The Culture: Behold The Process Of Reprograming A Captive Cult

Yes, this is engagement bait. Both of them. That said, it's astounding how willfully ignorant Conventional Play channels are about all of this.

The Error: "The new edition will launched like past editions, so it's just like 5e's launch."

The Reality: The trend, which Hasborg and Sorcerors By The Sea have signalled for years now, is to transition the Brand out of Tabletop entirely. Beyond is the caravansarai in the liminal state between Tabletop and Videogame media.

The budget and publishers for non-English editions got cut. SOBS exited non-English markets. Physical product is depreciated as a Collector's Edition thing, which means that the primary content publishing route is digital and that means via Beyond.

The kiling of Ala Carte purchasing is meant to drive users not only to not picking and choosing things individually, but to acclimante them to thinking that they can only play what SOBS provides; yes, this means that homebrewing for Current Edition is on the chopping block, and I do expect that this will be killed in Beyond sooner than later.

SOBS knows what Network Effects are, and gives no fucks exploiting that dominant position to push through these changes fully believing that most Conventional Play Cargo Cultists will go along with it regardless of what they say or even what they do in the short term. So long as the hobby is framed as a Consumerist pseudo-lifestyle Brand, this is the case.

The process of the transition is going to go down over the incoming edition. The acceptance, despite recent events, for Beyond is well past SOBS' expectations; this is now the norm for Conventional Play and everyone knows it. The bugmen, Causals, and Tourists currently infesting the space love this stuff and will offer only token resistance to these changes and those to come; they like the idea of centralization of thought and deed, so Everyone Playing The Exact Same Thing The Exact Same Way OR BE UNPERSONED! is their jam.

(For the bad actors, this gets them off because now they can punish their enemies; for the more Normie sorts, this is pure Ego Defense behavior to make conformity tolerable.)

The Professor is the one that gives the game away. He knows that YouTube rewards Current Thing adherance. A new Current Edition is the new Current Thing, so he is well aware that no one in the Cargo Cult will give two shits about his own OSR emergency toilet paper once that drops and he is incapable of doing what it takes to change that by his own (unwitting) admission. He needs that attention, so he'll shill for the new Current Edition because he wants to be part of the In Crowd so he can continue Consuming Product.

As for Pat, it's going to also Go Along To Get Along when the edition change hits because it too is slaved to the Cargo Cult despite disliking it and likewise lacks the grit or the perspective needed to break that Narrative framework and actually change anything. It too wants to just Consume Product and be part of the In Crowd, so exclusion is to be avoided.

That, folks, is a cult and you're now on hand to witness it being reprogrammed in real time to accept the new dogma. Scientology envies this power.