The Business: This Is How Irrelevant Conventional Play Is Now

The collapse of the commercial end of the tabletop hobby isn't just wishful thinking. The receipts are coming out in the wake of D&DTube's collapse; see the video in yesterday's post.

Tabletop, in business terms, is so bad now that no one other than Wizards of the Coast is even a factor in the entertainment business world. WOTC, in turn, is still far more about Magic than D&D and both brand will end up being used for entertainment niches other than Tabletop.

WOTC doesn't have any competition within the hobby. WOTC competes with Roblox, Netflix, Fortnite, WOW, and 40K. Not even Pathfinder and Palladium is on the radar now; that's how completely dominant the Network Effect for D&D (and thus for WOTC) is. There is no commercial viability in Tabletop anymore. Everyone else has to beg to get anything out there now; that's not commercial enterprise, but digital busking at best- usually it's actually non-commercial operations pretending to be commercial enterprises.

The only business left is Wizards of the Coast. Everyone else is in denial; if they couldn't beg via crowdfunds, they'd already be out of the game entirely.

The best thing that could happen is to force exactly that to happen; most would just shut down and go away, proving that this is just about their fucking egos. Only a dedicated, authentic few would accept that they are non-commercial hobbyist publications and just give their stuff away (or at cost in print) because that's how tabletop actually works. The window for making a living doing this already closed; those that remain are zombies slowly falling apart.

Diamond Distribution going under is going to force more hands than you think, but not as much as you may like.

"But (thing)"

Is going to get "Nah, I ain't learning that" far more often than not, especially from the Normies, Tourists, and Casuals. Network Effects still exist, and are stronger than ever; they want The Game That Matters. You can get away with Past Edition, or Very Good Knockoffs, but weird variants that can't be played Cold (no prep) or Stupid (no prior knowledge), which is what all those darlings D&DTube pushes are full of, turn those people--and they are the overwheling majority in the hobby--off with disgust like you shat on their shoes. They would rather go play Fortnite than learn your dogshit non-D&D product, and they have. Cope.

There's a reason I say you can stop your library at D&D, Traveller, and maybe one of RIFTS, Call of Cthulhu or BattleTech. Everything else hits that Effect barrier and gets rejected, and those three can and do wear out their welcomes fast. (It's another reason Vidya versions of Conventional Play trump Tabletop; you don't need others to sign on to play.)

"But my-"

Four to six people in a room does not a hobby make. That's a vanity project to stroke your ego, and no amount of shilling from fuckwits on YouTube changes that.

The only way out is to rebuild from a standard game that exists outside Your Fucking Table, connecting all players into a single networked and decentralized campaign. That means Conventional Play is not an option going forward, though many people (who have incentives to insist otherwise) will say that isn't so, and boy are they going to eat shit and start looking at how expensive hemp rope is before long.

I said it last year. Now it's becoming too obvious to ignore: the only future is the Clubhouse.

There is no business to be had anymore. There is hobbyist publication for the Clubhouse, or there is nothing; we're just watching the remaining zombies slowly fall apart and, at long last, die. This also means that a lot of slop merchants had better start pivoting to something else that brings in the big bucks, because this ain't it anymore. It never should have been.