The Business: Become A Niche Unto Yourself To Win

In the tabletop world, driven utterly by Network Effects, what other option is there but to be one of the Two That Matter in a given niche?

If you can't be the Master or the Apprentice, then the next viable course of action is to carve out another niche and become the Master there. In Tabletop, we saw this happen multiple times.

• Horror: Call of Cthulhu
• Space: Traveller
• Cyberpunk: Cyberpunk/Shadowrun (one of the few with a Master/Apprentice)
• Supers: HERO/Mutants & Masterminds (ditto)
• Generic: HERO/GURPS (ditto)
• Modern: Spycraft (closest this niche gets to a dominant actor)
• Post-Apoc: Gamma World
• Western: Deadlands (because most people have no idea that Boot Hill or any other Western exists)
• Mecha: BattleTech (because no one else, for all intents and purposes, shows up; when the next three titles are moribund IPs, that's not showing up)

There are several other niches that are flat-out dead, and the Generics are (by their nature) going to be everywhere (and performing badly), but before I move on I'll acknowledge specialists out there that attempt to replicate the experience of a particular literary work or tradition: Pendragon (and its fellow), Runequest (and its attempt to be deep in pre-Christian mythology), and (however poorly) Legend of the Five Rings (as before it Bushido and Sengoku).

In each case, being the Niche Definer also allows the game to be the Master in that niche and thus justify its existence vs. the overall Master of the hobby. Arrange them by their clout and you end up with a Legion of Doom with Dungeons & Dragons on top and each Niche Master being a top specialist in a particular field of popularity.

Then there's this Chad:

Palladium Books is the perrenial Also-Ran. Palladium Books is also now a niche unto itself, and RIFTS is why.

Prior to the publication of RIFTS in 1990, Palladium had its not-D&D and its Supers game (and a few others), but it made its bones with a pair of IP licenses: Robotech and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. There was already talk of crossing the existing lines over, but RIFTS made this an explicit feature and thus all other Palladium product lines are defacto supplements for RIFTS- and yes, this includes all of the products published since 1990.

This is not TORG style cross-genre play. This is Kitchen Sink play, and over time we've seen this become influenced more and more by Kevin's background in the Silver Age of Big Two comics (and somewhat by the younger people who've written for Palladium along the way). You are explicitly told that everything Palladium fits into RIFTS somehow, which is what the Conversion Book series of supplements is all about, and the (theoretically) limitless Megaverse can encompass anything and everything.

Which means that you can have a Summoner (Fantasy), an Android (Heroes), a mutant polar bear (TMNT/After The Bomb), and a few other guys show up on RIFTS Earth to Do Things- and that world's natives can go Elsewhere, such that some races and classes can do this explicitly.

Add in plenty things that players care about (gear, powers, classes, races, etc.) and now you have a business subcategory to yourself. That is Palladium.

By making all of its past and present product lines be subsidiaries of, and feeders into, the flagship product line which is itself a massive Kitchen Sink setting Palladium Books carved out not a genre-based niche to dominate but turned itself into a category of its own that is the sole source of product that allows access into the user network. Only TSR, and now Wizards of the Coast, could have achieved this--and AD&D1e is set up to do just that; see the DMG's conversion notes for Boot Hill and Gamma World--but turned away from that route. Now it's Palladium's alone.

This is why Palladium's die-hards sound like long-isolated cultists: they are. Wizards of the Coast wants this for themselves, and their Big Move to Vidya and a technologically enforced Walled Garden is their model to replicate what Kevin did almost 35 years ago with old-school wax block layout, equally old printing tech, and insight into target audience mindsets that WOTC can't get with 100x the money spent on market research.

This is why someone who's a Palladium Only Andy feels justified in being so provincial; he is well-served, he has little issue getting players, especially for RIFTS, and the company that he throws money at doesn't hate him or hold him in contempt. If the Tabletop world had people with competent business instincts, they'd see what I see and figure out that they could do it too- they just can't do their own RIFTS to do it.