The Business: Tabletop Conventional Play Is A Beggar's Guild

This past week, Bob confirmed what Roll For Combat and others have previously said with receipts: Conventional Play, outside of Wizards of the Coast and a few Also-Rans, are not businesses- they are beggars, maybe gangs of beggars, pretending to be businesses.

What does this show you? Conventional Play is Brand-driven.

All the big begger blowouts are due to Brand power, and all of them are tied to The Only Game That Matters either as tie-ins or as alternatives.

The non-Game That Matter stuff is massively diffused into impotence, same as before, while The Game That Matters maintains it utter dominant position. Bob's data shows this, and now I remind you of Josh Strife Hayes' video on why WOW Cannot Die.

Tabletop and MMORPGs are the same thing in different media. The digitization of The Game That Matters (as well as Also-Rans like BattleTech) is making this increasingly clear to those observing that happen.

They offer the same fantasies, run off the same dynamics, suffer from the same false beliefs, and are identically dependent upon Network Effects for their value.

Most of them cannot operate as a proper business and stay in operation; they have to either cripple the product and sell monetized solutions (microtransactions, supplement treadmill, Endless Product Slop), repeatedly beg for money in return for perks and egostroking (so many of those MMOs are crowdfunded), and ultimately fail because the people behind them do not comprehend Network Effects and thus do not know what they need to do to make all of this worth doing at all.

They would be better off being non-commercial hobbyist operations. Yes, the MMOs too (The Quinfall proves this most recently) They will be forced to do so more and more as the economy changes and compels those given these beggars money to stop wasting it on extraneous bullshit and refocus upon the core value-generating elements of the hobby.

What is that? It's not the art, trade dress, or presentation; it's a solid technical manual, competently written and edited, with only the illustrations needed to explain rules and procedures made freely available digitally and at-cost in print- BROZER shows the way.