The Business: The MMO Guy Gets Why Network Effects Work

Josh Strife Hayes, again, uses World of Warcraft to explain Network Effects in gaming.

Dungeons & Dragons also set an impossible standard for Tabletop.

Yet that standard is what Normies, Casuals, and Tourists expect and demand from all Tabletop products. They expect to be able to go wherever and play The Game--not your game, The Game--and if they can't do that, they quit.

Tabletop, therefore, cannot be a "Thousand True Fans" thing and Wizards of the Coast knows this. That's why their smarter, more successful moves are those that reduce or kill an element of friction keeping those three segments from playing the game (and thus connecting to and engaging with the Network Effect).

Publishers that refuse to acknowledge this are those that fail. Ryan Dancey recognized this, which is why he tried to reduce that friction by introducing the Open Gaming License (reducing/eliminating friction between products). Some of his successors at Wizards of the Coast have tried to do this from other angles--this is why Beyond is now the primary arm of the D&D busienss and not any form of retail; digital Walled Gardens have far less friction than dead tree books and in-person meetups--while others fucked things up.

What Network Effects do is reduce friction in the most fundamental manner: the ability to do the thing at all. The larger the Network, the easier it is to do the thing and the more likely that other friction-reducing powers come to bear to further reduce overall friction inhibiting Doing The Thing. If you play D&D, you are likely to Do The Thing; if you play it properly--i.e. as the #BROSR has described--in a Clubhouse environment that is globally-networked that reduces friction to near-zero; you'd have to play WOW to get a comparable situation.

Just Play D&D.