Ken “Whit” Whitman explains how he learned TSR was dying:
A lot of people ask me: “If you were just the Gen Con coordinator, how do you know so much about TSR’s internal strategy?”
Fair question.
Here’s a little story that might give me some legitimacy.
In 1994, TSR’s VP of Marketing, Rick Behling, convinced Lorraine Williams to spend $150,000 on market research.
That was a MASSIVE amount of money for TSR at the time.
They paid Nielsen—yes, the TV ratings people—to add questions about Dungeons & Dragons to one of their regular surveys.
The results came back.
And I was in the meeting when Rick presented them.
Here’s what we learned:
-9 million people had played D&D at some point in their lives.
-2 million people were actively playing.
-TSR controlled 80% of the role-playing game market.
-The other 20% was “leakage” to competitors.
-On paper, we were crushing it.
But then Rick explained the real problem.
He used a metaphor I’ll never forget:
“The RPG industry is like a water pipe. TSR controls the pipe. But there are little springs—little holes—where water leaks out to other companies.
The problem is, the pipe is only about 7 years long.
Most people get into D&D, play for roughly 7 years, and then get out. Forever.
They don’t come back.”
That’s when I realized TSR was in trouble.
Because if your entire business model depends on:
Capturing new players
Flooding them with so much product they can’t afford competitors
Losing them after 7 years
Then finding NEW players to replace them
…you’re not building a sustainable business.
You’re building a treadmill.
And eventually, you run out of new players.
Rick’s strategy—the one TSR actually used—was this:
“Make so much product, there’s no money left over to buy other people’s product.”
Flood the market.
Capture the entire wallet.
Starve the competition.
It worked for a while.
Until it didn’t.
Three years later—1997—TSR collapsed.
Wizards of the Coast bought us.
Spanked us. Hard. Because Wizards figured out what TSR never did: You don’t win by flooding the market for 7 years.
You win by keeping players for LIFE.
So why was I in that meeting?
I was the Gen Con coordinator.
Gen Con was TSR’s biggest marketing event—30,000+ attendees, vendors, distributors, press.
Rick wanted someone who understood the ground-level reality of the market.
I wasn’t an executive.
But I had access.
I saw things.
I heard things.
I was in rooms where strategy was discussed.
And 30 years later, I remember that meeting like it was yesterday.
Because Rick’s “water pipe” metaphor explained everything:
Why TSR made so many products
Why quality dropped
Why retailers couldn’t keep up
Why players got exhausted
Why we collapsed
We optimized for the wrong thing.
7-year wallet capture instead of lifetime engagement.
I’m telling these stories because:
1. I was there. I witnessed things that aren’t in the history books.
2. For my children. So they understand what Dad did and why it mattered.
3. For the ADHD community. Because my brain is Swiss cheese—I forget names but remember strategic presentations from 30 years ago.
4. For gaming history. Because if I don’t tell these stories, they disappear.
Pacing and quality matter for sustainability. It’s why the UFC doesn’t push it’s events too far in terms of numbers per year. 46 events in 2014 was the company’s all time high, and since then it’s settled into a sustainable 41-42 events/year, with about 1 marquee event/month.
The lesson is clear: Don’t oversaturate your own market, or you’ll get diminishing returns.
Why do we hear so much about companies like UFC and TSR that, let’s be honest, the world could do without?
Maybe it’s because they were created by entrepreneurs with a real creative spark and clear vision.
What discourages entrepreneurs like that from creating companies that would actually improve people’s material welfare, instead of distracting them from their sorry circumstances with creative new forms for entertainment?
It’s overregulation. The kind of creative genius who’d create something entirely new like UFC or D&D or your favorite website isn’t going to slog through dealing with FDA regulations, building codes, ADA compliance, and all that nonsense.
Entrepreneurship won’t really change people’s lives in America until regulation is swept away.
Why?
Well, that, and crappy editors, and crappy management (thus lack of playtesting or in some cases even review by someone numerate).
Oooh. Why wouldn’t he tell us about Gen Con, then? Including its $CURRENT_YEAR state, and so on.
So that’s what d20, D&D4 and whatever they call that unholy mess they have right now did?
I’m honestly surprised UFC can sustain the pace that’s apparently working for them — but running events a bit too often probably saturates demand and keeps out competitors.
I don’t think Whitman claims D&D successfully won all of its players for life, I think Whitman is holding that up as an ideal. I think a small number of highly visible TTRPG evangelists have latched onto TTRPGs for life: Seth Skorkowsky and Professor Dungeon Master might be examples. Those evangelists will not stop even if TSR or WotC or Hasbro goes bankrupt: even if the rules were not available in print, they would vanity-publish them, or pirate them, or something. With that type of evangelist, the company TSR has not won, but the community of TTRPG players has won.
I would go a step further: TTRPGs are best understood as part of a system of cultural practices that can be handed down from generation to generation. Many TTRPG players are childless. Some TTRPG players continue stable long-term campaigns and ALSO have children. Those players are rare (relative to childless gamers), but they are likely to pass on the cultural practices of gaming to their offspring.
A key weakness of TTRPG culture is that many people get into it for some finite span of years and then get out of it forever — often with nasty, resentful stories of how the people they played with were horrible. If those alienated ex-gamers become a large group, then TTRPG culture suffers.
If time permitted, I would blather at length about the sociology of TTRPGs, but I ought to listen more and talk less.