The Business: Big Daddy Wizards Ain't Going To Do The Heavy Lifting No More

The Cargo Cult faces an existential threat.

Wizards of the Coast does all of the heavy lifting, as it defines Conventional Play. Every other publisher relies on that heavy lifting for its own offerings to claim any form of commercial viability, regardless of whether or not it is.

The only other tabletop publisher that even tries is Games Workshop. Companies that could take up some of that slack due to having properties that are popular in videogames or tie-in media (e.g. Catalyst Game Labs) make no effort to advertise the tabletop end where prospective customers will see it; there are people to this day that do not know that there is a tabletop version of BattleTech or Shadowrun, believe it or not.

Go ahead, tell me what other tabletop publisher advertises itself anywhere outside of Conventional Play organs where Current Edition players are omni-present.

You won't find any. There is no one else even trying to bring in Normies and make Hobbyists of them. This includes Games Workshop, whose tabletop advertising game outside of existing organs is woefully inadequate; if you didn't go out of your way to look, you stand a great chance of never knowing that (a) Fantasy existed at all and (b) 40K comes from a still-published tabletop game.

"But-"

No, Anon. You seriously underestimate the sheer pig-headedness of Big Normie. Normies do not go out of their way for anything; if you want Normies, and thus Normiebux, you have to go where Normies are and get in their face.

This is why Wizards getting into mainstream retail is a big deal, and why Games Workshop having highly-visible stores of their own worked so well for so long (albeit mostly in the United Kingdom). When was the last time you saw anything from Palladium Books at Walmart? When was the last time you saw a licensed Conan game at Target? Hell, Wizards didn't even sell their licensed Wheel of Time game properly when they had the rights.

If you never set foot in a game store or a comic shop, chances are good that you never heard of Legend of the Five Rings, RIFTS, or knew that Call of Cthulhu was a tabletop adventure game and not an IP trademark for videogames, low-budget films, and some boardgames.

Plenty of people have seen zombie-themed boardgames. No one outside of game store customers ever saw All Flesh Must Be Eaten.

Do you get the point yet? All of these publishers rely upon Wizards of the Coast, and TSR before them, to funnel in all prospective players for them- they leech off The Only Game That Matters AND ALWAYS HAVE.

Now Wizards of the Coast is abandoning tabletop entirely. Do these publishers have a plan, either as individual businesses or as a business segment? NOPE!

This is the Cargo Cult in action, thinking that all they need to do is to keep doing the same thing they've always done and players will miraculously keep showing up and buying product (that most never read, let alone use). That's not how things work.

Over 20 years ago, when WOTC first bought out and took over TSR, Ryan Dancey went over the books. This is the same examination that led him to creating the Open Game License, which means that it was already known over 25 years ago that Only Current Edition Matters and that Current Edition does all the work while everyone else markets to Current Edition players- not the public at-large.

I ask you again: What happens when the one party doing all the work, holding things up like Atlas, shrugs it off and dips out for good?

Given the present conditions, and the lack of anyone--mainstream, indie, OSR, SJW, something else entirely--even signalling a move to take up that slack and fill that void I can tell you with confidence what's about to happen.

via GIPHY

Listen up, Conventional Play. You have no future unless you're ready, willing, and able to replace all the work Wizards (and TSR) has done for 50 years.

Otherwise, you know your options: follow the leader to Vidya, downshift to self-funding hobby (and get a Real Job elsewhere), or stop this madness and Return to the Clubhouse.

If you think you have a future carrying on, you better put in some hard work to be worthy of it.