The Business: The Sorcerers Cast Mass Charm On The Influencers

Pat reports that a lot of Current Edition channels are cheap whores.

Sorcerers By The Sea bought those channels to help promote Next Edition via sponsorship.

The audience is not happy about this, and they are right to be unhappy, as this proves that (a) they have no integrity and (b) they can be bought stupidly cheap.

If you're going to be a whore, charge dearly for your favors; you should have pushed for six figures upfront and generous backend residuals in return for setting your reputation on fire and pissing off your audience- no one respects someone you can afford at the cost of skipping an item or two on the Dollar Menu. That's how cheap these folks sold out for, relative to the buyer.

"But why sell out?"

Pat explained it: YouTube amplifies existing Network Effects on top of artificially cooking things via algorithm manipulation, so the only Tabletop videos that get sufficient traffic to make advertising revenue non-trivial is Current Edition and speculation on Next Edition. The commercial incentives reward being a sellout whore. This is why you get someone like Professor Dungeon Master shitting on SOBS one day and then shilling for them the next, to the point of eagerly being bribed so they can keep the attention, the clicks, and thus the revenue flowing their way. Advertising shares, product/service sales, and neo-patronage alike pushes this.

In short, this is Mammon and not Molech making this happen.

Did everyone take their 30 pieces of copper (because they couldn't be bothered to negotiate for silver)? No. Did enough? Yes.

Which means that when Next Edition becomes Current Edition, not only will these cheap whores shill for it like they're part of the 50 Cent Army shilling for the CCP, they will line up to shill for the medium shift as more and more things get announced and the game (and Brand) transitions out of Tabletop and into Vidya.

At least the Hellmouth ticket-takers get well-paid and benefit from patronage for their treachery. These people are just Useful Idiots that make folks like the Pundit look like saints by comparison. May they taste naught but ashes in their mouth for the rest of their days.

So long as commercialization of this hobby exists, this will only get worse. The better future starts by going anti-commercial, returning to being amateurs, and going back to the Clubhouse. Earn your living elsewhere.