The Business: Weaponized Contempt In Action

Shot:

Dungeons & Dragons executives think “the brand is really under monetised”.https://t.co/FBcKhlwPMR pic.twitter.com/RXYjtEduEd

— Dicebreaker (@joindicebreaker) December 9, 2022

Chaser:

Wizard's response to the rumored removal of the homebrew content license is also not encouraging while they also talk about how to monetize DnD further.

OGL is going to change and I have zero faith it won't be a target of monetization. pic.twitter.com/Oub80bIgWD

— Grummz (@Grummz) December 11, 2022

Desert:

Wankers By The Beach really love to shit on their audience, don't they?

Not exactly. This has happened too often now to be mere incompetence in action, but rather deliberately fostered incompetence.

What you are looking at here is the corporate leadership taking notice of a long-running problem in tabletop RPG business practice and making it a deliberate business model, or rather the first part of it.

What Grummz is pointing out is the second part, where LessThanTwoRPG is going to go.

This is the now-known pattern of "Create the Problem, Sell the Solution" that underlies all of the most predatory monetization schemes of mobile trash games and other Free To Play games out there, which means that--once again--we're seeing Whaling coming for tabletop RPG hobbyists. This time, it's the same sort that videogame players have endured--and, sadly, accepted--for years now.

"But I can just play Pathfinder."

First, Paizo would do the same thing if they could. Second, Network Effects, son!.

The reason Wankers keeps getting away with this is because Official D&D remains the biggest game in the space by such a large margin that its only real competition is Older D&D editions and D&D's counterparts in other media (such as Globe of Gankcraft).

The other point to consider is that Wankers, like Stupid British Toy Company and SpaceMace39K, have made it a deliberate policy to churn through their audiences for maximum cash extraction. Wankers does not care if there is resistance from the present users; they have every intention of culling them from the network in favor of a replacement cohort for whom no thought about how bad Whaling is ever enters their minds.

If you think the contempt that British Toys has for its customers, and the expectation that edition churn matches audience churn, is galling then what Wankers is doing will pale by comparison because they're going to do worse to its customers over a product that has even less physical presence than SpaceMace does.

The end result is that Wankers wants to turn Current Edition into a Game-as-Service model, where all of the Free To Play/Pay To Win Whaling is baked into the cake and whomever forks over the most cash wins every single time- so long as they are compliant with the Death Cult.

This has other implications--see my post at Empires today--but that's beyond this blog's scope.

What I counsel is to make ready to catch those bound to be shaken out of Wankers' user network. Some will want to keep playing RPGs, and they will be in the perfect liminal state to be receptive to learning how to #winatRPGs and thus satisfy long-frustrated yearnings that Current Game refuses to acknowledge even exist.