The Culture: More Mecha By Hobbyists By Hobbyists

The Game Formerly Known as "BattleYolk" has a new Jon Mollison video.

The game gets attention from The Last Redoubt in a recent article also.

"With the first set of turns done, we’re taking a pause. The broom managed to completely screw up shooting at the red ‘roo, and lost all of its chaingun ammo. The ‘roo in the meantime badly dinged up the jalapeno. Also, after chatting with the creator of the TTS module, they intend to provide an example terrain key, and also moved/shot chits that were overlooked. One feature of AESMAG is that there are not a lot of rules in place for terrain, but the basic language of rough terrain, and partial and full blocking of LOS allows for a lot of flexibility out of whatever is crafted. They also hope to have tiles and or more options / models available to place terrain on the table."

I'm pointing this out for a reason.

The origins of this hobby was that hobbyists made games, wrote up rulesets, played them, got feedback, and then revised them until the game hit that Good Enough mark to lock it down and go to print.

This was the 1970s. You couldn't outsource things to a bot, or even have any word-processing software, so it was hand-written notes rewritten into something to reference before you sat at a desk, put a sheet of paper and a fresh ribbon into a typewriter, and transformed those hand-written notes into a manuscript that could be mimieographed or (later) photocopied (back when that was a big deal) and the better ones formatted into two column standard layouts. Any illustrations or other graphics had to be done by hand, often by the author or by one of a few collaborators; if you see anything by Palladium Books made originally in the 1980s, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Today? That's easily done by one man by himself with free tools. Need a wordprocessor that can format? LibreOffice. Illustrations? Pick a LLM-based bot and learn how to use it. Flowcharts or similar tech manual graphics? MS Paint is part of Windows, if you want to do it by hand; you can also use free online resources for that- like you can for assembling a cover for Print On Demand printing (instead of mimiegraphed/photocopied copying, or paying for print runs). You can save in PDF or EPub in LibreOffice, and then use another free tool (Calibre) to convert to MOBI for those Kindle users out there.

In short, the tools are now free to make stuff by hobbyists for hobbyists. You don't need to beg on Kickstarter. You don't need to get loans from a bank, or to save your pennies to pay others for things/services, either. Get it made, formatted properly, put into PDF (and, if demand is there, Epub/MOBI) and put it up at DriveThru/Itch/Wherever and (if you have one) on your Patreon/Subscribestar/Whatever page.

In the ongoing collapse, there will be no commercial viability in product production outside The Only Game That Matters within a few years- just a lot of people mainlining copium like they're terminal patients needing to be doped to the gills to dull the pain. Distribution will follow, now that Diamond's gone under as that will destroy most of what retail is left out there, leaving only the largest options to weather that storm. (Yes, Amazon will be fine; WOTC's storefront will be fine, maybe DriveThru, but others? Doubt.)

That will flush out those out only for the money, especially as making a living will again be refocused to the real economy and not the bullshit service economy due to rebuilding of industrial capacity and relocalization of supply chains accordingly coupled with remigation of unwanted aliens and foreigners and the imprisonment/execution of the 5th columnists bringing them in.

Wizards of the Coast--and thus Current Edition D&D also--will remain on top, but everything else is vulnerable to destruction due to economic collapse wrecking their business models. The Clubhouse will thrive as it is not based on that model. Non-commercial games will thrive because they don't need to do anything but fund themselves; non-commercial games that are Real Games, using Clubhouses for organizing and play, will beat those that do not- so optimize for the Clubhouse going forward if you want to be someone after the changes have done their damage and the collapse concludes.