Pages

Saturday, October 26, 2024

The Business: Whyfor SOBS Big Move?

I'll let Mr. Jeff Hogg explain it.

"...We had a space, available for free, that a DM used to run his weekly. After 9 months, the five players had bought nothing. Not even snacks. That is what Hasbro is seeing. From a purely commerce perspective, 85% of the market is unengaged.

With the Black Friday sale coming up, I made sure to announce it to the room. None of the players took advantage of the deals. The GM did.

The next week I went into that gameroom when the DM stepped out for a bio break. I said, 'Gentlemen, in ten months your DM has dropped over 300 dollars to entertain you. We don't have table fees because we assume the loss for sales. If you won't support us, support him.'

That night, they all bought x-mas gift certs for the DM. Here's why I'm torn. The lesson is that the average forever player must be shamed into even being considerate. When there is an untapped market that big, and deeply 'sale-resistant,' microtransactions are inevitable."

(The above is from a Twitter thread, if you care to see for yourself.)

That right there, the parts I bolded for emphasis, is what SOBS talks about when they say that the hobby is undermonetized. They too have attempted all manner of retail-level tricks to get that 80% or so to crack open the wallets and they have failed.

SOBS concludes that the very medium itself is strucuturally incapable of fully monetizing the hobbyists that partake of it. That's why they are abandoning it in favor of Vidya, which has proven that they can monetize every last motherfucker on the planet- just that they can't get the same amount of money from everyone. This came up again over the past week in videogame news reports.

What the meatspace retailers have to accept after 50 years of abject failure to achieve that monetization is that SOBS Is Right About Tabletop.

They need to stop focusing on Tabletop Adventure Games as a thing to stock on the shelves, not when The Only Company That Matters is throwing them under the bus. Just as comics stores are becoming Manga stores to stay alive, TAG stores need to pivot out of a dead end product category to something that actually has superior monetization to stay alive- Magic is still around, despite SOBS fucking that up too, for this reason and card shops are in a better position than TAG shops.

Or they can pivot out of selling product entirely and reform as a Clubhouse with a high membership fee, but too many of you retailfags are not ready for that conversation.

SOBS doesn't want or need you retailfags anymore. They would rather that you all killed yourselves and your shops burned to ash so that the majority of players have an easier time transitioning into the Walled Garden and get on with Next Edition and their far superior business model for the Brand.

You retailfags have no future, no more than the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play, because while SOBS hits from above the Bros are coming from below removing all justification for commercial operations of any kind by putting out hobby products of equal or superior presentation and supreme quality of utility. Either change your stock to something that actually sells to more than 20% of the audience or change yourselves into Clubhouses that select for members with money to spend on a private, secured location. If fucking Mike Cernovich can do this for his cigarfag club, you retards can do this for tabletop games.

The Future Is The Clubhouse.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Anonymous comments are banned. Pick a name, and "Unknown" (et. al.) doesn't count.