The Business: How The Convergence Does Its Work

The intro is disingenious, because he goes on to explain why SOBS' aims are valid and viable- even likely.

At 4:50 he gets to the point, which is that there is a critical mass of Current Edition players that can't work the game's rules and procedures manually. They rely on an external tool that does all of the work for them, and all of their information is in that application; this is no different than people that can't do basic Four-Function Math (Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction) without a calculator.

This is a growing trend. The trend exists to exploit a Revealed Preference that Normies, Casuals, and Tourists routinely express: they want things to Just Work. Throwing all of the rules, procedures, and system mastery into an external application that also took care of the bookkeeping made Current Edition very appealing for Normies, Casuals, and Tourists. It is the lack of same that filters them out of the wilder Tabletop Adventure Game hobby.

See this? This is who SOBS is aiming at- not the hobbyist.

What else do these people hate? All of the other Conventional Play Known Issues. They want to play The Game not Your Game, they want to play when and how they like for however long they like, and they don't want to have their fun subject to either the incompetence or malevolence of others.

Guess what SOBS' Next Edition plans solves? All of those Known Issues.. How? By (slowly) making it into a full Mobile Trash Gatcha Game.

This is something Conventional Play refuses to accept is going to fuck them, despite decades of evidence showing that Videogames do Conventional Play in the ways those three segments (which always outnumber the Cargo Cultists, and this is a numbers game), because they keep making things that their supposed audience does not want.

"Where's your app?" is going to catch them by surprise when SOBS normalizes it; that there is already pressure on Pathfinder to conform says a lot right there and others will follow if they want to stay in this game- and they will either follow SOBS all the way or collapse trying.

The Bros, coming from below (vs. SOBS from above), provide the hobbyists an out from the oncoming collapse while throwing the commercial operations to the wolves. All it will cost them is the admission that the winning team is not the public-facing one, and this will filter out a lot of poseurs and similar lukewarm folks right there because they cannot countenance having something they can't farm clout with.

Then those that remain face the gates of the Clubhouse where more of them will get filtered out because they either cannot or will not (usually the latter, due to Ego Defense reasons) conform to the real hobby's norms and Best Practices, which are far more than what Conventional Play demanded of them heretofore and yet is devoid of the Known Issues of the same.

The Conventional Play commercial operations, having no prospect funnels to keep their revenues going and no recurring business due to hobbyist abandonment, cannot avoid going under. It's just going to play out over a series of years of decline and contraction before, one by one, they close up and shut down or reconfigure into self-funding hobby operations.

No new people due to the recruitment channels ceasing to exist. No way to keep going due to the real hobby showing how to do without them (at a time of severe, and lasting, economic contraction; "you can play for free forever" is a huge selling point). That's a one-two punch that takes the Cargo Cult out within a decade or so, leaving only some folks doing POD offerings and shlepping PDFs for passion more than pursuit of lucre while working real jobs or living off investments elsewhere to pay the bills. The business, by then, is dead and won't come back.

Good.