The Culture: Big Corpo Will Compel Convergence Via Officialdom Cults

Last week on Roll For Combat.

The smart move for both Games Workshop and Wizards of the Court is to herd the majority of the hobby into their Walled Gardens. GDubs already has very strong and effective Officialdom Cult practice as it is, which is going to be reinforced by technical methods that introduce such superior convenience that the Network Effect will swing that way irrevocably and thus drag the holdouts with them.

WOTC is already there with Beyond, reinforced recently by allowig third parties into their storefront, and they've been pushing the social end slowly over the course of Current Edition (to mixed effect, and that's being generous). The push for re-engagment into an IP-focused business is meant to drive larger audience recruitment and engagement via the draw of popular media that is Normie-facing, and Normies only go towards what is easy and convenient to do; Beyond is easy and convenient to do, can be done digitally from anywhere at any time, etc. and doesn't require going to a specialist hobby store or even buying from Amazon.

It is not in the interest of either corporation to permit use of their properties outside of their Cults of Officialdom.

As both of these are publically-traded corporations, with legal mandates to maximize shareholder value, they have both Carrot and Stick before them to chase and capture Normies and punt the hobbyists that made their success possible.

Do not think that their management is stupid. That's how you get blindsided. They may be ill-informed, or lack understanding of what works and why, but they are not stupid; they can and they will find out how to get from A to B and thus firmly colonize the Normiesphere in ways that you need to mention Monopoly and Catan to match.

Then back that up with a tournament tier (40K's practice, which WOTC will also do in due course) and you have the backstop needed for the Officialdom Cult to get and keep its power over the property and its audience.

Common experiences, for Normies, is what drives the perception of legitimacy in tabletop gaming; if everyone does it, then everyone will do it. That's Network Effects in action, and everyone that isn't the Top Dog is going to get left behind due to the Walled Garden lockins gatekeeping everyone else out of the Normie-farming. In an environment where the room for commercial viability is already in a state of collapse, this will push it into freefall and begging on Kickstarter ain't going to cover the gap indefinitely. We're going to see more people tap out as this happens; some will downshift to non-commercial publishing, the rest will just quit.