The Business: Revealed Preferences Matter

I see that I need to explain this again.

Look how many conventional players had their minds blown by the "freedom" they had in Baldurs Gate 3.
Agency is sacrificed for Courtesy in conventional campaigns.

— AlchemicRaker (@AlchemicRaker) August 18, 2024

This is an objection to my position that videogames do Conventional Play better than Tabletop across the board.

I do not say so idly. I have 40+ years of Revealed Preferences to back this up.

In short, pay attention to what people DO not what people SAY. But, since there's handy explainations with more nuance to be had, here it is.

People can and do say that tabletop is better, but fortunes have been made selling videogame alternatives to them and not in tabletop.

Videogames satisfy the actual preference of the target audience for Conventional Play. Tabletop does not. Ergo videogames do Conventional Play better across the board. This is not Quantum String Theory.

The reason is simple: Videogames do not have the far greater costs that Tabletop imposes upon Conventional Play participants.

This is what Conventional Play Cargo Cultists do not get: Tabletop has far greater costs, and thus a far higher barrier to entry, than the Normies/Causuals/Tourists are willing to bear. This is not just monetary, and almost never is just monetary; it has to do with far greater Opportunity Costs, starting with the need to play with others and to keep to a schedule (i.e. things those people associate with Things That Matter such as Jobs and Social Climbing activities, and Conventional Play is neither). N/C/Ts do not go out of their way for a God-damned thing, will not work for their entertainment, and certainly will do neither if it is deemed Not A Thing That Matters.

This is why videogames have now, and have for 40+ years, been the Revealed Choice for these people. They can play when they want, how they want, for as long as they want, and they can keep their mouths shut about it if it's declasse without concern for being ratted out. They don't have to put in work to play, schedule their fun like it's a job, or get fucked over by petty bitches and left in the lurch- all of which have happened enough that we have comics and videos about it.

So the objection is invalid because there's decades of proof, in the form of massive sales and in the popular perception that tabletop RPGs are depreciated or dead in some parts of the world (or some social circles), such that "RPG" is presumed to be a videogame original thing.

Plenty of people made millions making RPGs, but over 90% of those fortunes were all for PC and console. Furthermore, recall that SOBS funnels Current Edition through Beyond such that a crticial mass of players can't actually work the game's rules by hand. Good luck getting those people to even look at any Conventional Play product that doesn't offload that work to a phone or desktop app, which means it might as well be a videogame because it's just a few steps from one as it is.

SOBS gets this, which is why they're throwing Tabletop under the bus. Others that can will follow for the same reason. Others that cannot will die pitiful wasting deaths because they won't be able to compete and they will not change to conform to the real hobby that the Bros have ressurected from the dead.

Revealed Preferences matter to commercial enterprises that don't have Patrons to protect them from market forces. That's Conventional Play Commercialism in a nutshell: not protected from market forces, so Revealed Preferences matter- and they don't want what too many offer because they don't give the audience what they want, but videogame versions do. (Again, Baldur's Gate 3 was more profitable and popular than Current Edition ever has or will be. Revealed Prefernces are Revealed.)

Stop with the copium. You can't compete and win against this. The real hobby can and does because it is not Conventional Play and better satisfied those Revealed Preferences.