The Business: You Can't Ignore Gravity Forever

Conventional Play is aware that there are too many products chasing too few dollars and buyers.

What they are not accepting of yet is that "too many" is "More than a handful, after D&D". Most of Conventional Play is not commercially viable; they are delusional, but increasingly unable to maintain that delusion. I am now seeing that those able to break their delusion soon will be able to downshift to a self-financing hobby successfully, using crowdfunding to finance operations and offering premium quality books for backers while going POD thereafter to eliminate overhead. Everyone else will fold and shit down; no one will follow WOTC to Vidya.

Other Tabletop sectors are set to follow this trend as Network Effects play out there to the same end. Miniature wargaming is 40K, BattleTech, and Random Shit No One Plays; historicals are already well down that path, with Napoleonics still on top overall followed by World War 2 and Random Conflicts Most People Don't Care About. CCGs? Magic, maybe L5R, and Shit No One Cares About (which is sad, because Shadowfist is not a bad game). All of them are already showing signs of doing more or less the same thing: going self-funded hobby mode, defacto or de jure, and downscaling thereafter to conform to market realities. (CCGs would benefit greatly by selling the actual card graphics tied to a user-only print-at-home license, provided that they are printed on proper card stock.)

The realities of the market can't be ignored forever. Only The Only Game That Matters is truly viable; others can struggle to make a fragile niche, but they'll never break out of that struggling state and as soon as the one figure keeping it together is gone so is that other thing.

Not ever cultural artifact needs to be profitable to be worthwhile.