The Business: The Cargo Cult Keeps Ignoring The Signal

Conventional Play Cargo Cultists still aren't getting it.

SOBS' layoffs target the legacy--Tabletop--side of the business. The digital side, where SOBS is taking Current Edition, is fine.

In conjunction with Hasbro, SOBS keeps signalling by both word and deed that the Big Move is going down. Yet the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play keeps ignoring these signals, as both the commercial operators and the end users continue to think that they are the target audience for Current Edition.

They are not.

The recent releases are hold-overs, place-holders, glorified glad-handing while the real work continues apace: transitioning over to the Walled Garden, where Next Edition is an all-digital, always-online Live Service business model using Gatcha-style monetization and bots to eliminate known issues choking Normie acceptance of the product (i.e. having to rely on human Referees).

The reactions to the changes in the new version of the rules for Current Edition show that they are redesigning the game to be digitized and robotized, a necessary change for the medium transition to succeed- especially if you intend to replace human users in certain functions for bots, and SOBS intends for bots to run the game specifically to kill off that notorious choke point for both Normie acceptance and for monetary revenue maximization.

They already announced the funnelling of the users into Beyond and the VTT ("Sigil") as the primary playing place. The rest of the business and design changes all point in that direction, and yet somehow the Cargo Cult still thinks they are the audience for this mess.

They are not.

Some of them are sensing that a massive seismic shift is underway, and some of them even sense that SOBS could disappear from the Tabletop medium. None of them figured out that the business and design changes also mean a change of target audience. That blows my mind; they cannot comprehend that changing a product so severely means a change of the audience being targetted.

"But they won't succeed."

Yes, they will. Removing each and every element of the tabletop model that gatekeeps Normies out means that the mass market success they're after is going to happen, especially when it is an all-digital Live Service business model. Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, Nikke: Goddess of Victory, etc. are all exactly this model and they are orders of magnitude more profitable than Current Edition.

Put that on mobile phones and it's guaranteed to succeed. They aren't stupid--you don't hire mobile trash people if you're stupid--so they're doing that. They just haven't confirmed it yet. Existing mobile devices are already capable of handling the execution of such applications, so this is not wishful thinking- it's informed speculation.

Why would anyone cognizant of these facts conclude that the legacy audience is what SOBS wants? Yet the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play does just that. They will suffer for it, and behind the gates of the Clubhouse I will stand unphased by it all.

Those that ignore the Colony Drop deserve to be incinerated by it.