The Business: This Is What Conventional Play Competes With

Dear Conventional Play Publishers and Designers:

You do not compete with each other. You do not compete with SOBS directly. You compete with this.

That's right, you compete with videogames. BG3 is just the most obvious example. Larian's other two games, the others sharing that brand, and all other such games (going back to the 1980s) are your competition.

They offer everything that you do with your products. Furthermore, they are superior to what you offer across the board. They are socially acceptable. They don't require any form of scheduling, can be played when and for how long you like, and--given how expensive some of your products are now, despite being digital-primary or exclusive (a real failure on your part)--are either cheaper than anything you offer (some of them are both free and good) or no less expensive at worst.

Yes, including all those folks who'd rather play MechWarrior or PC BattleTech than tabletop. (Especially since MegaMek is free.) the SpaceMace/Fightstick counterpart examples are no less plentiful. "Not needing to schedule my fun", more than anything else, drives this rejection of Tabletop Conventional Play.

The Bros, and thus the Real Hobby, compete and win against videogames because all of those unfavorable comparisons do not exist. Furthermore, the Real Hobby focuses so much on the agency of the player that it becomes the driving force behind play and thus makes designer/publisher-driven content commercially impotent and therefore irrelevant. (It's why you Boomers had to lobotomize the Real Hobby to make it commercially viable in the first place.)

SOBS finally said "Fuck this. I'm going where the real money is."

Mongoose said "We can't do that, so fuck it we're going where the real hobby is."

What are you going to do, because "Carry on as we are" isn't going to be an option for much longer. SOBS' Big Move approaches. Choose. Tick. Tock.