I am not surprised that people do not comprehend why SOBS wants to take The Only Game That Matters from Tabletop to Vidya.
The common hobbyist, and certainly the curious Normies and Tourists, do not consider second and third-order effects of decisions made. They look at what SOBS is now confirmed to have in the works for The Only Game That Matters in its Next (soon to be Current) Edition and react with either indifference or confusion.
- SOBS goes all-digital for Next Edition.
- SOBS has no reason to support physical retail outlets as the entire game and its entire business model is all-digital.
- SOBS has no reason to support in-person play for the same reason.
- SOBS has every incentive to put the entire thing behind a Walled Garden that they alone control, so that happens.
- SOBS has every incentive to redefine what "RPG" means to be the all-digital model that they use. (This is on deck; pay attention over the next year or so.)
- SOBS has the only marketing campaign that matters because only SOBS bothers to get in Normies' faces to pitch their product at all. No one else even tries.
- SOBS depreciates legacy customers--that would be all of you naysayers and your totally-never-going-to-stop-playing-sure-Jan pals--because they already got as much as they're going to get out of you. You are no longer the target audience.
- SOBS uses their uncontested marketplace position, with supreme Network Effects and unparalleled knowledge of Revealed Preferences, to target the new demographic that is Terminally Online and draw them into "The New Edition" that is specifically catered to them and their Revealed Preferences for usage and tolerance for monetization. That, put simply, is GATCHA MONEY!
- SOBS makes a big splash, follows that up with frequent updates that maximize FOMO pressure to induce the audience to swipe that card to stay competitive (and yes, Next Edition will be far more competitive than you're used to) and includes all of that bot-powered content creation/delivery/execution so that you never need to play with others (and be slaved to their schedules) ever again. You will even be able to do this on the go as it will be mobile-friendly; swipe your way to REAL ULTIMATE POWER as you commute to and from your wage cage!
- Do it all again in a few years when Next Edition drops and the entire thing resets.
And as for those second and third-order effects, well don't say that I didn't warn you.
- SOBS abandons print and thus physical retail. This is not only your local store, but also Walmarts and similar Normie stores (like Target). Normies no longer see ANY hobby games and so forget that they exist. This is not unlikely; if you don't spend a lot of time in the few remaining corporate book stores, your Normie friends already forgot decades ago.
- The rest of the hobby publishers cannot make up the difference, forcing stores to pivot away from hobby games to other product categories, to downsize, or to close. Stores also cut out use of in-store play space due to the use case no longer being present. (This is why you also see stores lean harder on Manga, Magic, SpaceMace 39K, and Fightstick over others in their product category; Network Effects matter all the way down.)
- The lack of Normie-facing presence for any hobby products, the collapse of Normie-facing prospect funneling into the hobby (which only SOBS does), and the collapse of specialist retail outlets due to SOBS pulling out and taking all that revenue with them means that local hobby centers also collapse and thus Conventional Play withers and dies because there is no way to replace those lost to attrition because SOBS' new model satisfies Normies' Revealed Preferences better than Tabletop Conventional Play ever could.
- Conventional Play in Tabletop collapses in a decade, and disappears in two or three.
What people need to understand is this is a "gradually, then suddenly" process. In gaming terms, this is a Damage Over Time effect with the damage increasing with each tick until either it runs out or the target dies.
That's what the second and third-order effects are: the consequences of a back-loaded Damage Over Time effect as applied to an entire hobby scene and its commercial operations.
The Cargo Cult of Conventional Play cannot even admit that this is a threat, nevermind bother to do something about it by building out replacement capacities and get out into the faces of Normies themselves, and a lot of people who've been around long enough to see the reality of Network Effects and Revealed Preferences wholly change the hobby and the related business operations more than once are the most in denial about all of this.
You're fucked. All of you.
There will be SOBS, there will be the Clubhouse, and there will be a wasteland where Tabletop Conventional Play once stood. That is the future.
Choose which way while you can, because soon SOBS will choose it for you.
You make excellent points, as always. Would it be possible for another publisher of TTRPGs, such as Goodman, Paizo, or Troll Lords, to get a boxed set that introduces their game into the retail stores in front of normies? If WotC abandons traditional tabletop play and physical retail distribution, could this leave an opening for another company?
ReplyDeleteI'm not in the gaming business, so my knowledge is limited. But it seems like a company like Hasbro, or any other tabletop company, might benefit from giving a VTT or app option for their game, but also have a traditional tabletop option available as well. The latter is less profitable, but serves as marketing for their digital game, helps keep awareness of the brand alive, and appeals to hardcore or traditional gamers, who often serve as ambassadors for the game or the hobby as a whole. For example, Hasbro made a lot of money from their Monopoly app, but as far as I know they are still publishing the physical board game.
What it would take to do that would require turning their publishing companies into corporations like WOTC, which has all of the incentives to go the rest of the path that WOTC took and is taking. All you would be doing, if you succeeded, is to reset the clock until this all happens again- and Paizo would be the first to follow because they already have videogame adaptations that have a following.
DeleteThe return on investment for print vs. digital is so bad that there is no reason to keep that legacy business going when you get into WOTC's position. That's why the recent books are considered, pitched, and sold _as collector's items not tools to be used._
The other thing to consider is that Monopoly doesn't have a user generated content issue. Current Edition does, and WOTC needs to either yoke that or kill it to make this transition happen and succeed; given that the target audience has even less people who do make their own content than on Tabletop, going all-digital makes it trivially easy to control what (if any) user generated content is allowed to be played.
The future for Official D&D is going to be alien to what we have now, but very familiar to those that think of RPG as a form of videogame and not as a tabletop hobby.