The Business: A Look At A Possible End State For SOBS And Current Edition

Remember how I've been saying that videogames do Conventional Play better than Tabletop? It's gotten worse for Tabletop in the last year or so.

"But there's no videogame that replicates the immersive (Ed: That's a meaningless Container Word, perfect Nominalism tool.) experience of dungeon crawling with your friends.

Folks, welcome to the Fantasy Adventure Extraction Game. First person, team-based, Player-v-Player AND Player-v-Environment (PvPvE) where you only keep what you loot if you get out of the dungeon with it.

Links:

• Dark & Darker (site, Steam)
• Dungeonborne (Steam)
• Legacy: Steel & Sorcery (Steam)

Sorcerers By The Sea are taking Current Edition from Tabletop to Vidya. Imagine that the final state is something like these, but scaled down into a mobile game and riddled with microtransactions to make it Pay To Win. (Don't laugh; Dark & Darker already have that.)

Don't think it can't be done. Go look at the Tech Specs behind current generation mobile devices- not just the Steam Deck or the Nintendo Switch. They are beefy enough to handle this, especially as this style of game (like the modern/futuristic Extraction Shooters they forked from) are Hub-and-Instance archtecture like Destiny 2 (RIP) and Guild Wars (the original).

The loot you get from running delves gets used in the hub to upgrade your man and give him bonuses when in the field, just like how Conventional Play operates. The presence of PVP is actually a step, something that is a stronger pull than Conventional Play's Get Along Gang bullshit; someone in Vidya reads the #BROSR and knows where the Real Game comes from as well as what is truly on the table. (But falls way, way short of what Real D&D is.)

SOBS has a problem if it doesn't accelerate, it does if it does not, and it does if it goes too hard too fast.

SOBS needs to accelerate, but it has to be coming in the wake of this new style of game reaching a critical mass and not alongside or ahead of it and certainly not behind it.

The reason is simple: as Conventional Play, in terms of play, is already this model (minus PVP) so there is no good reason not to hitch the wagon to it. Instead, SOBS (and Hasborg) would be wise to foster all of these games in order to cultivate the business environment for their own efforts to succeed.

But that would require both corps' C-Suites to not be basic bitch MBAs, and I have no evidence for that as yet.

There are other possible end-states, such as using the architecture for Baldur's Gate 3 as the basis for a mobile trash based model, but this? This would be their best one to commit to at this time, especially if they go all-in on bots so players can lead a bot team on delves instead of having to talk to other players.