The Culture: One Hand Follows The Incentives, And The Other Exploits The Results

Others have reported on the SOBS Story about Brink's booting.

Which means that others are catching on, as I said last week when this first broke.

What I want to remind you all about is that Brink's replacement will only make things worse. The woman that replaces him is by no means Le Based Gamer Girl. She can't even be a Jobber in the Women's Division.

She's is, at best, a Mammon Mob Mol who is zealously devoted to Line Going Up. More likely is that she is a Death Cultist devoted to the pozzing of the hobby as part of destroying Civilization via poisoning the culture- and yes, the hobby is part of the culture, moreso than many would ever admit. Which means all the things I talked about before on what SOBS plans to do with the Brand and the business remains in place. Yes, both the Mammon Mob and Molech Maniac sides of it.

This is not the way to do it though.... https://t.co/WRuDNMGEQD pic.twitter.com/eljjVngQWc

— YoDanno #DragonlanceDragonlance (@YoDanno) July 16, 2024

That is not changed. They want to end physical products. They want to end player groups. They want to atomize you, isolate you, mindfuck you into a Brand Cult, and (for the Molech Maniacs serving the Death Cult) use that despair to make you vulnerable to taking the poz and becoming one of them.

That is what turning this into a Mobile Trash Pay-To-Win app with a Walled Garden, FOMO everywhere you turn, and Brand tie-ins to keep you in the grip of the Brand Cult will do to you. The Mobsters are following commercial incentives in trying to atomize and isolate you. The Maniacs are assisting the Mobsters because atomized and isolated people are easy to demoralize and break psychologically- and broken people are prime recruits for pozzing into the Death Cult.

The incentive for other publishers to follow SOBS' lead if they can will only increase with time, faster for those already corporatized and publically-listed, but even smaller commercial operations will be compelled to do so because all of the commercial incentives reward it. That's why, as much as I may like some of the folks out there, I say that there is no commercial future in Tabletop. There is only a slow, then sudden, death in commercial terms.

There is a place for self-funding hobbyist operations, but those will become part of Clubhouse organizations over that same time because the revival of the Clubhouse is where the future of the hobby is. The Return of the Amateur is long overdue, but that is where things must go for there to be fantastic adventure gaming on the tabletop in another 50 years as there will be no commercial form well before that point.

Follow the money and be broken and damned. Follow the hobby and be joyful in obscurity. Or quit. That's your fork in the road. Choose. Now.