Anyhow, as a result, lots of publishers either started releasing D20 material, or sprung up solely to do so. Many companies released D20 versions of their own, already viable products, with no real market research (and no, ad hoc polling does not count as real market research) and subsequently lost money because the market rapidly became flooded. What was most sad, and pathetic, was the publishers of non-viable games who wasted their time publishing D20 versions or D20 conversion guides. Hint: the reason your game wasn’t selling was not because people had to learn a new system to play it.
D20 as a universal system, with a couple exceptions, was not a wild success for anyone but Wizards of the Coast, and in many cases just ended up being ar resource drain and money loser. (One of these exceptions was White Wolf’s Sword & Sorcery line. And guess what? White Wolf has the money and talent to make a slick product and market it well. I buy games (and try to play them) based on a setting that is cool (or compelling, call it what you want, to me) and a system that at least doesn’t seem to get in the way of things.
Similary, porting/writing your application to/in .NET or Java (or changing it so it supports one of both of them) is not going to magically make it popular. It needs to address the needs or wants of the person using it. When I develop for the web, I almost always use PHP. It was specifically designed for web use and integration with HTML. .NET and Java were not. Now, to be fair if I needed to deploy the application in a distributed manner (say, for performance reasons), I might consider Java/J2EE, because it addresses problem better – though this is not a feature intrinsic to them. Thus just serves to further my point though: the right tool for this job changes. J2EE becomes attractive not because it’s a universal language/platform, but because it supprts deploying distributed applications. (This isn’t to say that you can’t write distributed apps in PHP, just that J2EE supports this model better.)
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