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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WheresMyD20" data-source="post: 5710537" data-attributes="member: 60772">You asked for a quote, so here's a quote from an interview with Adkison:Athans: You are the man who single-handedly saved  Dungeons & Dragons from bankruptcy in 1997—how much of your decision  to bring TSR into the WotC family came from just being a fan of the  game, and what did you see in the brand from a purely financial  standpoint?   Adkison: There’s no denying that buying D&D was a  personal highlight for my career. But I wouldn’t have done it if I  thought it was a bad business deal. Did the company make money  on acquiring D&D? I’m not sure. I never did that math, but I think  it would be close. But my job as CEO of Wizards wasn’t to make money for  the company it was to make money for its shareholders. I believed that  owning two of the top three games of the hobby game industry (the other  at the time being Games Workshop’s <a href="http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/catalog/landing.jsp?catId=cat210004&rootCatGameStyle=wh40k" target="_blank">Warhammer 40,000</a>) would make the company a more attractive acquisition target for a strategic buyer of the business.  And, indeed, two years later Alan Hassenfeld, the CEO of Hasbro,  confirmed my strategy by telling me that Wizards was very interesting to  them because it had multiple proven brands. <a href="https://fantasyhandbook.wordpress.com/2011/03/29/the-fantasy-author%E2%80%99s-handbook-interviews-xiii-peter-d-adkison/" target="_blank"></a><a href="https://fantasyhandbook.wordpress.com/2011/03/29/the-fantasy-author%E2%80%99s-handbook-interviews-xiii-peter-d-adkison/" target="_blank">source here</a>I find this quote interesting for a couple of reasons:1) When the interviewer says "You are the man who single-handedly saved  Dungeons & Dragons from bankruptcy", Mr. Adkison doesn't offer any  correction, denial, or response of any sort.  He may not be the one (in this interview at least) saying that he "saved" D&D, but he doesn't seem to mind that statement being made or that impression being created.2) When the interviewer asks him whether he bought TSR because he was a  fan or for financial reasons, he responds only from a financial perspective, particularly one about making the company a more attractive takeover target.Do you have any quotes from Mr. Adkison where he refutes claims that he "saved D&D" or prove that "opportunistic" is an inappropriate word for describing the TSR acquisition?Adkison may be a D&D fan and may have been buying a product he loves and believes in, but the acquisition was a calculated business venture and he made quite a bit of money on the deal. Casting him in a purely positive light as a  white knight who took a huge risk simply because he wanted to prevent the game he loves from  going extinct doesn't tell the whole story.You asked me "what's to be negative about?"  I voted that WotC neither saved nor destroyed D&D.  I view it from a somewhat positive, somewhat negative perspective.  Judging from the poll and the comments on this thread, there are people here who have a romantic "white knight" impression of WotC and want to cast WotC in a purely positive light.  Do you see anything negative about the acquisition or do you view WotC from a purely positive perspective?</blockquote>

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