The Business: Even The LOLCow Sees Why The Cargo Cult Is Cooked

The LOLcow gets it. Too many Cargo Cultists refuse to see it.

He didn't say the phrase, but he does comprehend Network Effects. In particular, he comprehends the key element of a Network Effect: control over friction.

Conformity to the Network's dominant party is how and why Wizards of the Coast gives no fucks about the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play; they set the rules, and they know because they have witnessed it in action FIVE TIMES in 27 years that all they need to do is inflict some pain via ramping up the friction on the non-compliant and all other parties will bend the knee.

"But Palladium-"

Is a D&D Knockoff and always has been; it is in the network, run by a man who still thinks it's 1980, which is why people come and go between D&D and Palladium.

Paizo's deep in the shit and unlikely to survive. Lots of other resentful bottomfeeders are in the same boat. Palladium will endure because its flagship took over the space vacated by Gamma World, until its Boomer founder finally fucks off and his successors somehow screw the pooch.

There is no future pushing product. There is only a future in providing a service.

WOTC's pivoting to a service model.

Everyone else is getting crushed, and those not yet showing signs do so at the expense of their neighbors- staving off the inevitable. Things are playing out as I said before; this is an Outside In collapse, an implosion, taking those furthest out first as the frontier collapses inward towards the core in an implosion function.

What WOTC wants is everyone else serving The Only Game That Matters. This is more benevolent than it sounds; a truly Full Corpo regime would pursue extinction of other parties, but WOTC instead wants subjugation in perpetuity and by transitioning the Network Effect into a Walled Garden via Beyond (already the case) this is enforcable in the same way that inflicting a curse does- at a structural level.

WOTC wants to offload the costs of product support to external parties, but retain most of the revenue (and thus profit) from that product support.

They're going to get it because as most Casuals, Tourists, and Normies only go to the dominant party in a niche that means they only use Beyond and thus are readily captured by the Walled Garden. That market vastly outsizes everyone else, and they outspend everyone else (as they are conditioned to be mindless consumers), so WOTC will have the leverage needed to keep everyone else in line. If you want to pay the bills doing this going forward, you are WOTC's bitch.

Unless you seek out the Clubhouse.

(Side Note: UMBROS is now available as Print On Demand via Lulu.)