The Culture: Gen Con Doesn't Matter. Cons Don't Matter. Culture Is Retrenching, Morons.

GenCon 2025 went down the other week. Don't be surprised that there's no buzz.

What we're seeing with GenCon is not just a Tabletop or a Conventional Play problem. Rather it's a wider Convention Culture problem.

The fan convention has been something that’s been a staple for science fiction, fantasy, comic books, and gaming, but in recent years it looks like events like Worldcon, Star Trek conventions, and others are on the verge of dying out as the group that started them is aging without a younger demographic coming up behind them to fill out attendance.

This weekend was the large Star Trek Las Vegas convention, run by a company called Creation, which has been doing the conventions for over 50 years, with Las Vegas holding a mega-convention since 2001. The convention boasts over 100 guests from the various Star Trek shows each year, and at its peak, it was garnering around 25,000 fans. It doesn’t look that way anymore.

The problem is not just Death Cult wanking being all over the place; that's the lagging indicator. The real issue is that the money's gone; the Mobsters are either pulling out entirely, or they are yanking the leash on the Death Cultists among them for messing with the money because the Death Cult hasn't gotten the memo yet that the Money Printer got shut off (that's all that USAID and related looting of the US Treasury was about).

As these propaganda fronts got their funding cut, now those fronts need to do actual business and turn a profit to stay alive. Guess what kept these conventions afloat? That's why the Trek con was so shit, and why Gen Con does not matter anymore: the people who push away the profits like vampires shun the Cross have made it nigh-impossible to run a business, and the massive collapse in discretionary spending means that the cult-like schemes employed via crowd-funding to keep the grift going has faltered (and for some, failed). The end result? Total Hobbyist Retrenchment.

The Tourists, Casuals, and Normies are more and more actively shaming and shunning those Indie Darlings and the weridoes that push them like the second coming of Jesus in favor of The Only Game That Matters: Official D&D. The data doesn't lie: every Indie Darling and foreign IP claiming to be the D&D Killer can, has, and will fail just like every WOW Killer in the MMORPG niche can, has, and will fail and for the same reasons.

Freakish weirdoes from the Soup Aisle push that bullshit. Grifters farm those freakish weirdoes for clout and cash, selling them slop they don't need for games they never play and never will, because despite 25 YEARS OF HARDCORE DATA BACKING UP THE ORIGINAL ARGUMENT'S CASE these people still think that Network Effects are not real--if they did, they'd never bother trying to compete with The Only Game That Matters--and thus keep putting out their dogshit competitors to less than a fart in the wind.

Meanwhile, if you try to tell them that commercial pursuit in this manner is never going to work, you get gainsayed first and vindicated later when they end up wrecked by their own hubris. Go non-commercial, you retards, and earn your living elsewhere doing something that pays a living like working in a factory.

Stick to what gets played, not Le Indie Bullshit, you clout-chasing cockgobblers.