Pat here demonstrates a common delusion among the Terminally Online sort.
The delusion: That Wizards of the Coast has any competition within Tabletop.
WOTC is not stupid. They know who their competitors are--Fortnite, World of Warcraft, Genshin Impact, etc.--and there is not Tabletop operator that matters.
Most people who play Current Edition are not Terminally Online and do not care about anything but Current Edition, the same way that most wargamers are 40K Only Andys and don't care about anything else and that cardfloppers are Magic Only Andys and don't care about anything else. If they aren't playing The Only Game That Matters, they aren't playing at all. This has been known for 25 years thanks to Ryan Dancey.
This has been reinforced multiple times, in multiple media where Network Effects are the source of value, over those 25 years. The majority of players in a given medium of that sort are not general players; they are Top Dog Only Andys and refuse to play anything else because, rightly, they see anything else as a waste of time and money. We see the reason most clearly with MMORPGs, but it is there in all of them: the sheer size of the Network enables these people to play how they prefer, and smaller competitors do not. Josh Strife Hayes proved this with math a while back.
Skip to the Conclusion; it's the Highlight skip. That gets to the point I've made, which he independently arrived at.
Pat's assertion that any of these defections matters is delusional. If that were the case, Palladium Books would have overtaken WOTC (or TSR before that) by 1990- by 1995 at the latest. That never happened, and it never will happen. All of these folks, like folks who quit WOW for another MMO, will be back in short order once it becomes clear that Current Edition is where the action is.
Watch for it, and watch how shameless they're going to be about it.
"They know who their competitors are--Fortnite, World of Warcraft, Genshin Impact, etc.--and there is not Tabletop operator that matters."
ReplyDeleteD&D has no RPG competition because it has the dominant network effect in RPG land. No can defend.
But vidya like Fortnite, World of Warcraft, Genshin Impact are not competition to D&D. Because D&D is not a competitor to them in any way.
Video games have been the big money makers over RPG's since the 80's. Nothing has changed since.
They are two completely different mediums. For "D&D" to compete with vidya, the D&D IP will have to be exported over to the vidya format.
And so far WotC has completely failed to do so.
"But 'muh Baulder's Gate 3..."
A licensed one-hit wonder.
Where's the follow-up making the D&D IP a staple in vidya land like WoW? It's not there. And nothing is coming soon in the pipeline.
Yes, WotC wants to make the D&D -IP- translate to vidya and bring in the big vidya bucks.
But so far they are failing at that.
Still undisputed kings of RPG land.