The Culture: The Discourse About The Hobby Shows Signs of Turning

The social--meaning the YouTube--side of the hobby didn't want long to get back to work after the New Year.

Black Lodge did this one almost a week ago.

BLG has plenty of potent critcism of Conventional Play, but they have incentives to stop short of where those criticisms inevitably lead to because they are PDF merchants in themselves and thus are contributing to the problem.

Yet BLG, over the past year and change, have already allowed that the hobby cannot remain focused on Endless Product Slop and cannot remain viable as a commercial pursuit because the takings from the begging alone has declined for many and the commercial end of things has fallen similarly.

The Also-Rans and Never-Weres are just as swiftly degrading as Wizards of the Coast, as they too are Death Cultists producing propaganda using their properties as skinsuits. Others are still deluded into thinking that they have a real shot at taking the crown, despite no one knowing who they are. (We'll come back to this error tomorrow, with a specific case in point.)

The hobby's collapsing again around The Games That Matter (i.e. the ones with the strongest Network Effects, the Masters of their niches, which is none of these losers), only the response is to just do the same thing but harder- not to adapt to rapidly-changing circumstances.

I told you all this was coming. Now it's here. By the end of this year the question will stop being "Who will replace WOTC?" because no one can even conceive of doing so, all the while WOTC is off with D&D slot machines, rolling out the Walled Garden for Next Edition (and getting that Big Move well underway), and somehow having the Best Year Ever because despite unforced errors and trash-tier treatment of the audience there is no Apprentice on hand to take advantage of the Master's errors.

None but the #BROSR, that is. But we'll see how they see it when they show up to talk to Dunder Moose tonight.

This cannot go unpressed. Product competition has been a dead end since 1980, yet no one tries to train people how to play properly. What do you think people watch Mercer Gang for, if it isn't for shit-tier melodrama? They're the closest thing to teaching people how to play that there is, and they're doing Wimp Lo jobs as a result. This needs to stop, and it's not that hard; if two retards can do this for a dead CCG like Shadowfist, it can be done for the hobby.

The issue of What Game To Play got settled decades ago. It's DONE, DEAD, DUSTED. Focus on what the audience wants but is not getting: SERVICE. Serve Your Fellow Hobbyist; teach them how to play the game.