Who's the Biggest RPG Company?

[Dendread]

I mean, besides Wizards of the Coast, does anyone know who the biggest tabletop RPG company out there is? I'd be interested in what people think/know in terms of both body counts and profitability.

 

[Aus_Snow]

White Wolf.

 

[Crothian]

Ya, White Wolf.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

In general, White Wolf produces very evocative settings and publishes books at relatively cheap prices. I love the setting of Exalted, and I've bought all the core books of the new World of Darkness.

However, their playtesting of game mechanics often leaves something to be desired...

 

[Aus_Snow]

Who's the third biggest, Steve Jackson Games?

And yes, agreed - White Wolf games vary in their quality of fluff, but their crunch is consistently very poorly thought out and/or implemented and/or tested for bugs. At least, by 3e's standards, say.

 

[Crothian]

I found the new line of WoD to be pretty good rules wise. But it isn't like D&D in which balance was a main goal.

 

[kenobi65]

Who's the third biggest, Steve Jackson Games?

That'd probably be a good guess, though GURPS seems to be a minority of SJG's sales over the past few years (they've been putting most of their resources behind Munchkin, which continues to sell like hotcakes for them).

I start to think that Paizo would be in this tier, too (below WotC and WW). I don't know enough about Mongoose to really comment, but I'd suspect they'd be somewhere around here, too.

 

[Asmor]

FFG's probably somewhere around there, too. Although they seem to focus more on board games (and, indeed, I probably own at least 20 or 30 of their games), I first heard about them in the context of RPGs, so maybe my view's skewed.

 

[jdrakeh]

I found the new line of WoD to be pretty good rules wise. But it isn't like D&D in which balance was a main goal.

Agreed. I'm by no means a big fan of the WoD (in either incarnation), though the new Storytelling System seems to be much lighter on errors and statistical anomalies than the old Storyteller System did. You do make a good point regarding 'balance'. Storyteller/Storytelling has always been about genre tenet emulation, not mechanical balance in the sense that all PCs/NPCs are evenly matched. This never has been and (likely) never will be a goal of Storyteller/Storytelling games.

 

[dmccoy1693]

I thought I heard that Mongoose is #3.