The Business: The Receipts Keep Coming (On Network Effects)

Network Effects In Action: The Livestream.

They get to the point at 23 minutes in, with the key point at 28 and change: nothing the New Darlings are doing disrupt The Only Game That Matters. The designers confess that they aren't even trying.

As I said yesterday, all "competition" advertises for the dominant player in the niche due to its Network Effect power. Wizards of the Coast knows where it is, which is why they are confident that Nothing Ever Happens and treat the hobby like petulant children.

And people can (and do, I bet) hate Derik for saying so but he's got the receipts. WOTC does this because they are right. Most in the hobby do act like petulant children; they throw tantrums, flounce off like a drama queen, and then come slinking back as soon as they aren't getting to play anything because everyone else doesn't want to switch away from the dominant game in the market niche.

Which means that the stream's transition to Critical Role and its aim to switch off The Only Game That Matters is relevant; audience dropped off hard, harder for Not D&D stuff, and that's from people who are not hobbyists- the folks who watch, but don't play. CR is not yet bigger than The Only Game That Matters because CR does not yet know what the most valued customers for WOTC want that WOTC is not giving to them.

If you do RPG content on YouTube, you feel the Network Effect in a visceral way. The Professor talked about this earlier this year.

Which means that going against that grain takes serious effort, technical magic, or both; most (like the Professor) blend the two or try to confuse the system into boosting it anyway to varying degrees of success- and those that do are other D&D editions far more often than not, or are videos that explicitly compare (X) to D&D.

Network Effects are far more powerful than naysayers think because they don't see past the point of contact; they don't see Second and Third Order effects, and media talking about the dominant party in a niche is one or two degree removes from the party itself. YouTube, besides being a Dominant Network in itself, amplifies the Network Effect of others! You want to pay the bills talking about Fantastic Adventure Games? You talk about The Only Game That Matters. How can vary, and it can vary quite a big, but so long as you do the YT bot rewards you with the ability to pay your bills. This is why you see plenty of WOW and FF14 channels, but sweet F-all about Meridian 59, and so on.

Until you grok what Network Effects are and how they work, you cannot compete and win; all you do is end up captured, neutralized, and assimilated into the system that keep the Master in power. Y'know, like we saw depicted in a certain well-known movie franchise 25 years ago.

You don't defeat the Master without surpassing the Master. The only other viable option is to Go Somewhere Else and Do Something Else (i.e. leave the Network entirely); this is what Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, and HERO (Champions) did to become the D&D of their niche- and, after a fashion, how RIFTS became what it is as no one does what it does better.

You want to win, to beat the Master? You need to find out what the Master is not doing that the audience wants. Then you have to execute better than the Master across the board and keep that up for years on end, first becoming the Apprentice and then challenging to become the Master. The rest is details.

Commercial or non-commercial, the process is the same- only the route to getting there is different, and the non-commercial route gives you superior options for staying on top once you win.