The Business: Lore Proves A Lack Of Commercial Viability

Another Jeffro observation:

This follows from another well-known complaint about Conventional Play: No one gives a shit about your fucking lore.

Lore creation by publishers, especially by people paid via Work For Hire contracts, exists solely to build up the property as a Brand for non-hobbyists to consume. As with what Jeffro said about a few related topics:

Players really don't care about your big brain house rules. They already don't want to listen to you talk about your campaign updates. They definitely don't want to hear about your "lore". House rules? Even less so.

The BEST source of campaign information of ANY kind are OTHER PLAYERS recounting their experiences or else mentoring each other on sound tactics and strategies. Ideally, the referee should be the most boring person at the table.

Back to the Lore matter: the purpose for Lore, for a publisher, is to develop a Brand that is better suited to a Narrative medium: film, television, comics, novels. Not games. A competent publisher, in developing such a body of lore, does so with the aim of creating a Series Bible for the Brand that hired guns and corporate partners will adhere to when doing work for the Brand. (Note: There are no such publishers in the hobby. NONE!)

Lore can be consumed without participating in the game that it came from, which is the point of its existence from a commercial perspective. The ongoing success of lore channels for BattleTech and 40K and Fantasy show this in action, and thus become unpaid Brand Ambassadors doing marketing for the Brand.

Over time this non-gaming audience will grow to eclipse the hobbyist audience and the publishing operation will pivot operations to cater to this new audience over the original, eventually to discard it entirely as a legacy element that impedes the Brand-focused business that the publisher has become.

Games Workshop is already well down this path, as is Wizards of the Coast, and a lot of corporate business media pushes the drive to depreciate the original core audiences in favor of the more numerous non-gaming one attracted by the Brand-focused material that lore publication cannot help but to attract.

If you are a commercial operation in the hobby, you have no reason to not go down the route of writing reams of lore because this effect is a desirable consequence- assuming, again, that you are a competent operation. A mature form of this business has no in-house ludological capacity or acumen at all; that's all licensed out to corporate partners- just look at Hello Kitty as a successful example.

(This also puts the lie that Tabletop gaming is itself commercially viable; if you have to spin off subsidiary product pure to use as leverage into a different medium and business where the actual money lies, you are not commercially viable.)

An honest hobby publication, operating on a non-commercial basis, has no need to do anything but to produce a competent technical manual for the hobbyist game and then leave well enough alone. The hobbyists, as end-users, will take that turnkey product and make their own content to use with it through playing the game as the manuals command them to do. There is no need to publish lore, including setting material; let the users do that themselves, for they shall do better than you ever could.

That is what AD&D1e and several other classic Fantastic Adventure Games allow; that they are not exactly just a set of technical manuals is a flaw put into the design due to commercial incentives. The rest are lobotomized crippleware meant to enable Endless Product Slop, through which they can also enable Endless Lore Publishing and thus turn the product into a Brand that becomes the road to where the money is (and thus the path to selling out).

This needs to stop for the good of the hobby. Destroy the slop and the lore. Replace it with teaching, training, and building up new hobbyists; the Clubhouse is the Dojo.