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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scott_Rouse" data-source="post: 5054049" data-attributes="member: 51773">Mark, I don't feel like I am contradicting myself and at the end of the day it's my opinion, and nobody else has to agree with it. The OP asked: I take the OPs question as game changing, growing the category, vaulting a company into a higher level of operation type of innovation. Magic: the Gathering is listed. This lucky break of the right game at the right time put WotC on the map and gave them the capital to eventually buy TSR. If it weren't for M:TG WotC would likely have failed as a business in the mid 90's. With that in mind,  I am coming at this from the big innovation = big cost. I am thinking capital investment of tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.  There are a handful of companies that can handle the type of investment I am talking about. WotC, White Wolf/CCP, Fantasy Flight, ProFantasy, Mongoose, GamesWorkshop, maybe Paizo.  IMO the most likely place this will happen is WoTC because they have a) the capital, b) the biggest property (at this time), c) the audience. The company that will make the biggest bet is likely the one that expects to have the best chance of winning.My second most likely is White Wolf/CCP. Eve Online makes a lot of money, they have good properties, smart people work there with experience in technology, and they have infrastructure (servers etc).I don't think the potential reward in the TableTop RPG industry is worth the time and investment of most companies outside the industry, the ROI for larger scale development is not there.  But there will still be innovative ideas developed. For example, some grad students at MIT are doing some neat applications for RPG play with Microsoft Surface. I don't see Microsoft suddenly making a RPG product for Surface but maybe the ideas from MIT trigger someone else to develop  a similar application on  their own as a hobby or pet project.  Again, I was answering what I thought to be the OPs question of innovation that would drive commercial success. Yes, good ideas are plentiful and some of the best ideas are definitely going to come from the smaller companies and relative unknowns but I have the somewhat pessimistic viewpoint that most good ideas never amount to large scale commercial success for the creators.  Rarely do good ideas get funding and become the "game changers". Going back to M:TG, Richard Garfield's trading card game may never have taken off if it weren't for Peter Adkinson's company funding development and production. Of the list below, only one is thing is directly attributed to WoTC and the OGL was not a 100% new and unique concept. Innovation does not always equal invention. The open source movement was not created by Ryan Dancey, but as with many innovations, it is often less about original creation and more about how others ideas are applied in new ways. Gygax was just riffing off war games and Zeppelin was just playing the blues with amplification and reverb, doesn't mean it wasn't innovative. If I was able to really predict innovation, I wouldn't be here telling the world about what i thought the next big thing would be. It's, just my one man's opinion on what I interpret to be the question the OP posted.</blockquote>

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