The Business: More Evidence That Conventional Play Is Done

You folks need to be paying attention to economic factors outside the hobby.

Couple this with that video I posted yesterday.

Do you think Conventional Play is immune to this process? No, it's not; this entire thing is Network Effects in action. The only difference is how this will play out within the hobby, which is exactly as I have described: Wizards of the Coast wins by being Too Big To Fail, guys like the RPG Pundit win by being Too Small To Hit (because they can downshift out of commercial operation on a dime), and everyone else gets their shit pushed in because they take hits they can't tank.

Don't be surprised to find more and more of these other companies take bad options like making licensed tie-in products (i.e. making a new Warhammer game for Games Workshop because they haven't been able to be bothered since the 1990s, or making Yet Another Star Wars game for the Devil Mouse), speed up the slop spewing process to resemble the Rapid Release model seen in Indie fiction publishing (complete with a lack of quality control), or sell out to bigger buyers (because the owners want to retire or move on with fat bag secured to fund it).

If you're one of those people, selling out is the least bad thing you can do. You're already running a zombie company; you might as well secure the bag and eject while you can before you're put into the position of having to lie that you're still viable and relevant to an audience that knows you're not.

As things get worse--and as this is a market segment on par with FunkoPops, so it is already bad and rapidly gettting worse--the window to exit without losing your shirt narrows and closes with equal speed under this massive outside force compelling contraction and consolidation. (Note to Hasbro: This is when you can buy up or otherwise yoke all these little shits for pennies on the dollar, so do it and slough off product development to them so you can focus on the real money.) Revealed Preferences keep revealing that this hobby is about what Real D&D offers, so only madmen and dreamers think they can succeed as a business selling otherwise.

No, this is the time to retreat, to retrench, to go back and chose the road not taken- to abandon commercialism in favor of a tightly-knit non-commercial hobby built around that decentralized network of Clubhouses. That is viable; this is no longer.