The Culture: Life After The Wizards Leave, Part One: The Opportunity Of The Void

Wizards of the Coast abandoning tabletop means that there will be a massive void erupting in the tabletop hobby business.

Cargo Cultists think that they'll be able to step into that breach and take over without much issue. They will be shocked at how wrong they are.

As I have said previously, Wizards does all the heavy lifting. Wizards does all of the marketing outreach to prospective players that are outside the hobby, does all of the funneling of those prospects into the hobby, and on-boards them into the norms of Conventional Play. Everyone else leeches off of these efforts.

Yes, everyone.

The current C-Suite at Wizards knows this, and they are aware of their totally dominant position, such that (like Games Workshop) they can claim that their product is a separate and distinct hobby from all other fantastic adventure wargames- and they are not wrong.

They aren't correct either, but they get away with it because the closest competitors are so far behind that no one that isn't already familiar with the hobby has heard of them.

The Cult's Challenge

Not all Cargo Cultists are complete retards. The best of them are in touch with reality to some degree, and as such they can see what needs to be done to step into that breach. They see that they need to get into Normie-facing stores like Walmart or Target. They see that they need to have a storefront presence on Amazon, not just their own site or on DriveThruRPG. They see that they need to get in the faces of Normies with targetted advertising campaigns, sales funnels where buying product (and teaching them how to use it) is necessary.

The problem is 50 years of inertia, coupled with a normative culture of incompetence in business. "To make a small fortune in RPGs, start with a big one" is not just a joke.

There are very few properties that originated within the hobby that have any presence outside of it, and that usually means either tie-in media (books and videogames, usually), such that I can name them here: 40K, Warhammer Fantasy, Pathfinder, Shadowrun, BattleTech/MechWarrior, Call of Cthulhu, Vampire The Masquerade.

Games Workshop are even worse than Wizards about the Walled Garden business model, having pioneered the concept decades before, and even then most people think of it as a videogame property first and foremost- not a tabletop one. Why? Piss-poor processes to convert vidya players to tabletop players, starting with a piss-poor product (including the use of that product) vs. vidya; it is cheaper, easier, and more convenient to do wargaming via the PC games than their tabletop counterparts, and any Cargo Cultist aiming to replace Wizards has to solve that problem or end up failing as GW has.

The Cult's challenge, therefore, is to become basic-bitch competent businessmen complete with basic competence at sales and marketing to people who are not already hobbyists. They need to get into mainstream retail outlets and advertise in mainstream media offerings or they will wither into irrelevance.

The Bros' Time To Shine

The Clubhouse shall become the castle for the Bros to operate out of, using it to raid Conventional Play as it weakens and show the increasingly disaffected and dissatified hobbyists that (a) there is a better way and (b) there's a veteran cohort ready and waiting to show you how it's done so you too can have the fun you've been seeking all this time.

This is not a product-driven alternative, but a service-driven one by default. Players teach other players how to be good hobbyists, as iron sharpens iron. Some sad sacks that can't hack it get filtered out, and that's fine; lots of people are present right now that should not be because they are wrong about what this is and how it works- and they would be far more happy, satisfied, and thus be better people if they just went where they belonged instead.

The products that remain, having been shorn of all the status-striving "Please validate me! I'm really a High Status leisure pursuit!" bullshit we get rules for full and complete games that are clean, clear, and consist as well as competently crafted. We do not get drowned by Yards Of Books about things no one reads or cares about, wasting wood pulp and ink in a backdoor attempt to craft a Setting Bible for some IP Brand business (what all the tie-in media is for).

This is harder to sell as there's no product to sell, and what service is offered is there more as a gatekeeping mechanism than anything else- same as a real Club does.

But, instead, the tradeoff is the recreation of social networks like what the Boomers enjoys before they atomized them all in the '80s and '90s as they pulled the ladder up behind them. It's just going to be online as often as not, with all that such entails.

And with more and more Conventional Play outlets shuttering, taking their crap non-games with them, what remains will be The Games Worth Playing- and that is a number small enough to be counted on one hand with digits missing because those real games can handle far more than they get credit for.

Product Or People?

Given the generational pattern of incompetence by the Cargo Cult, I'm betting on the Bros filling the breech by teaching others How To Win At RPGs and How To Filter Out Non-Games.

Taking a curious kid aside, showing him how to play--and how to win--is far more effective at filling that void than some publisher that doesn't have what it takes (and none of them do, not even those who otherwise could like Catalyst) to replace a massive entertainment corporation so large that its affairs get mentioned on CNBC and its properties get made into (very bad) movies.

(Oh, how we could have had a banger of a BattleTech series before that abortion of a cartoon; just watch the FMVs done back in the day.)

And, quite frankly, the hobby will be far better in the long-run by receding back into the underground where it came from- back to being a leisurely hobby pursuit, and not Big Corporate Business.