The Business: Bullshitting Helps No One, Professor

The Professor is late to the party here, but hey.

Yes, showing the chain of ownership is a nice value-add.

But again the Professor exhibits both his understanding of the problem and his cognitive dissonance in dealing with it: "I believe that indie games are the lifeblood of the hobby."

Professor, you've been around long enough to know that what you said is a bold-faced lie. Ryan Dancey proved this with a pile of receipts 25 years ago!

Indie games do sweet fuck-all for the hobby. The majority have always been D&D Only Stans, and Sorcerors By The Sea knows that very well. You, having been around for the launch of Current Edition and how it sucked all the air out of the room for everything else (including Pathfinder, the only not-bearing-the-brand D&D that even blooded D&D) the day it launched.

That's right, years of anti-Official D&D momentum wiped out with the flick of a wrist as everyone and their mother instantly flocked to new Current Edition.

That's what happened. You were there. You saw that happen. You know from experience that what you claimed about indie games is bullshit; in a medium wholly and utterly dependent upon Network Effects "the lifeblood of the hobby" is always the dominant user network, i.e. Current Edition.

Every other game--and certainly every indie game--could cease to exist tomorrow and no one would notice or care. That's how irrelevant indies are to the hobby.

Only D&D competes with D&D in Tabletop. Everything in Tabletop is an Also-Ran and all indies are Never-Weres; the common hobbyist is correct to see that anything but D&D and the D&D-like games in other niches are the only ones worth playing. Everything else can be, and should be, summarily dismissed as a waste of time and money.

In reality the only competition Current Edition has is with videogame alternatives like World of Warcraft or Divinity: Original Sin.

All of this is driven by the inherent incentives that comes with operating as a commercial endeavor, so you won't be able to blame the Death Cult for this: this is Mammon Mob territory.

If you want indie games to be viable, you have to kill the commercialization of the hobby. You won't eliminate the Network Effect issue, but you will weaken it enough to make it worthwhile to do anything but stick with The Only Game That Matters.