See, that's you seemingly arguing with my point by acting as if what you are arguing against is actually what I said, and yet it's not. Perhaps it is just that you aren't quite following what I am posting. Everyone agrees WotC should and can recruit new players and retain old ones and, in all fairness, draw from other companies' market share if they can. The point is that there is no way that they have done as much of that as it would have taken to be where they were when the wheels came off, let alone be better off.
Hypothetically, with no new customers, they would have had to bring back everyone who left to play PF. We know for a fact that did not happen because people still play PF in huge numbers (maybe more than originally did, judging by Paizo growth). So, once again, hypothetically, just to pick a fraction to get one's head around (could be a little smaller or not), if WotC lost half their market share to PF and needed to replace all of them with totally new RPG customers just to get back to where they were, the overall market would have to double. That's the overall market doubling to allow for WotC's halved share to double just to get back to where they were.
All right, those are just the extreme case scenarios for how it would have had to happen. We know it didn't. People still play PF. The overall market did not double. No way possible the market doubled without everyone (not just you) finding out about it. No one with any sense would try to make that argument. Would someone like to see the RPG market double? Gods, yes! Everyone would love that. New players for all. New customers for publishers. It would be fantastic. But it hasn't happened.
Where does that leave WotC? To get back to where they were, just where they were not better than they were, they need to get folks from somewhere. They need to come from somewhere other than Paizo, judging by PF success. They need to come from more than just overall market growth, since we know that hasn't covered things even if it has grown a little.
Is it possible that WotC's market share in the 3.XE period wasn't the majority of the RPG market? Some might argue that but I would not. But, hypothetically, let's say WotC had a 50% share, lost 25% to PF that they haven't gotten back and the market didn't grow. To get back to where they were they'd have had to take over half of the entire rest of the market. Again, another extreme scenario just to understand the outside parameters of the problem.
But we know other RPG companies are doing quite well. Green Ronin hasn't shuttered its windows. Did companies that no longer exist or do less with RPGs even have half of the rest of the market to fill in the hole in WotC share? Did all other RPG publishers go away and their combined share fill the hole? I don't believe that has happened nor do I think anyone else does. For that to have happened we would have had to see an extensive collapse for the non-Wotc / non-Paizo RPG market such that half the companies who weren't Paizo or WotC withered and died.
So, here we are. The extremes of how to regain that market share have been defined. Despite the cries of some who like to squelch any speculation that might trouble them, we don't actually need hard numbers to get some sense of how things have been going for WotC since walking away from the OGL. No one with a lick of sense could believe they've cobbled together the the kind of numbers they would need to make up for the huge loss they experienced (PF growing, the rest of the market doing well, overall market growth relatively good but not crazy good).
I'm pretty sure that even you, Alphastream, can see what WotC was up against and how impossible it would have been for them to come back from that without absolutely EVERYONE (not just you) being able to see it and unable to refute it. But it didn't happen. I wish it had. It would have been the success story of the decade and GREAT for the RPG industry.
