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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grainger" data-source="post: 7658605" data-attributes="member: 6779234">It does seem crazy that I can go into the small town near where I live and buy a Starter Box (from a chain book shop), and yet the number of people working in the industry is so tiny. For a product with relatively large distribution/availability, that just seems out of whack to me, but I guess if you spend a lot of time on a forum, the subject you're discussing seems far more popular than it really is.From the discussion upthread it seems the biggest two RPG companies, Wizards and Paizo, have about 30-50 employees between them (in D&D's case, presumably it shares resources with Wizards as a whole so its staffing numbers would be higher if it just produced RPGs). Presumably, all other RPG companies have much lower staffing levels, if they even have dedicated full-time staff, so the total industry is tiny. I guess Fantasy Flight might have some dedicated people, but AFAIK they work on other games. Steve Jackson Games makes its money from Munchkin, not GURPS...Pretty depressing that there's no money in our global hobby, and hence next-to-zero chance of making a living in the industry, and that it seems TSR in the 70s and 80s was riding a fad, not something that's repeatable, so even if they hadn't mis-managed it, they were never going to remain at that size. I guess a mega-successful D&D movie could turn things around hugely, but other than that... Maybe another "D&D is evil" type scandal...?</blockquote>

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