What did TSR do wrong?

[Thurbane]

I'm just curious, I'm seeing a lot of comments surfacing with the whole Dragon issue that "WotC are becoming as bas as latter day TSR".

As someone who was temporarily out of the hobby when TSR eventually went belly up, what did they do that has earned them this general level of animaosity? Was it marketing practices, poor quality products?

I am genuinely curious. I used to be a huge supporter of TSR and was generally quite happy with them. My D&D group went into hiatus towards the end of 2E, and only regualrly restarted about 2 years ago.

Many thanks - T

 

[Dragonhelm]

You're bound to get a ton of answers here, so I'll just say that they had problems with money management. I've heard a few stories.

Marketing was probably an issue, as was splintering their fan base with too many settings (though what amazing settings they were!).

 

[papastebu]

There were a lot of good things that came out of that company back then. But they had too many addendums to the rules with each new setting to make universal appeal an option. Also, with things like the fighter strength bonus and the like, game balance was a big issue. I don't know exactly what the monetary angle was, of course, but there was something both relavent and prevalent in that area, as well.

 

[M.L. Martin]

From what I've managed to gather, I'm fairly certain that key parts of the woes were massive returns from the book trade (they were pushing a lot of hardcovers at this point, which might have had something to do with it) and overproducing Dragon Dice. In addition, it seems that a lot of their products were underpriced for their production values, leading to losses.

The 'splintering fan base' comes up a lot, but I'm not as certain as others about that, if only because I know that one of those settings (Ravenloft) was pretty much the only thing keeping me interested in D&D, and I'm not sure I was alone. Anecdotal? Yes. But I can't help but notice that TSR was willing to cut the cord on at least three of those settings (Greyhawk, Spelljammer, Dragonlance) when they weren't performing up to par, I don't know if TSR was wholly ignoring indicators on them, despite what some would like to believe. In addition, it wasn't until the runup to 3E that we got a massive purge of the settings. If they were major contributors to the demise of TSR, instead of just low-performance lines that didn't fit in with the new vision for D&D, I think they would have gone sooner.

 

[WayneLigon]

Dancey's letter pretty much sums things up.

 

[Henrix]

I'd like to quote a small part of that letter:

I know now what killed TSR. It wasn't trading card games. It wasn't Dragon Dice. It wasn't the success of other companies. It was a near total inability to listen to its customers, hear what they were saying, and make changes to make those customers happy. TSR died because it was deaf.

 

[M.L. Martin]

Dancey's letter pretty much sums things up.

Dancey is also a man with his own view on where the RPG hobby & industry needs to go, and I'm certain that informs his viewpoint.

 

[Steel_Wind]

Well...I'm not so sure that's what the poster asked.

Sure - the company nearly went under. But that's just business.. I'm not sure that's the "wrong" to the customer that the OP asked about that earned TSR the animosity of some of its fans. (other than the end result of course.)

And, I suppose, Dancey's comments that the company didn't listen to their customers, is a stone against which any axe can be ground.

The one I remember most from a PR standpoint was that they antagonized the hell out of the their customers by not reacting well to the internet at all. Fan sites were threatened with litigation - overly conservative legal advice over trade-mark protection lead to some very nasty threatening of fans. Even fan module authors were threatened from time to time.

I'd count that as a "wrong" from the fan's perspective.

 

[Lanefan]

From the perspective of the game-player (rather than the business), TSR in its later days just started putting out too much material that simply wasn't very good, and that repeated verbatim too much that had been put out in other material. There were still occasional gems in the chaff, but not enough; and I think I'm not alone in that I stopped bothering trying to find them.

Now, with lots of opportunity to learn what was any good, it's easy to go back and cherry-pick via the secondhand trade. But that doesn't help TSR very much...

Lanefan

 

[Thurbane]

Yes, I'm more looking for what caused the ill will amongst the gaming community, rather than specifically their financial/business failings.