The Culture: 40K Tourist Failure Reveals How To Fix The Hobby

Yes, this is good news. But that's not why I'm posting it.

I take it back. The Ultimate Guide wasn't just 9/11 for woke Warhammer tourists. It was Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

>40k confirmed not satire
>female Custodes officially sent to the dustbin of history after less than a year

I'm not tired of winning. pic.twitter.com/0mKMXlCOao

— Marshal Bohemond ⚔️⛨ Space Crusader Vtuber (@HMBohemond) December 26, 2024

"But why then?"

First: This is a Network Effect issue. Being the dominant actor in a market niche that relies on Network Effects means that your brand defines the niche, and if your business starts the transition from being a tabletop gaming brand to being a Intellectual Property brand by extending your brand into tie-in media that has sweet fuck-all to do with tabletop gaming then you are heavily incentivized to turn your brand into a cult idol to worship via Consumerism.

That's what Games Workship did, and is doing, with 40K while trying to more openly poz Fantasy. (See the feminist Bretonian shit in the newer stuff.) Are they backing off? Yes. Are they ending it? No. Like DEI rebranding as BRIDGE off-stage, expect this fuckery to get a reintroduction down the road in a more subtle fashion. That I am pointing this out leads to the big isssue.

You want to get all those dissatisfied eyeballs off The Brand and to something that you know is more to their liking, maybe of your creation or maybe not. You want to exploit the Master's fuckups to either become the Master or the Apprentice in this niche. How do you do that?

As Jon Del Arroz explained the other day, the dissatisfied 40K player and fan just wants 40K to not be shit. They don't want an alternative; they want the broken brand to be fixed.

What if it can't be fixed? That's the case for Current Edition D&D. That's the case for the Big Two in comics. That's the case for OldPub, AAA videogames, and so many others.

(Note: Again, I think that "The Woke is being put away" is a scam; go back to that JDA stream where he calls this out as exactly that. It's being rebranded; it's not going away- and that's why Games Workshop's move on 40K is not yet a win. Everyone that made this problem ARE STILL THERE!)

What you do is what JDA has successfully done with Fandom Pulse: use the Master's Brand to draw attention to the alternative, affirming the audience's complaints with the Master before presenting the alternative that satisfies those complaints. This is how the Apprentice positions itself to shiv and replace the Master. That's why John's videos always mention his books and comics in the context of being a more audience-pleasing alternative to Brand failures.

This applies to Tabletop also.

The best way to get hobbyists mired in the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play is to (a) start with Current Edition or a would-be Apprentice, (b) affirm the complaint that Cultists have with Brand (now they are receptive to persuasion), and then (c) transition the Cultist to the Real Hobby step-by-step by showing them the alternative that better satisfies their needs.

The other way is to bully the retards running the Brand until they relent, but that may not be a lasting result without whole personnel purges to flush out the guilty and replace them with the loyal, something that audiences are notoriously unlikely to accomplish without open warfare. ("Why mention that?" Go ahead, fuck with some sicario's favorite character in a corporate property, see how that works out for you.) Without deliberate organization by a rival, moneied, elite cohort (see The Populist Delusion), this is not viable long-term. Getting the audience to switch to an Apprentice and helping it shiv and replace the Master doesn't, so it is.

And that is how 40K's Tourist Failure revealed how to fix the hobby.