The Business: Others See The Writing On The Wall For Conventional Play.

I do not know Ben Riggs. I had not seen anything about the business of the hobby from him before this. Nonetheless, this thread is correct.

The Golden Age of TTRPGs is Dead

We are watching a bright and special time in the TTRPG industry pass away before our eyes.

Around the start of the 2010s, we saw the dawn of a new golden age of tabletop roleplaying games. pic.twitter.com/8vYB4cLyHp

— Ben Riggs (@BenRiggs_) January 3, 2024

Magic-Users By The Water scored big with Current Edition. Corona-chan's World Tour bolstered that success greatly.

Magic-Users' former policy, a refinement from when the Open Game License was launched over 20 years ago, encouraged all the also-rans and never-weres to benefit by tacking all of the product publications that are neither profitable enough nor Brand-safe enough for Magic-Users to do in-house.

Last year, Magic-Users decided to stop being a Big Tent. That was the OGL Debacle, and it lead to all these petty-ante parties thing they can compete and win.

The last time conditions like this occured was in the changeover from Third to Fourth Edition. At that time, the online marketplace was just jumping off for the tabletop hobby and the one big winner of that day--Baizuo--decided "We'll make our own Third Edition, with blackjack and hookers!" and created Pathfinder.

This would also, in time lead to the Old School Renaissance scene with thousands upon thousands of slightly-altered B/X retroclones reskinned and rebranded into things pretending to be competition for Current Edition- and some actual, geniune clones of other Brands (if not other Games), with the hope of a proper product in the offering down the road.

As with the TSR collapse that Ben mentions in his thread, there was an ever-so-brief window of time when Current Edition was not the top dog.

In the 1990s, this was a six month window with no AD&D2e product at all. A similar issue occured with PF and Current Edition, for a similar length of time.

The takeaway: At no time was (then) Current Edition ever in any serious competition with anything inside its own medium. IT COMPETED WITH VIDEOGAMES, NOT TABLETOP!

That is still the case here and now, with the addition of board and card games cover the slim marketplace space where vidya and Current Edition are not winning favor.

I lived through the 1990s crash, and the Fourth Edition decline. Every single time that Current Edition goes into decline, it takes THE ENTIRE HOBBY WITH IT!

Even Palladium--one of the most resilient also-rans--feels the pinch. That's how bad it is.

What all the folks gainsaying this do not understand, or refuse to admit (speaking for Matt Colville and others that ought to know better), is that Brand Recognition Matters.

Current Edition has Brand Recognition. It is Conventional Play. Normies, Tourists, and so on refuse to play anything else because it is lacks the Social Proof that Current Edition possesses- and, due to the nature of the medium being driven entirely by Network Effects, all the other utlity that makes this hobby worth a damn in Conventional Play.

This is why every would-be competitor worth a damn goes for Brand License deals from Big IPs outside the tabletop medium (most notably being Uncle George's Space Opera), because that is what it takes to get Normies (and their money) to go to anything but Current Edition. (It's also why Current Edition only worries about Past Editions and not what the also-rans and never-weres publish.)

You'd think, with all the Death Cult attention focused like a laser beam on only the top dog in the hobby business, that these retards gainsaying Ben's analysis could intuit as to why he's right. (Hint: If he was wrong, they'd be all over the place; they aren't- they care only about what has clout and power for them to exploit, and the instant that is gone so are they.)

But if the Top Dog goes down for the count, all that clout and power goes with it- there is no inheritance to be had. Why in God's name do you think Magic-Users is working so hard to move the Brand out of this medium and into vidya? ORDERS OF MAGNITIUDE MORE CLOUT AND POWER!

And no, if Current Edition abandons the tabletop no one will fill that void. That's the load-bearing pillar getting yanked out; the only thing that follows is total and complete collapse of commercial viability because all that of that attention will follow, and so will the money.

Within a decade, tabletop RPGs will revert entirely to a low-status hobby where the only people who publish do so out of passion- not to pay the bills.

And I am here for it. Conventional Play deserves to die. Proper Play will survive.

UPDATE: As expected, the retards at Reddit are doing midwit faggot copium huffing.