Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
TSR's attempts to control players' use of their materials is probably a big part of why they got bought out.
|
Well ... there was a
lot of corporate infighting, business decisions being made by people who had the business skills of a squid, stock battles (not to mention the whole Buck Rogers thing), and general-purpose piddling contests going on in Lake Geneva. They got bought out for a lot of reasons, but "heading for bankruptcy with JATO assist" was probably pretty high on the list. It amazed me at the time how they hung on as long as they did, despite apparent endless efforts to prove that not only did game design skills and business skills not coexist in the same person, but they did not even coexist in people who could remain on speaking terms.
But in the end, their demise wasn't because they were unable to influence the market the way they wanted it -- that is, to put an end to creativity on the part of their players -- it was that they
were. They successfully drove away the people who would give them money, and continue giving them money for years, and replaced them with short-term faddists who would be content to read the boxed text to their players. Then when those people grew up (or started playing M:tG) TSR wondered where their customers were.
That has, I think, a cautionary message for those insisting on DRM: Their worst nightmare should not be that they fail, but that they succeed. If they do, they, like TSR, will quietly starve in the corner while the people who would have been their customers become someone else's customers instead. TSR learned that if you jerk the players around too much, they'll go play something else. Publishers are going to learn, and learn to the detriment of the market, that if they jerk the readers around too much, they'll go do something else. Reading is not the only game in town -- it's competing with TV, video games, movies, and a host of other things. Make it too inconvenient, and people will decide it's not worth their time, and customers are lost forever. Then there's nobody left to pay the authors, and we bookaholics lose.