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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8882683" data-attributes="member: 18">Games Workshop has a bit more of a captive audience, I'd suggest. Literally from the late '80s to until about 2016 D&D has enough competition/alternatives that it's never been in the same "catbird seat" that WotC got into with 5E. Ironically the OGL helped both maintain that competition AND get WotC into that "catbird seat"*.When GW started to get into the really bad behaviour in the late '90s and onwards, they'd already basically wiped out all competition and there was no culture, at all, certainly with 40K players, of even considering other TT minis games. People kept trying to break into the industry, but it was very hard, because you just didn't have 40K players talking about other TT minis games at all in so many cases, and one thing that really helped GW there was the earlier purge of non-GW products form GW stores. I mean, I bought all my initial 2E AD&D stuff from a GW store. But quite soon after that they became GW-only.And in the UK at least, those stores would be on the high street and stuff. So I kid might come into one, and be introduced to this amazing world, and they'd literally never know other minis games even existed. You had to go to hyperspecialist stores, which were few in number, and often primarily (in the '90s) dedicated to historical wargaming - rather than SF or fantasy, and where the other customers were guys in their 30s and older who smelled of pipe tobacco! Rather than fellow kids and conventional nerds.This situation allowed GW to get away with a ton. And WHFB didn't quite have the same culture, and that DID in fact lose people to other wargames, because of that combined with GW's bad behaviour. That's part of why WHFB started flagging (by GW standards), and got remade into AoS, which was designed to be much more marketable in a 40K-ish fashion.Also GW have just done a lot of really clever little manuevers, not all of them evil, which no version of WotC has ever done.So what am I saying?I don't think Hasbro/WotC are in quite the same position. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think with the prevalence of social media (and how important stuff like CR has been to D&D's success), the fact that D&D players skew young, optimistic and open-minded (rather than many idolizing space-fascists as all too many 40K fans do - c.f. GW's own statement on the matter!), and the fact that TTRPGs have a much much longer tradition of coexisting and existing as alternatives to each other - something I've been increasingly seeing discussed on places like the 5E reddit and the D&D reddit, even before this - all adds up to WotC being in a significantly softer position than GW was in in the '90s and '00s.*  = One subtle point I'd like to make here is, if there was no or a weak tradition of making 3PP material for D&D, as was the case in the 1990s thanks to They Sue Regularly, then there probably wouldn't have been any big Kickstarters for D&D material, and people like Critical Role would have been less invested, because they'd have been in a riskier position if they wanted to ever monetize certain aspects of their business. And I think the combination of those two things, in geek/nerd culture - being able to Kickstart "cool stuff" for the game you like, together with there being tons of creative nerd stuff for/about it - has really significantly helped ensure D&D got huge.</blockquote>

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