been quite "professional" looking, even impressive in 1979. The trouble is that expectations (at least in one segment of the market) have risen to expect a new top notch that may be even more costly than the old one.I don't have such expectations. Hardbound books are nice for oft-used reference volumes, not so worth it to me for works of short-term or occasional interest. Full color and glossy paper are as easily annoying as attractive, and even in the latter case there's the question of cost versus value. My guess is that utility tends more often to take precedence for those of us who buy game manuals to use.</blockquote>

Verification