The Business: Outside Forces Compelling Change On Tabletop (Part 3)

There's one more thing that people are not accounting for: our rapidly-changing geopolitical order.

Which sounds like it doesn't matter, until you see this.

"But how-"

Do I need to remind you about how one nearly-botched hit resulted in the First World War?

The consequences of events far outside your context and beyond your control have previously had major effects on entirely unexpected quarters of the economy. Why? Because the second and third-order effects of that event can--and have, previously--resulted in the Sovereign ordering wholesale reorganization of the entire economy in order to execute the duties and prerogatives needed to handle the problems that arose out of that action.

"But that's over-"

Globalized world, gamer. What goes on over there affects you here, or are you still thinking that the tariffs have nothing to do with geopolitics?

Then there's even bigger forces. Boomers hold the vast majority of the world's capital and they've hit critical mass retirement; all the capital they put into the economy is going to start draining out to pay for their final years in a vast tidal flood. Conventional Play began as Boomers reached Peak Capital Accumulation and as such commercial viability is tied to the Boomer demographic; as they start taking up more and more spaces in nursing homes and hospitals, more and more of that capital is going out of everything else and into healthcare.

"But that's-"

The economy is political. It is ordered by political will, not market forces. The political will caters to the Boomers because they are huge and they are rich. Couple that with a geopolitical order in the middle of a Fourth Turning--those Paki and Pajeet diasporas are going to hash it out on our streets, same as every other alien diaspora does, and that's just a first order consequence--and what you have in a recipe that can and has killed the commercial viability of entire luxury entertainment sectors.

Couple that with the already demonstrated capacity for chatbots to spit out all the playable content for free that you would ever need or want, the capacity to publish all you would ever want--not need, want--for free indefinitely (or in print at cost), and the Revealed Preference that Free Trumps All and you have the perfect storm to kill commercial viability in Tabletop.

This is why it's the Colony Drop. So many factors have come together all at once to ensure that this little racket can't go on any longer, and not out of any malice towards any player--not even WOTC--but purely because all of things that allow it to exist have themselves been destroyed. You'll be able to go on for a bit--momentum is a thing in economics too--but all the energy feeding into this sector is now gone and as such the collapse is inevitable.

There's no money it in going forward. If you're unable to see and think in terms of how an aging demographic, geopolitical realignment, political recalibrations, and capital flows can have consequences beyond what is immediately in your face then you are not going to make it- and you deserve to get wrecked.