nothing to see here said:
Don't forget their antipathy of the 'suits'...a combination of anxiety that their hobby is also an industry...a fear that those in control of this industry are non-gamers who don't respect the hobby...and a fundamental belief that, just by being big fans of a game, they can make better marketing decisions than any business-type...no matter what their education or experience
Well, the typical gamer's antipathy towards "suits" is well justified IMO.
Remember "she who shall not be named", who owned TSR and made D&D while openly expressing her contempt for the people who play it. Remember how corporate mechinations forced TSR away from Gygax and into the hands of corporate "suits" who didn't know the game and didn't really care about it. These same non-gamers who earned TSR the nicknames of "They sue regularly" and "T$R" for their overaggressive copyright policies that sued fans for posting a homebrew spell or class on their website?
Those wonderful professional marketing decisions included removing "Demons", "Devils", and Assassins from D&D to placate the Religious Right, the flop of Dragon Dice, the fizzle of Spellfire and SAGA Dragonlance 5th Age. Remember Ryan Dancey's famous open letter about saving D&D, and even he remarked with sadness about reading the corporate minutes of TSR and how they morphed from the notes of gamers who loved the game into the terse dictation of lawyers with no connection to gaming? Just because you have an MBA doesn't mean you're competent to produce something with as much tradition and eccentricities as D&D, you need to know the field and know it's traditions and practices. The business world is littered with the corpses of companies run by executives who didn't know the field they were in and didn't think it mattered because "all companies run the same".
So, many gamers consider "suits" to be the enemy, because in the past they have been antagonistic to gaming and their "professional" business skill nearly drove the game into oblivion, and gamers know that those "suits" don't want a better written, better designed game, they want whatever will sell the most units, and if that they thought that meant turning D&D into a boardgame they'd do it in a heartbeat and tell us "tough". At the absolute best, they are uneasy allies, because they do not share our interests and at best their goals can be compatible with ours (the success and proliferation of D&D, but how it succeeds and proliferates is room for major contention).
We were lucky that WotC, before it was owned by Hasbro, rescued D&D from the wreckage of TSR and gave us a well written, heavily playtested, open-source version of D&D. We fear that the game may fall into a slump of mismanagement and there won't be anybody to ride to the rescue.
This is the real fear of 4e, the fear that businessmen with the legal rights to the game will produce an edition that sullies the name of D&D in a blatant cash-grab, and that we as the gaming public will be stuck with a new and worse game in-print and seeing something we care deeply about wrecked while we have little recourse.
