The Culture: A Feral Man Explains Why The Cult Came For 40K

"Walker, why did the Death Cult go so hard on Tabletop?"

I'll let Feral Historian answer that.

The Death Cult needs Clout. Cultural Relevance generates Clout. The Cult cannot generate Clout; it has to parasitize Clout-generating things to use Clout to push the poz.

Whe is something relevant? When it becomes Above The Fold and breaks into the Normiesphere bubble, getting into their faces and insisting upon itself.

It's that last part in particular the the Death Cult wants because the Cult, being a totalitarian ideology, must establish and maintain TINA: (T)here (I)s (N)o (A)lternative. That means, in practice, it must not only insist upon inself it must crowd out all possible alternatives. Tabletop in particular is vulnerable to this due to any given product being wholly reliant on the size of its user network for its value, and the Cultists at Wizards of the Coast would have gotten away with it had D&D in particular not breached the containment of any legal owner and become an egregore to itself.

Believe it or not, but 40K is already most of the way to that point now. It just needs sufficient viable alternatives to Official Edition to finish that transformation. (By contrast, World of Warcraft has also made that transition due to proliferation of private servers permitting containment breach.) Once done, it cannot be taken by the Cult because it cannot be taken by anyone anymore than one can take a tidal wave or a thunderstorm.

That moment has peaked.

The colony drop will destroy so much Death Cult infiltration by destroying what they used as propaganda fronts. While the biggest endures, it has lost control of what it attempted to turn; the same is playing out now in tabletop wargaming, and soon we'll see it happen in other tabletop gaming niches (you can just do things, like make your own cards or minis).

The Clubhouse will stopgap the hobby, preventing this from happening again, once it's all over.