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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RFisher" data-source="post: 3493644" data-attributes="member: 3608">I don't think Wizards needed to get on the treadmill, but for a different reason: They (at the time) had a least two successful cash cows.I think an awful lot of businesses make two crucial mistakes:(1) Treating different products as if they were different businesses-within-a-business. e.g. Some products are low margin, some are high margin. That doesn't mean the low-margin products aren't important to your business or that you must figure out how to make the low-margin product high-margin.Even within D&D: It's was easy to look at the numbers & say that adventures don't sell as well as the core books. That doesn't mean that adventures aren't crucial to the game's success. It means you need to figure out how to improve the product (if a product isn't selling well, it might be the quality rather than the nature) AND how to keep production costs in line with the market. (& the OGL/d20L & Dungeon magazine weren't bad answers to parts of those equations.)(I'm not convinced that adventures are crucial to an RPG's success, but I'm not convinced they aren't either.)(2) Focusing too much on "growing the business" instead of sizing the business to the market. Don't get me wrong: "Growing the business" is important; but there's a tendency to over-emphasize it.The alternative to the treadmill, IMHO, is diversity & sizing.I'm not convinced, however, that the D&D supplement treadmill isn't the right path for Wizards. (Or that it has made the mistakes I mentioned above too often. Avoiding those mistakes is more important to smaller companies without such solid brands.)& Gurps. It's an overgeneralization to say that the mere number of settings hurt TSR.</blockquote>

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