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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Eyes of Nine" data-source="post: 8170689" data-attributes="member: 99786">I played GURPS for a long time, with a 2 year run as GM. Don't have interest now to run it, but would play. Jealous of [USER=52905]@darjr[/USER]'s GURPS Traveller leatherbound edition. I also have tons/most of the GTrav books, but never got it to the table sadly.Both of these resonate with me, although there are other toolkit rulesets out there still doing well. Besides SW, also FATE.My personal opinion is based on my history as a FLGS owner. 4th Ed GURPS sold poorly, or at least compared to expectations. Most GURPS players I know, including my group, stayed with 3e. Folks just had too much invested in terms of dozens of sourcebooks that wouldn't get replicated for 4th. So why move to a new edition? But the company had published the new edition, and it wasn't really backwards compatible (although also wasn't that much of a departure). So they were stuck having to support this new edition, but a large proportion of their base stayed with 3e. That immediately meant any new 4e books were going to have low sales compared to a 3e book released at the same time in the edition-lifecycle (ie, Vehicles will be one of your first supplement releases - but the 4e Vehicles I'm sure sold way less than the 3d Vehicles book).The other thing that reduced the popularity of GURPS was that they chose not to open it up for 3pp. I explicitly asked Steve about this at their booth at GTS (GAMA Trade Show) in ~2001. With the success of D&D 3rd (I asked) did SJG ever consider opening up GURPS to an open game license? I think that sort of platform play didn't map to SJG's short or long term vision - and I don't think they were able to conceive of a way that having an open license would help them and not cannibalize their own book sales. I personally think that was short-sighted, and if they had gone open-source, and allowed 3rd party publishers to publish GURPS 4e (or even 3e) work, GURPS would still be a powerhouse today, perhaps even matching D20 in relevance. But instead they ceded the "generic" platform to D20 - and are now a shadow of their 90's influence.Hindsight is 20/20 of course. But GURPS used to be in the 2nd tier of relevance in the 90's RPG industry along with Shadowrun, Rifts, a few others. You had D&D and White Wolf as 1st tier, and then SJG was a major RPG player in the next level down with Fasa, Palladium, and a couple others that I can't remember. Today, SJG's RPG division feels much less relevant - TFT 2019/20 sales notwithstanding. I would hazard more people play Dungeon World than TFT, and definitely more people are playing Savage Worlds than GURPS.</blockquote>

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