The Business: No One Noticed Where Wankers Wants The Game To Go

First, this mess with Wankers and the Open Gaming License is having a positive effect in uniting everyone against them. The momentum among them is growing to actually fight this in court, and there's increasing momentum to do just that. Now that Dancey, today, has come out to confirm what others have quoted him as stating is his position that will now just escalate.

However, I want all of you to consider that Wankers have already signalled that the business model all of them--all of us--are used to is not where Wankers wants to go.

Consider that not only did Wankers hire on ex-Microsoft executives, this Williams woman is a microtransaction specialist. All of the announced and confirmed provisions of the v1.1 OGL are not merely aimed at wrecking the established tabletop publishing environment--that is actually secondary to Wankers--but rather reveals what the business model of the future edition of Current Game will be.

What it is?

Remember all of those Network Externalities that Dancey explained to show the value of the original OGL? Now Wankers will wield that against competitors.

Wankers wants "The D&D Hobby" as GW has "The Warhammer Hobby".

The new model Wankers wants to use is entirely digital, primarily on mobile, locked into a walled garden and utterly divorced from all current and past tabletop paradigms of business and usage. They want to be one step away from being Fate/Grand Order, not a paperless tabletop RPG.

Wankers has the means and the acumen to market their properties in a competent manner to a mass audience, something that tabletop RPGs are notoriously incompetent at doing and lacking the resources to do so.

Wankers is counting on this to sell future Current Game to a new cohort of casual poseurs, a terminally online cohort tied to their phones and long-ago acculterated to being nickled-and-dimed via microtransactions. They don't want the game stores. They want the App Store.

This explains all of the Walled Garden provisions of v1.1; they want to pull people into a gatcha-style business model and they want to make it inconvenient or impossible to be effective without paying the microtransaction fees necessary to make the game not suck harder than a Hoover on overdrive. Diablo: Immortal proves that this is a viable model in the West.

You Cannot Compete Against This

That's what the recent statement about "increasing monetization" is about. That's what hiring a non-gamer who's a microtransaction expert is about. That's what having legal advice that's the Open Source version of being a union buster is about. This is not about your Dead Tree/Retail-focused business model of physical products. This is all about turning Current Game into a predatory mobile application that makes bank by catering to the younger generations and their atomization making them ridiculously easy to such dry like vampires do to captive populations.

Don't think this is the direction? YOU ARE WRONG! Forces far greater than what is working at Wankers' C-Suite are driving this. They see that tabletop RPGs are on the cheap end of the divide that comes with destroying the middle class (and thus the middle market) so they're putting in the business model that makes serving the poor profitable.

If you do not recognize this as the force driving what Wankers is doing and how they mean to do it, you will fail.

This is why those Network Effects are now being weaponized against everyone else by Wankers; they see the pie shirnking, and they want it all to themselves.

Solve this problem or die in a ditch.

---

Access issue resolved. There was a DNS outage. Normal activity will resume.