The Business: Not The Win (Or Own) It's Claimed To Be

One of the folks who previously attempted to steal credit from the #BROSR is back again doing something that, at first, is very different.

First, Beast is only talking about Kickstarter. Not Indiegogo, not other crowdfunding platforms, not folks using Patreon (et. al.). This is not the business as a whole, where Current Edition dominates and is really only challenged by Past Editions and a rotating handful of also-rans.

Second, Beast is only talking about the presence of projects to back and the money raised. As regulars and veterans know, this does not translate to actually being played- yet another decades-long issue that Jeffro summarized with "Yards Of Books" (alternative: "The Shelf of Shame").

But the stinger is at the end, where Beast slyly bring up the shift in the Narrative in the last few years- coincidentally when the #BROSR took off.

Beast is good at this. He relies on the viewer conflating "projects backed on Kickstarter" with "success in the hobby", creating an image of something being far more influential than it really is.

from Imgflip Meme Generator

Or, to put it bluntly-

from Imgflip Meme Generator

All that money raised. All those projects backed. All those graphs and so on are utterly meaningless without piles of Session Reports to back it up!

Without that, all you have is a barely-disguised form of Patronage that could be mistaken for money laundering by people far less charitiable than I about all of this.

You have Art Therapy products disguised as games, Theater Kid bullshit disguised as games, and more than a few Fuck You Dad projects pretending to be games. None of them have any real audience, don't get played much (if at all), and when they do reveal themselves to be boring wastes of materials by boring wastes of people. They are useless wastes of resources.

And as such, they have no right to exist. They are surplus to requirements and unfit for purpose.

Beast isn't stupid. He has an idea about how the situation really is in tabletop, or he wouldn't be shading and weaseling like this. He is not a friend of the hobby or the hobbyist; he is wears the skinsuit of a Pop Cultist, but he operates like a Death Cultist.

And in doing this, he's trying to hide how explosive the #BROSR has been to the hobby; the Bros have passed "First They Mock You" and are now in "Then They Ignore You" territory, complete with attempts to scrub the Bros from the discourse entirely. This too shall fail. It will fail for the same reasons Current Year AAA fails with the real audience.

REAL PEOPLE WANT TO PLAY REAL GAMES!

All this Kickstarter crap is as counterfeit and catamite as he is.

There is sweet fuck-all liminal space in tabletop adventure games. Real D&D occupies most of it by itself; the rest is split between Classic Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, and (again) a few also-rans. Don't let him convince you otherwise.