The Business: Outside Forces Compelling Change On Tabletop (Part 4)

Conventional Play just lost its business model.

Mike Morheim just took the Cargo Cult model and fixed its biggest problem: Scheduling Your Fun.

Dreamhaven also just fixed the Forever DM problem in that while you can play for free, you can't run for free. You also need to use a Mobile Trash app, but younger cohorts don't even blink at that so it's going to work. Furthermore, you don't need to be in the same place to play. All of the other things that Vidya has over Tabletop Conventional Play applies here also, so now even that last little sliver you had is gone.

"But it's just one-"

What's the timeline from the publication of Original D&D in 1974 to the publication of Classic Traveller, Gamma World 1e, and Boot Hill 1e? Five years.

That's right, before 1980 we already had Space Adventure, Post-Apocalypse, and Western sorted. Call of Cthulhu was on deck, Siembieda had been doing stuff in the run-up to Palladium Fantasy during this time, and so much more.

You don't think Sunderfolk isn't going to launch an entire category? You're delusional, especially as other categories are now maturing and saturating- Vidya always looks for Blue Waters to stake out and own, and Mikey-boy ain't new to the dance.

This is something that even concerns Wizards of the Coast, and demonstrates why WOTC needs to pivot to Vidya; all it would take is Vidya leveraging its strengths to target well-known Revealed Preferences in Conventional Play audiences to suck all the oxygen out of the room for Tabletop forever.

And Vidya is far more popular, far higher in social status, and has far superior Network Effects than Tabletop- even Current Edition. The threat is real.

Notice that no one in Vidya is trying to replace the Real Hobby (even though someone got close once) despite having replicated all of the elements of it. Either they lack the vision, or its not commercially viable to do so.

Either way, this piles on to why Tabletop is no longer a commercially viable luxury entertainment sector: Vidya does Conventional Play better across the board.