Parmandur
Book-Friend
Worse, the business people didn't seem to know about business, either.
TSR TSR's Amazing Accounting Department
- Thread starter JamesWard
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Worse, the business people didn't seem to know about business, either.
Tyler Do'Urden
Soap Maker
Speaking as a businessman (an MBA, no less!) living in 2019, looking back at business practices just a few decades ago... the idea that a company like TSR would be run by people who weren't enthusiastic about the product seems absurd. Today, upper managers are expected to be obsessive about everything their company does - it's product, it's history, the contours of the industry... the management-is-management model is dead. Even in the massive, dull megabank that I work for, we're expected to be "passionate team players", and while I'm a pretty deep cynic about my firm, I'm pretty obsessive about my industry - delving into history, the dynamics of the industry, new product, etc. The idea that the heads of a game company wouldn't be even more focused just seems nuts, especially given that's not exactly an industry known for generating great fortunes (Peter Adkison's Poke-Millions aside)...
Joshua Randall
Hero
I roll to disbelieve.
BookBarbarian
Expert Long Rester
It seems like a few of them were business people who knew very little about business.
It hurts me to see Agile automatically associated with Scrum.
This remains the Manifesto for Agile Software Development:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
A lot of very smart people came up with it or at least put their names on it.
Strict adherence to Scrum process flies in the face of all that. And I say that as someone who actually likes a lot of the scrum ceremonies as they seem to take a lot of the the random willy-nilly conversations I every 15 minutes often the same conversations multiple times a day just with different people, which really kills productivity, and regiment them. But it's certainly not the only way to curb the communication problems common to development. And should never be held with religious like reverence.
I suspect Jim means the 1980s for getting the catalog material done further in advance. In 1988, when I started with TSR, the company was already working with advance catalog copy and cover art. Editors and line heads had to provide summaries of content for each product, along with cover art orders, months ahead of time, frequently well before the books were written. (That's how you end up with the occasional cover–product mismatches, like Tantras, both novel and module. The Avatar covers were painted long before the novels and the modules.)
RPG Geek has entries for many of the TSR company catalogs from the late 80s and 90s here: https://rpggeek.com/rpgseries/19204/tsr-product-catalogues
Between 1988 and early 1994, when I stopped working with TSR, the overall movement had been to complete products earlier, for a variety of reasons (to provide near-finished books to fiction reviewers who wanted galleys six months before publication, to have more time to schedule for the best print costs, to increase overall schedule flexibility, and so on). By the mid-1990s, the company was completing RPG and fiction material further ahead of ship date than they had in the late 1980s. And that meant an increase in the time gap between when the freelancers were being paid for a product and when the company brought in any money from that same product. (Random House typically paid TSR on ship.)
TSR's cash flow problems made themselves known outside the company by 1995 or early 1996, when the company started to pay bills late. By 1996, they had stopped paying me and many of the fiction authors the royalties that were due quarterly. They owed a long list of individual writers tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that's just the debt for late/unpaid fiction royalties. Freelancer payments of other sorts had become routinely late, too. As we know now, TSR was in a financial tailspin.
If a dictate on the production schedule--shortening up the time between project completion and ship--came down from upper management, that would have been why. The completion–ship gap was one of the few areas where TSR could control the pace of the cash outlay for products. Shortening the gap to one month is ludicrous, of course, but it would not have been unusual for management to go completely overboard on such a dictate. That's just speculation, though. I was outside the company at that point and did not see that dictate play out firsthand.
--James Lowder
RPG Geek has entries for many of the TSR company catalogs from the late 80s and 90s here: https://rpggeek.com/rpgseries/19204/tsr-product-catalogues
Between 1988 and early 1994, when I stopped working with TSR, the overall movement had been to complete products earlier, for a variety of reasons (to provide near-finished books to fiction reviewers who wanted galleys six months before publication, to have more time to schedule for the best print costs, to increase overall schedule flexibility, and so on). By the mid-1990s, the company was completing RPG and fiction material further ahead of ship date than they had in the late 1980s. And that meant an increase in the time gap between when the freelancers were being paid for a product and when the company brought in any money from that same product. (Random House typically paid TSR on ship.)
TSR's cash flow problems made themselves known outside the company by 1995 or early 1996, when the company started to pay bills late. By 1996, they had stopped paying me and many of the fiction authors the royalties that were due quarterly. They owed a long list of individual writers tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that's just the debt for late/unpaid fiction royalties. Freelancer payments of other sorts had become routinely late, too. As we know now, TSR was in a financial tailspin.
If a dictate on the production schedule--shortening up the time between project completion and ship--came down from upper management, that would have been why. The completion–ship gap was one of the few areas where TSR could control the pace of the cash outlay for products. Shortening the gap to one month is ludicrous, of course, but it would not have been unusual for management to go completely overboard on such a dictate. That's just speculation, though. I was outside the company at that point and did not see that dictate play out firsthand.
--James Lowder
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I'm sure part of it has to do with what type of environment you're in (I imagine a smaller shop would be much better suited for Agile), but I've done waterfall for 16 years, and Agile for the past 4. I'm telling you, in my experience, Agile slows down how much work actually gets done because you're spending more time bouncing around ideas no one ever comes to consensus on on rather than have a stricter timeline of checkpoints and documentation to follow. Not once did I have requirements change in the FSD after it had been approved with waterfall. Happens all the time in Agile, which drives the testers mad because the stuff they just spent their time testing now and suddenly becomes irrelevant. LOTS of wasted effort in Agile, especially around that area of QA testing with stories constantly overwriting previous ones that haven't even had that sprint finish yet.
You wrote Ring of Winter? I really enjoyed that on my flight from Portland to Seoul for my first deployment as a young private in the army back in the day. Thanks for the good memory!
EthanSental
Hero
Does audible count for Ring of Winter? Great novel!
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Having worked in companies that ran their key operations on JIT I twitch every time I see the phrase, because far too often in reality Just-In-Time ended up as Just-A-Bit-Late; which is a [female dog] when you're expected to make sales targets on product you don't have...
Jay Verkuilen
Grand Master of Artificial Flowers
Monty Hall, "Haul" was a great parody!
At least in the USA, the show "Let's Make a Deal" was revived several years ago, though the host has, of course, changed. If you spend time in waiting rooms or PT offices like me, you develop a fine taste for Game Show Network shows.
Jay Verkuilen
Grand Master of Artificial Flowers
That seems to be all too common among the kinds of small to medium cap companies like TSR back in Ye Olden Tymes. My dad worked for several, eventually advancing to just below the Vice President level---he was too much of a straight shooter to survive that level---and some of the tales he had of the upper management would peel paint.
One company's ownership had made so many foolish decisions in the bedroom it had serious consequences for the boardroom due to all the owed alimony. The owner would travel around the world ostensibly visiting factories to "learn about best practices" but he'd conveniently always end up in places like Bangkok... Manila... Vegas... of course, wife back home would eventually find out and.... Of course, appearances were such that evidently he "needed" to get married again and the cycle would continue.
Another company wouldn't divest itself of unprofitable product lines because the owner "preferred to to hang out with the people in the fifty to hundred million cap group to the twenty to fifty." That's despite the fact that he'd have ended up taking home a lot more money.
This is so pervasive I know someone who is retired now but used to be in a business school who had a productive academic career writing and researching this kind of thing.
You can have a great product that really sets the market and coast for a long time on that but eventually things catch up. That seems, in no small part, to be what happened to TSR. The stuff that late TSR was turning out is great. Take a look at the modules they generated for lines like Dark Sun, Planescape, Greyhawk, and even non-world specific---they're amazing! WotC inherited a fantastic pipeline and some of their best work was started under TSR.
Jay Verkuilen
Grand Master of Artificial Flowers
A senior professor I knew in grad school had done a good bit of work on the topic of business failures. Especially a company that had a killer product generated by a founder can often last a long time on the momentum started that way, which can cover for a lot of business shenanigans. But yeah, TSR sure did seem to have some real problems along the way until they finally died.
It may be hard (and sobering for those of us of a certain age) to realize, but WotC has owned D&D for nearly as long as TSR. TSR went from 1974 to 1997, so 23 years, and WotC has owned it for 22....
Parmandur
Book-Friend
Yeah, it's not like Scrooge McDuck levels, but D&D brought in a lot of money: in the end, it wasn't even lack of sales that seemed to do them in, but they overextended themselves in expenditure and loans...
Dungeonosophy
Legend
JW: What did you argue with Bruce Heard about?
Jay Verkuilen
Grand Master of Artificial Flowers
It sure did, and they had some failed Venger... er, ventures, such as when Gary Gygax went to Hollywood looking to break into the larger entertainment industry. But they survived that and even managed to do fairly well despite the loss of Gygax as the founder for nearly a dozen years.
Parmandur
Book-Friend
They were playing Russian Roulette with their whole business model, they got themselves in trouble way before 1993: they had a very strong run of luck.
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