The Business: Hobby Game Publishers, You Determine Your Fates NOW

The receipts keep coming.

This is not typical shitty corpo cost-cutting at the end of the year.

This is the consequence of that aforementioned plan to shift Current Edition from tabletop to vidya, which includes several other related changes as well as people settling internal scores--office poliitics, yo--and a few low-performers getting axed.

The movie failed. The toys, tied to the movie, failed. A lot of overpriced luxury addons failed; that's what's showing up in Ollie's now.

Meanwhile, the core product--the game--is having its print side wound down and both financing and development shifting to vidya. The recent shilling for the custom Virtual Tabletop Top, complete with being riddled with the cancer that is microtransactions, by people like Dungeon Craft (and other "We're against Magic-Users, no really!" shills) is all you need to see to know where Magic-Users and Hassle Brothers are going to go come Hell or high water.

Lest you think that Conventional Play has a future, despite all that's been shown, let me remind you of why the Open Game License came to be.

The reason for the OGL is also the reason for why Magic-Users will kill Conventional Play in tabletop: Tourists go where the action is, and Cultists go where the power is, both of which are different manifestations of Social Proof.

Normies, which is what this "wider audience" is comprised of, run off Social Proof.

Normies prefer vidya to tabletop because of Social Proof. Magic-Users wants Normiebux. QED, Magic-Users wants Current Edition to be a vidya product and IP, not tabletop.

There is no void to fill once Magic-Users quits the medium.

Anyone thinking that Paizo will become just as big in tabletop that Magic-Users is now is delusional. Palladium has been in this positions more than once and flubbed it every single time; they aren't going to do it either. White Wolf could have done it, but botched the execution decades ago and now it's a dead brand. BattleTech and Shadowrun are better known for their videogames than the tabletop games they came from, and now that is also true of Cyberpunk.

Normies will not play Conventional Games. They choose--and have chosen--videogame alternatives for decades, EVERY SINGLE TIME!

The games that endure after this extinction-level event hits will be those that (a) are not Death Cult sinecures or vanity projects, (b) are full and complete games with plenty of subsystems to keep things interesting (Jon Mollison has a post about this), and (c) are built on the Braunstein cornerstone of campaign play with multiple tiers of play and all that other stuff the #BROSR champions.

(Short, non-exhaustive list: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition, Adventurer, Conqueror, King, Classic Traveller. Others will be talked about in due time.)

You, designers and publishers, need to decide your fates here and now.

1. Change medium to digital. Most of you have neither the means nor the will to do this, so this won't prove to be viable.
2. Downshift to self-funding hobby operation. Most of you will have to take your pride and beat it to death to do this because it means finding another revenue source to pay bills.
3. Be a retarded faggot, deny that this is happening, go broke, lose everything, and watch your life's work wither and die- and your future with it.

Oh, there's a few other options, but most of you won't relocate to a cheaper foreign country to play currency arbitrage like the RPG Pundit did and despite having several successful examples shoved in your faces (BattleTech, SpaceMace 39k, Fightstick Fantasy) most of you won't shift emphasis out of tabletop RPGs to a more lucrative part of your IP exploitation schemes.

So most of you, currently Fucking Around, are going to be Finding Out once Magic-Users makes their big move and you find out that your big hopes are so much cope.

And after seeing so many of you do this dance for decades and refusing time and again to learn ONE GOD DAMNED THING I am out of sympathy for you as a class. If you refuse to get ahead of this and make preparations now, don't come crying to me when I make the Smug Face as it all turns to shit and collapses around you.

Either you change your ways, and your products, because you confess that #JEFFROISRIGHT, or I get to quote the Geto Boys at you.

As for where we're going as we go back to the past, that's the weekend's posts.