The Culture: Behold The Future Of Conventional Play

The Walled Garden's proprietary Virtual Tabletop is out there.

This is integrated into the core business of Wizards of the Coast: D&D Beyond.

This is what the bots will integrate with, allowing you to play The Only Game That Matters without the downsides of Conventional Play on Tabletop (most of which involve other people), and by having content generator tools incorporated you can make stuff to sell in Beyond's integrated cashshop.

If you ever lived through the early days of hobbyists competing to make the most lethal dungeons, welcome back, baby!

If you hate the creep of MMORPG sensibilities into The Only Game That Matters, you're fucked, mate.

What is going to come is going to be users engaging in competition to optmize party performance vs. content (dungeons, mostly) optimized to compel party optmization in order to clear the content and get paid. If that reminds you of what World of Warcraft has suffered through over its 20+ years, good- that is Working As Intended.

Guess where the best options will be? Behind the paywall. Guess what is going to pressure people to pay up? The inability to clear content without doing so. The tyranny of Best Or Benched will come to The Only Game That Matters, and the target audience will pay up because that will be the easiest and least offensive option (as they are Normies) to get in the group and thus be able to get paid and level up.

Yes, even if the Referee is a bot- especially if the Referee is a bot. (The bot won't cheat; you meet the Tank/Heal/DPS Check or you wipe- the bot is Crom, it does not care and it cannot be cajoled or bargained with, as it is a Terminator.)

This is not the hobby you signed up for, but it will be the hobby that Normies see going forward. This is why I say that bifurcation is happening, and that Tabletop is going back underground as an inherently occult practice. The publishers know what's going down and are angling to follow WOTC if they can, with a few notable holdouts (like Palladium Books), so you have no excuse now to not stand up your Clubhouse- it's going to be the only place where the hobby will be found.