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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Harry" data-source="post: 2600163" data-attributes="member: 5468">Go into a bookstore, not a gaming store, but a bookstore.  The vast majority of the game books you will almost certainly find are WotC.  D&D (at the level of production that it has maintained, especially after 3E) has opened up the doors to a lot of smaller publishers now having their product before the public, primarily because the larger sell numbers of the D&D books has made "Gaming", as a section, profitable enough to get its own section of valuable floor space.If WotC went down right now, do you think that these stores would simply call up even first rate smaller companies like Green Ronin or Expeditious Retreat, and say, "Hey, we have more shelf space, send us more stuff"?WotC has the size and the cash resources to print large enough print runs to widely stock bookstores, and the company is large enough that it will not cripple thier cash flow if those copies are not all sold in the first 30-90 days.We are having a different conversation if you think anyone is talking about WotC "magic"It takes a lot of money to pay for a large print run, and the money has to be paid (in general, and especially for small publishers) before any money is made from the sale of the material.How would you propose that a small company print the bigger print runs, like say the initial print runs for the core books?  Maybe White Wolf could do it, but even the largest third-party publishers have much smaller print runs than the WotC books.Where woould the new company make the money to pay for all of these things?  WotC, even before being purchased by Hasbro, had certain economies of scale that made providing benefits for some group of ten workers cheaper than a small company providing the same benefits for the same workers.  Please explain how it is that you don't see any reason why some other company would provide the same levels of support and production - I could only see this if the new company has the size and finances of WotC.   Where is a smaller company going to get the money to support the same level of print runs, and the same rate of new product release?</blockquote>

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