The Culture: Life After Wizards, Part Three: People Still Do That? (Or "The Visibility Question")

Wizards of the Coast will go to an all-digital business model for its properties. This includes Current Edition.

This model is a Walled Garden, an enforcable version of what Games Workshop's claim of being "not a wargame, but a separate hobby entirely". This is the claim of there being a separate and distinct "Dungeons & Dragons hobby", defined by being an ongoing payer to Wizards within the Walled Garden company store to a defacto subscription.

Being that Wizards defines what "RPG" is to Normies, Casuals, and Tourist it is expected--and rightly so, given 50 years of past performance--that not only will most current players meekly go along with this change, but that being shoved into the faces of young Normies (etc.) will bring in orders of magnitude more people into the sales funnel to be tapped and farmed for recurring revenue.

What both Conventional Play and Bros alike will be forced to do is to distinguish what they do against this new all-digital alternative.

The Conventional Play faction will have a serious uphill battle, as they have to argue with the facts that what they offer is inferior to what the all-digital alternatives possess across the board: having to schedule your play time, be held hostage to the least committment player, be held hostage to the least competent or mature player (including the Referee) because Rule Zero faggotry is a thing, and have to put up with people wasting their time by not paying attention or being prepared to haul ass and get shit done- among other flaws solved in Vidya alternatives.

But the Bros won't be on Easy Mode; the issue with getting people who are too-long accustomed to doing all things digitally, with all that involves, have a hard time going analog and thus playing the real game. Older players, who do have prior experience on the tabletop, as well as those who have no previous contact with this form of game at all, have proven themselves more receptive. That said, they face the "People do that?" problem because they are not widely visible to Normies (etc.) unlike cyclists, Poker players, etc.

This is the two-part question going forward: "How do we let people know that this is a thing?" and "How do we bring the curious into the hobby?"

For Conventional Play, this is part of the larger "Oh shit, we have to do real business operations!" issue. For the Bros, this is more about getting out there more and more and letting the winning moves heretofore get bigger audiences- people are drawn to confident folks having fun mogging on squares.

"People still do that?" not only is something that can happen, it's something that has happened; Normies (etc.) don't go out of their way for anything, so if it's not in their way they forget that it exists- and YouTube just demonstrated that this is indeed How It Is.

Pat here also explains that YouTube also works off Network Effects.

It's on everyone--not just Wizards--to do marketing and advertising for the hobby and its games. Videos like this is what happens when you don't.