The Business: There Is No Future Tabletop Gaming Business

All of the problems in the tabletop adventure game hobby stem from abandoning hobbyist-for-hobbyist creation in favor of turning into a commercial pursuit for profit.

"So what's the problem?"

You Get What You Incentivize

The hobby products that I and others have played, written about, and revived from the Memory Hole are all products that are not compatible running a business for commercial gain.

The incentive for a business, as repeatedly demonstrated by Revealed Preferences over the decades, is to take its own side vis-a-vis pursuing commercial gain by way of ensuring that customers keep buying from the business because they feel the need to do so in order for the product to work as intended.

This is part--not all, just a part, but a big part--of the reason that tabletop products became products and not actual games.

The incentive is to ensure that You Are Never Complete. Fear Of Missing Out. Cult Psychology. Deliberately crippling "core" products to sell the cut parts as "supplements" (something videogame players are now seeing normalized in AAA products), using Organized Play to reinforce CultThink and FOMO via Officialdom, eventually transitioning to a Lifestyle Brand business where Brand is what matters and not the game.

All of this is incentivized.

It's not just the immediate incentives. There are second and third-order levels to this that drive all of the deeper issues with the business side of things, and how horrific and exploitative it has become.

As this is the case, and there is such severe punishment for going against those incentives, there is only one viable course of action.

Change The Incentives At The Root

The only viable course of action is to cease commercial activity entirely and return to pure hobbyist activity.

The incentive to non-commercial activity is to deliver only what is necessary for a hobbyist to partake in the hobby. There is no Brand to build up, so there is no need to develop a distinctive look or waste time on other things that are surplus to requirements. Rules manuals return to being actual technical manuals, not excuses to make overly-wordy coffee table art books or sneak in tie-in media for Muh Brand (as there is no brand).

There is also no incentive to design a Walled Garden business model where you not only sell the manual, but (more importantly) all of the play aids and game tokens required (i.e. the Stupid British Toy Company model).

Instead, there is incentives to teach hobbyists how to do things for themselves like making miniatures from scratch.

The means now exist to use social pressure to shift the incentives. No, I don't just mean alternative technologies to acquire and use manuals and play aids. I mean the means to spread the word about those alternatives and pressure people to use them.

It's as simple as making it fun and cool to go non-commercial and cringe to be a Pop Cult soyjack Consuming Product.

And later we get into specifics about restoring the non-commercial focus.