Quote from: jgants;276234Here's a couple that are the opposite case:

* Rifts did much better than Gamma World (despite TSR's large resources and marketing) because it had better art presentation, a more interesting world, and a lot more kewl powerz.

* Traveller did much better than Star Frontiers (despire TSR's large resources and marketing) for a variety of reasons - Traveller got there first, Traveller was marketed more towards adults, and Traveller was simply better written.

In both cases, you are comparing the "successes" to a game that is an also-ran game by TSR. Which again, gets me back to my "supported by a company that cares about it."

Quote from: Captain Rufus;276527Rifts was really contemporary with TORG though.

OK, here's my shot for Rifts vs. Torg:

* Rifts had a much cooler name.
* Rifts had a cooler, more uniform concept.
* Rifts had better artwork.
* Rifts had cooler character concepts.
* Torg's system was decent, but a bit gimmicky/overcomplicated (cards + die rolls, and the die rolls just had you read a chart to get a bonus that you applied back to a stat then compared to a target number) and thus not really superior to Rifts.
* Torg was designed to lump tons of metaplot in from the very start.
* Torg didn't have nearly as much marketing effort behind it as Rifts did.

Quote from: Caesar Slaad;276530In both cases, you are comparing the "successes" to a game that is an also-ran game by TSR. Which again, gets me back to my "supported by a company that cares about it."

I don't know about that.  In their heyday, TSR gave an awful lot of support to marketing and producing expansion products for both Star Frontiers and Gamma World.  They just never caught on enough to be really big successes.