The Business: Wankers' Leadership Got What They Wanted

As I said yesterday, the drama over the Open Game License is--for all intents and purposes--already over.

What will come over the following weeks and months are what, in real terms, is a series of finalization manuevers to attempt to achieve secondary and teritiary objectives.

What will shock a lot of people thinking that Wankers By The Beach has taken a loss is that Wankers' leadership just won their biggest fight: the internal one, the one against the insiders leaking material out in the first place.

The new Wankers head is a non-gamer MBA from Microsoft, and she's a microtransaction expert. She's trying to pivot WOTC's D&D away from its current form into something far more profitable, which means switching to a different customer demographic- and given who this woman is, that means turning D&D into a gatcha-style business with aggressive microtransactions focused around a Walled Garden with in-app purchases.

This entire drama is WOTC signaling that they're dissolving the legacy group and pivoting to someone more profitable. They don't care about the existing players getting mad; they care about the sub losses, but that is--as the leaks showed--considered a short-term hassle.

They want to get atomized friendless losers with money to buy into the Garden, which they can do on mobile, and play exclusively via VTT. The players will be gimped if they don't pay, encouraging transactions, and using the VTT exclusively means that DM autonomy is gutted- and, once a DM bot is good enough, replaced.

Wankers DELIBERATELY antagonized the existing D&D customers with their response.

They want all of you--us--to GO AWAY.

By provoking this reponse, and being confident that someone like Paizo would step up, said MBA Boss Lady can turn to the naysayers sandbagging her and say "See? I AM RIGHT! Fall in line or get fired."

They will. Expect to see some people leave the company--be yeeted from it, really--soon and the rest to quietly get in line behind the bossy bitch.

Expect Wankers to proceed with turning Current Game into a proprietary digital service.

Expect Wankers to expound on the new edition "liberating the player from the need to maintain a regular group" by ensuring that the new service has a matchmaking system that works, which means that all of the problems of Organized Play will be normalized for the new edition and then solved in the most technocratic manner possible.

Expect the gameplay experience to drop from a standard play session length measured in hours to one measured in minutes, likely 10 minutes or less--the length of a single encounter--so that those Gatcha players can get in a game or two as they commute to and from work in their Bugmen hives.

Expect Wankers to proclaim that the service is Free To Play, but in practice you will be gimped without paying real money; due to the amount of SJW Death Cult convergence going on--and the failed attempt at making this a Culture War issue--expect all of the overpowered character options to also demonstrate Death Cult morality while Cult enemies are left at the Free (Shit) Tier, meaning that paying those microtransactions to not be gimped is also a subconscious buy into the Death Cult narrative frame of morality.

Expect Wankers to gut the autonomy of the Dungeon Master by making him little more than a bot to handle interactions that cannot yet be scripted, and then be eliminated as soon as all interactions that fit into the business model's paradigm of play are scripted.

Expect Wankers to then expand this service internationally, looking to break into heretofore hard marketplaces via a new angle that renders them soft: phone-based applications.

Expect Wankers to not only claim that this edition of Current Game met expectations, but that independent audits thereafter to confirm it as fact. Wankers wants what Blizzard got with Diablo: Immortal AND THEY WILL GET IT.

Expect Wankers hereafter to refocus the rest of their business into completing the pivot away from being a tabletop RPG publisher to being a Lifestyle Brand company that extracts value from the brand alone and cares about what its attached to only insofar as it aids or hinders that brand's ability to magic-up massive profits out of nothing.

Expect Wankers to begin explicit disavowal of the tabletop RPG hobby within a year or so, especially if they can pin the failure of the upcoming movie on them.

Where one Williams failed, another is now set up to succeed.

Yes, tabletop RPGs will persist after this. All of you will still be able to make, publish, and play elfgames just fine. However, you can expect any popular sentiment to once more turn against you over time as Wankers now has incentive to smear you--us--as low-status and perfidious villains who should not be accepted in polite company. Old timers remember those days; get used to it, youngin's.