The Business: The Alt-D&Ds Are Tabletop's Private Server Scene

These are the same video.

When I say that World of Warcraft is the D&D of MMOs, I mean it.

There are nowhere near as many private servers for the would-be Apprentices to WOW's Master, and yes how many private servers an official MMO has is a reliable metric for measuring the power of its Network Effect. WOW, like D&D, has one so strong that soon we'll be saying of WOW what is now being said by the other publishers of D&D: There Is No Competition.

In addition to every edition of Official D&D there is also the near-alikes that are the Tabletop version of private servers. Yes, PDF Slop Merchants, that's how you compare: you are the private server scene of Tabletop, something that will become more obvious as the Big Move progresses and Wizards of the Coast transitions the official game out of Tabletop in all but name.

This is why (a) I say that the Network is not the Brand and (b) it is possible for hobbyists to take over the Network, but not any commercial competitor.

By not only preserving past editions, but unfucking their mistakes, the private WOW server has successfully captured a significant portion of the User Network and thus benefit from the Network Effect. As with alt-D&Ds, the servers vary a lot in quality and thus only a few are worth playing long-term (Turtle WOW for certain) while others are good because they are playable dev environents for all intents and purposes (Ascension is this; play solo until you can dungeon grind to the cap, using a totally classless build system to break the game in raids and PVP)- all the fun, none of the money going to people that hate you (as these are always free to play).

What are these clones attempting to do? Preserve and unfuck, with varying degrees of success.

Should WOTC decide to take its ball and go home, the Real Hobby is already prepared to keep the game going indefinately because--like the private servers--we have the source code and can spin up our own. Now that we know how to do so without needing to follow the folly of making a business out of it, we can expect that what WOTC says and does to become increasingly irrelevant as more people see that we're having more fun than they are without having to pay Big Corpo a penny.

And given how things have gone, we should not dismiss this as a possibility.