It's still roughly the same social niche though. And the Warhammer miniatures wargame may be semi-mainstream, but its RPG manifestation is much less popular and so only fitfully supported by GW.
That's kind of the point: the same social niche had the power to create a company with shops on many high streets playing tabletop games with little figures and lots of dice.
So for parent comment to suggest that it's obvious for D&D to have stayed so small is a bit odd. It had potential to be much bigger than it was.
I'm not sure if the not-great animation series helped or hindered D&D uptake.
My point isn't that D&D stayed small. The entire US roll playing milieu is fairly large. My point is that the size of this milieu wasn't very likely to effected by how well the owners of D&D managed a supposed budding empire (the original quote compared the Games' growth to Facebook's, remember).
Just as much, you're exaggerating a bit the size of Games Workshop. It's just a game store that also publishes some games [1]. It's got the size of both things but that's about it - it's hard the ups and downs appropriate to those two uncertain businesses. Everyone in the table top game business faces the challenge that once they successful sell a package, their customers can play for years and never pay another penny. This makes game-selling a labor of love rather than empire building, as anyone in business should be able to sell you.
> Just as much, you're exaggerating a bit the size of Games Workshop.
From the Wikipedia link you provide:
> The group reported revenues of £123.1 million in 2011.[28] This is a reduction in revenue of £3.4 million on 2010 but still translated to an operating profit of £15.3 million. In 2011 the company averaged 1,901 staff across all activities.
Not too shabby, especially when they didn't have the Pokemon juggernaut to help them out for years.
