The Business: Copium-Huffing Doesn't Change Reality, Cargo Cultists

Oh no, Cargo Cultists, are we still talking about this?

There's more where that came from.

There's a lot of reactions, and they all share a common thread:

Cargo Cultists are willfully ignoring two things in their retorts:

1. Everything Ben Briggs talked about got proven conclusively over 20 years ago by Ryan Dancey when the Open Gaming Licence was made.
2. Everything that Ryan Dancey said then about TSR to justify the OGL's existence got proven again when Magic-Users By The Water illegally broke it last year.

As far as Conventional Play is concerned, only Current Edition matters.

All these naysaying anklebiters are mainlining Copium like a strung-out whore hooked on heroine- and that includes a lot of Death Cult adherants in the Cargo Cult like those linked to above (and their "friends").

The real question none of them ask is "Why would Magic-Users do this?"

To which I roll my eyes.

Magic-Users By The Water, being run now by former Microsoft and Zynga executives, are well aware of the orders of magnitude more profits and control to be had in vidya over tabletop.

This is not 40 years ago. It is not 30, 20, 10, or even 5 years ago. The technological gap between media is IN VIDYA'S FAVOR!

Why would some Normie curious about Current Edition play your off-brand knockoff? They won't. They'll fire up their Steam/GOG/PS+/XBox GamePass accounts and buy Baldur's Gate 3 instead.

No, Professor. No, Bob. No, Pat. No, none of you Cargo Cultists and Tourists can compete with that.

*Pundit appears!*

No, you OSR guys are just as fucked. The Gold and Silver Box games are on Steam and GOG now, as are the other non-branded SSI games using the same format. Normies would rather play Fallout and Wasteland than Pozzed By The Apocalypse, Jagged Alliance 3 over Spycraft or Ninjas & Superspies, Evil West or Desperados over Aces & Eights or Deadlands, etc., so without Current Edition to subsists like the bottom-feeders you are--taking the castoffs and calling it a coup--are going to find nothing but falling fortunes once The Only Game (And Product) That Matters leaves the tabletop medium entirely and takes the business with it.

I hope all of you are ready, willing, and able to either scramble to follow Magic-Users to vidya as your primary medium (e.g. Catalyst, Games Workshop), or to shut down business activity qua activity and instead be a self-funding hobby ala Basic Fantasy, because your days of being a viable business (unless you do as the Pundit did and expatriate out of the West; he can make this work, for now) are numbered once the load-bearing pillar propping up Conventional Play in tabletop pulls out and takes that pillar with it- collapsing the entire category.

Don't think that's the case? Ask a Normie how many tabletop miniature wargames there are. If you get more than one--SpaceMace 39K--you get two (it and either FightMace Fantasy Battles or BattleTech). That's what product category collapse looks like, and it can happen within just a few years of the inciting event.

You Cargo Cultists and your non-games have no future.

The future belongs to the past. The future belongs to the Bros.