Quote:
Originally Posted by smascrns
It's simple, buy a business strategy or marting strategy 101 book and you will find it there. And "giant corporation" is a relative concept. At the time TSR was a "giant corporation" in comparision with most any other company producing rpgs.
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No, it really wasn't. At the time that games like Runequest and Tunnels and Trolls were competing with D&D, there was no huge gaming empire anywhere. Later on, this certainly became the case, but if you take a look at the early D&D products they look like something that was hardly done by professionals. I think that you're falling into the trap of a lot of people who have been criticizing D&D for the whole life of the company: Gary and company
built the game. They built it out of what was essentially nothing, I mean come on: if you were going to create a product with international appeal in the days before the Internet, would you ever guess it would start in
Wisconsin of all places?
So yes, I am quite aware of how marketing and branding work, and how they played a role in making TSR go from a group of gamers to the corporate entity that spawned the moniker "T$R," but you need to remember that before there was all the marketing and all of the hype, there was the game. If no one wanted to play the game, and if it hadn't of sparked some interest that comparable products from the same era
didn't, we'd be arguing about one of those other products from the same era instead of D&D. It's just that simple.
--Steve