The Business: The Real Hobby Is Not Commercially Viable, Nor Should It Be

Jeffro took the time to make this observation yesterday at his blog.

Take these two ideas and put them together and you get real life gaming groups that grow over time rather than consistently fall apart after six sessions. Even better, the type of games that develop from these ideas can not only entertain whoever happens to shows up, but they can also scale up to host as many people as arrive as well. These ideas not only were pioneered in the sort of environment that Bradford Walker terms as “the clubhouse”… but they also in a very real sense cause such social entities to spring into existence.

He's referring to these ideas:

1. Braunstein
2. 1:1 Timekeeping

Jeffro, again, is right.

Playing the Real Game creates the conditions that makes the Clubhouse desirable and inevitable because only the Clubhouse can handle this effectively.

There is something else that is also going to become obvious, something that detractors already notice because it directly affects them: it kills the desire to Consume Product.

Recall the other day when I posted about how retailers have long known what SOBS' present and past leadership knows, what all Soup Aisle PDF merchant know, and what all Conventional Play publishers know: no more than 20% of the people in Tabletop buy a damned thing- at least 80% are Free To Play Andys.

The Clubhouse doesn't care about this. The reason is because the Clubhouse environment is anti-commercial by its nature. You don't need Consumerism when you particpiate in an ongoing campaign where all parties in the action, all content generated, and all additions contributed are done by the participants for the participants.

You don't have a viable commercial marketplace in such an environment. You have, at best, self-funding hobbyist publication because anything else is just a waste of time and resources to pursue- unless you change the product to make it viable, which is what the Cargo Cult did by lobotomizing the game into crippleware and selling what got cut as a line of supplements. (Where do you think the videogame market got the idea?)

Back in the 1970s the options to stay in the hobbyist space were painfully few and yet become a popular pasttime. That is no longer the case with digital and Print On Demand publishing now the norm for all but the most massive economies of scale (and that too is soon to disappear), and as things go on it will become obvious to all that Consumerism is not the way to go.

Tick. Tock.