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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JohnNephew" data-source="post: 494192" data-attributes="member: 2171">You had written, "If you want sales your product better be GOOD." and "he's just not buying YOUR crap anymore when there is better stuff out there."  I was trying to illustrate how, in this kind of market, having good product, and even having good product that the gamer is buying, may have little bearing on the survival or profitability of a company.In fact, a company that produces garbage but is ruthlessly efficient at collecting bills -- even as much of their product sits unsold on store shelves or is consigned to dumpsters -- may survive, while a another whose products are snatched up and beloved by gamers may go bankrupt.Sure, companies create barriers (though perhaps we mean different things by the term).  Some retailers have told me that they're starting to require an advance copy of a D20 book if it's from a new publisher; this is creating a barrier, where 18 months ago they would have ordered anything D20 sight-unseen.  Some distributors are declining to carry small D20 publishers directly, insisting that they instead get a fulfillment house to carry them (and nothing requires the fulfillment houses to do so; they can throw up their own barriers of requiring a certain level of quality, or an investment in advertising, or whatever they like).As time goes on, more of the middle men will set up more stringent hurdles for the explicit purpose of reducing the number of titles on the market.  Up to a point, more titles are good; beyond a point, the added titles increase costs and risks while not increasing revenues.  To protect themselves, the retailers and distributors will develop means of choosing some products over others (and those means will not necessarily be based on product quality).You also write, "You scenario assumes something common to all markets up until, say, 3 years ago; Imperfect Information."  If you are implying that there is perfect information in the market today (or coming very soon), I can only say that I find that preposterous, the economic equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.  There may be more avenues for information, but the proliferation of titles degrades the value of those avenues, and even the greater number of information avenues adds friction to the system.  People do not have infinite time to evaluate all of the options, let alone all of the opinions available on all of the options.  With a proliferation of choices, it's not sufficient to study reviews of your choices; you have to study reviews of the reviewers, to determine which ones provide reviews that are of value to you.  Information itself is a product that needs to be evaluated and judged, even if it is "free," because finding, receiving, processing the information is not instantaneous, and there are irreducible elements of subjectivity in all evaluations of "quality" for things like RPG products.You say, "I won't be tempted to buy product 'B' after reading 5 bad reviews here (or elsewhere). I'll buy product 'A' after reading 15 good reviews."  I'm not sure where you'll find those twenty reviews -- certainly not on ENWorld, which probably has more reviews than anywhere else.  In the early days, there'd be a half dozen or more reviews of every D20 release.  But today?Just looking at Atlas Games, I see that we have 19 books that are in the database and are on the market.  Here's how the number of reviews breaks down:0 reviews: 1 book (the most recent)1 reviews: 8 books2 reviews: 1 book3 reviews: 4 books4 reveiws: 1 book6 reviews: 1 book8 reviews: 2 books9 reviews: 1 bookOf the nine books released in 2002, only two have more than 1 review.In any case, this talk about how perfect information on products is or isn't doesn't really bear on my original point, despite your claim that it invalidates it: Even if fans love your book and are buying it whenever and wherever they can, the way things work in the real world, you can still wind up going out of business.I'd have to agree with you there, even if I find myself far more on a pragmatist side of the debate than the idealist/theoretical side.</blockquote>

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