This exhaustive history of the RPG industry covers the fate of the companies that were founded in the 1990s as well as the trends and developments during that decade.
The most interesting thread covered one of the biggest players in White Wolf, publishers of Vampire : The Masquerade and related games. I had been aware of these games from someone I knew who took them very seriously indeed, but they clearly brought a lot of new people into the hobby and made good use of ideas like metaplots across different games and crossovers with fiction and LARPing.
The other major story was the financial implosion of D&D publishers TSR and their acquisition by Wizards of the Coast, who were in turn gobbled up by Hasbro. Their story is something of a roller coaster with the new third edition of D&D and the associated D20 licencing agreement leading to something of a bubble as many other smaller publishers rushed out a slew of D20 compatible games only to have the rug pulled out from under them as the terms of the licence were changed, followed by a 3.5 edition with significant differences.
Financial pressure from Hasbro led to a series of redundancies at WotC including venerable names and lead designers, just as they were working on the innovative but critically panned and short lived 4th edition which seemed designed to appeal to players of MMORPGs like World of Warcraft as well as tactical miniatures games. This in turn led to the rise of Paizo with their Pathfinder game which was effectively good old D&D to all intents and purposes, and which at one point looked like it might even eclipse the original game.
It was definitely a turbulent time, but it set the foundations for things to come later.
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