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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JustinA" data-source="post: 3473011" data-attributes="member: 51618">TSR did a lot of things wrong.1. They steadily cheapened the quality of their products. I used to be able to fairly accurately date any 2nd Edition TSR product by looking at the font size and the size of the margins: Both steadily increased over time as the word counts steadily decreased.2. At one point they went around threatening to sue any fans who put fan-created material up on their websites. (Decades of slowly accumulated fan-lore was actually wiped out of existence during this period. Most of it has never re-appeared publicly, although I retain some small hope that private archives still hold it.)3. They generally patronized their fanbase. The owners of the company were convinced that the average D&D player was or should be a 12 year old child, and they treated all their customers like 12 year old children. Since the average D&D player is not (and never has been) a 12 year old child, this generally didn't go over well.That's what they did wrong in terms of satisfying customers (and there are many more examples where that came from). Stupid business decisions were also legion.1. They repeatedly divided their customer base so that every single release was steadily being marketed towards a smaller and smaller portion of the pie: The most to 2nd Edition was bungled and many fans were left playing 1st Edition. 2nd Edition products were then sub-divided across dozens of product lines. And then they introduced the Players' Options rules which further sub-divided the AD&D fanbase.2. But what actually killed them in the end, according to all accounts, was their mismanagement of their paperback book division. Basically they treated the book division the same way they treated the RPG division (larger fonts, smaller word counts, not willing to pay to retain or attract talent)... and the book market bit back quicker. TSR got hit with massive amounts of paperback book returns and this essentially pushed them into the bankruptcy that WotC rescued them from.3. Producing products and then selling them for less than it cost to produce them. (No, seriously, they were apparently doing this a lot.)This I think is the most telling bit from Ryan Dancey's letter (which I see someone else has linked to): "In today's hypercompetitive market, that's an impossible mentality. At Wizards of the Coast, we pay close attention to the voice of the customer. We ask questions. We listen. We react. So, we spent a whole lot of time and money on a variety of surveys and studies to learn about the people who play role playing games."What happened to this spirit? Why has WotC turned a deaf ear to its fans?</blockquote>

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