RFisher said:
Arguably, some of them have succeeded. For some of us, there was a pretty dark time for a while. Even after the "resurgence", there's still the fact that you could once find a pen & paper role-playing game for sale in probably every mall in the US. These days that isn't always true.
Well, we enter into the nebulous land of 'maybes' here, but I'd argue that there's a couple of flaws with the 'RPGs will die' theory.
1) False sense of market size: In 1980-1982, D&D EXPLODED onto the zeitgeist. It did not and
could not sustain that success. Any more than any other fad could or has. A lot of people expected that success to last or endure...I'm not sure that it was ever realistic to believe that.
2) Some of the blame for the market failure belongs with TSR: Regardless of how you felt about AD&D 2e, it is a fact that many long-time fans did not make the switch and many either left the hobby or moved to another system. TSR did not manage to replace these lost customers and did not manage to bring them back. WotC clearly did manage to, at least initially.
3) The Market is much different now: Comic and Game specialty shops (and truthfully many other different kind of enthusiast-specialty shops) have been adversely affected by Internet retailing and changing printing and production costs. Further, there is a far more diverse selection of materials available now for that same money, even WITHIN the D&D market, let alone the d20 or RPG market as a whole. In 1984, you only really had one or two places you could go to buy a D&D adventure or new rules supplement besides TSR. Now you can get a supplement from dozens of small producers (PDF or print) and through a ton of outlets (amazon, walmart, Paizo and even ENWorld).
Since the RPG industry is still essentially a cottage industry (which only a handful of companies that actually make a full-time go of it), it's hard to even track their success. Part of the problem is that D&D IS the industry, in many practical applications, and when we say 'kill the hobby' we really mean 'kill active D&D sales'. As Diaglo would be quick to point out, there are still folks who play and enjoy systems that are long out of print. The industry's health and the hobby's health aren't necessarily the same thing, though it is one of the few bellweathers we actually have.
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
