The Business: The Bros Proved That The Hobby Is Not Commercially Viable

Jeffro observed the following:

You need to appreciate just how new all this is. There is all this stuff that people can see suddenly. And there has never been so many eyeballs on this one domain before. If the insights are not compiled down into essays or documents like Brozer and Umbros… then we lose out on the next round of developments and refinements. The people collecting Superchats and publishing clones cannot assist in this effort. A failure to synthesize the gains of this summer will rob the future of not just a slightly better campaign but entire realms of possibility. “Well, surely someone must have gone further along on this during the golden age.” No. “Well, surely this is just a minor technique here that is unimportant in the grand scheme of things.” No again. “Well, at the end of the day, aren’t you just doing what the old rules say to do.” Actually, no. I honestly don’t think that what we are looking at can be sold. And there is something about that that makes it that much more important that we communicate what we have observed and developed to whoever is going to move the ball down the field two to five years from now.

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

He's right; this can't be packaged and sold as a product.

It's arguable that it can be rendered into a service, and it is unlikely that it could- not a commercial operation, in any event.

This, I say, is part--not all, but very clearly part--of why the Oldfags, the Cargo Cultists, and the PDF Merchants are so mad about the Bros. By restoring the Real Hobby, they reveal what had to be lobotomized in order to cripple it into something that could be commercially viable.

The Bros proved that all of the problems with Tabletop are self-inflicted, starting with Oldfags like Sandy Peterson confessing that they couldn't read (and still can't) so they gutted the game to conform to their illiteracy.

This, in turn, proved Jeffro right again: Tunnels & Trolls was the first Cargo Cult product that is "an RPG" as that cult defines them- not The Only Game That Matters, which is based on (and derivative of) Braunstein.

Boy are they going to be mad when the folks now demonstrating that Traveller also works as a Braunstein show it by their own receipts as they're being published.