The Business: You Don't Need Death Cults To Make Gaming Turn To Shit

I keep saying that Normies don't do Git Gud. Now you have Normie-facing proof.

You don't get much more Normie-facing than World of Warcraft.

What you are seeing here has nothing to do with Mary Sues, Girlbosses, Troon Propaganda, or any other heretical filth of the Molech sort. This is all driven by Mammon.

The Normie, his enabler the Casual, and the Tourist that serves Molech are all the same: They don't do GIT GUD.

The Normie does not see putting forth effort for anything that doesn't get him paid in concrete, if not tangible, terms as a legitimate form of entertainment. Putting forth effort towards a task is how the Normie sees, and defines, work. Work is not fun for the Normie. The Normie defines "fun" as an effortless passtime and videogames in particular as a skillless (and thus effortless) power fantasy.

The Normie that hits a wall when engaged in entertainment feels a visceral betrayal of expectation, an expectation that every single culture, across the world reinforces in everything that Normie sees and does from cradle to grave.

When a Normie plays a videogame that forces him to put forth effort, he gets mad. If he can, he will skip it. If he can't skip it, he will grind easy things to power up enough to overpower it with brute force like a bulldozer. If he can't skip it or overpower it, HE QUITS EVERY! SINGLE! TIME! Then he will badmouth the game, loudly if particularly mad, and other Normies will find out that he's right should they see (or do) it for themselves.

This is why Normies are not Gamers. Gamers do find it entertaining to Git Gud, as the attaining of mastery in and of itself is a desirable end to itself- a worthy pursuit.

This is also why once a commercial operation that publishes games reaches a critical mass, and thus becomes dependent upon Normiebux to continue meeting its objectives, it has to depreciate or abandon the Gamers and that always comes in changing the games to conform to Normie expectations. Maybe, if there is sufficient capacity, the Gamers continue on as a secondary mode for Normies to enjoy the game (i.e. as spectators, which is how E-Sports became a thing) but most of the time there isn't and yet the Normies turn out to not be as dedicated an audience as the Gamers so the leap to them as the primary audience turns out to be a failure- resulting in collapse.

Your videogame market crashes map to this pattern with the reliability of a well-maintained atomic clock.

Guess how different it is in Tabletop? If you guessed "It's not", you get a No Prize.

The lesson is this simple: there is a hard limit to growth for any gaming operation as a commercial enterprise. This makes the MBAs mad because Line Can't Go Up Anymore, which is why you take them out behind the shed and shoot them before they goat-fuck everything into the dirt.

In Tabletop, you're better off eschewing commercial operation at all in favor of self-funding hobbyist publication (and even then, only publishing the one complete turn-key product required to play and not doing anything else). In videogames, this means doing some serious tard-wrangling and herding to keep things within boundaries of both budget and time; mission/feature creep is your enemy and this is hardly impossible even if you're doing Work For Hire on a licensed product. (On sale until the 30th; would be a nice early birthday present.)

In short, there is a reason for the hobby to keep its distance from the business, and it comes down to the fact that all commercial incentives push commercial operations to fuck over the hobbyists for the Normies once a critical mass is reached- and that is what Line Must Go Up Ever Faster inevitably leads towards. Therefore commercial operation is a trap and should be shunned in tabletop entirely while working to reach that state in videogames. Until then, get used to the Mammon Mob turning what you love to shit because it makes them richer faster even if it opens the door to the Death Cult of Molech to poz and pummel it into trash.

Yes, even in Vidya, the future for gaming is the Clubhouse.