The Business: Now The Data Backs Up The Wizards' C-Suite's Decision To Jump Ship

Bob doesn't know it yet, but he just explained why Wizards is abandoning tabletop for vidya.

At 7:00, Bob notes that the opening weekend for Baldur's Gate 3 saw 1.7 million mans made, vs. 3.2 million mans for the whole of the year on Current Edition Beyond.

That, right there, is sufficient for anyone looking to maximize revenue and profit for Current Edition to justify abandoning printed products and tabletop for the all-digital realm and vidya.

Three days, 1.7 million mans. 365 days, 3.2 million mans. Do the math.

What did I say about videogames and Conventional Play? "Vidya does Conventional Play easier, faster, and with superior convenience across the board." This is your proof.

"But what about-"

They don't matter to Wizards. If they did, Wizards wouldn't have been signalling--and now screaming--that they are abandoning printing product to go all-digital. That means one other thing: there are nowhere near enough non-digital players in Current Edition.

Be it by sheer (lack of) numbers, or (more likely) lack of presence, all-analog users have been rendered irrelevent and have been discarded by Wizards of the Coast. That much is crystal clear to any competent observer, and the honest ones will admit it.

The future of Conventional Play is as a videogame franchise. Get used to it if you want to stay in Conventional Play with Current Edition. Don't be surprised to see others with the means to do so to make the same switch; Catalyst is, at this time, best primed to do so as they already have successful videogame adaptations of BattleTech and Shadowrun (and, with proper incentive, will stop being retards and keep at it).

Oh, and it is good to know that the Default Adventurer is still a Human Male Fighter. Glory to Bob the Fighter!

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Aside: The race distribution mirrors similar distributions for World of Warcraft (Humans and Night/Blood Elves are still most popular by far) and other games have similar distributions (i.e. the further from Man you get, the less popular it is, and that's before accounting for paywalls or other non-trivial barriers to access).

What this means for you, oh Anon the GameDev, is that you can get away with making a fantastic adventure game where Man is the only playable race- despite there being so many other races present in the adventure's fantastic environment. The data is clear that most players, as shown by Revealed Preference across the globe, prefer to play as an idealized Man and not as anything else.

You can also cut the playable archetypes down to just Fighter and Magic-User, letting gear and powers do the rest for customization- including "Thief" and "Cleric" stuff.

Remember the order of OD&D Class creation: Fighter (as "Fighting-Man", a straight port of wargame Hero Figures), then Magic-User, then Cleric (see the story of Sir Fang), and Thief came last. You can, and you should, cut out the latter two--even the latter three--if unneeded as playable options; you cannot ever remove the Fighting Man, as that defines the heroic adventurer archetype.

This will, no doubt, provoke freakouts among Death Cultists. Good. Let them join the 41%.