Dear Conventional Play Cultists: YOU ASKED FOR THIS!
I hear your objections. Two words: REVEALED PREFERENCE.
"But players-"
*inhales*
50 FUCKING YEARS OF REVEALED PREFERENCE PROVES YOU WRONG!
Revealed Preference. Network Effects. Get what, motherfuckers? This is all your fault, Cargo Cultists. This is the future YOU CHOSE.
"We'll just-"
No, you won't. You'll be like this fucking loser and come crawling back to The Game That Matters, using The Outlets That Matter, because the Revealed Preference of your own Cargo Cultists is to stay with Official Edition stuff and shun the rest. Your own kind doesn't want your PDF Slop.
I told you that this is an outside-in collapse pattern. I told you that this is one where WOTC can tank it indefinitely due to be the owner of the Network Efffect. Now that there is independent confirmation proving it, I'll be accepting your apologies.
We're going to start seeing shutdowns and throttle-downs being announced more and more over the next few years; some (thank God) just quit while behind and leave with some of their dignity intact, some go back to being a self-funding hobby, and the rest will be the wrecks on the side of the road.
No, non-D&Ds are not immune. They'll follow the same pattern; the oldest, most established non-D&Ds will be the last to go, barring a Black Swan event and those non-D&Ds will be either the D&D of their niche, or they are already half-out of Tabletop because their real scene is adjacent to it (e.g. BattleTech).
The future Dancey stated would come about in 2000 is here. We are just in the final stage of its arrival, the consolidation stage. For commercial purposes there is D&D and there is Sweet Fuck All Else. If you don't want what WOTC's cooking, you will be forced to go non-commercial to find it- or to use the very bots some of you are crying about to make it yourself.
Someone saw how well leaning into the memes worked for the knockoff (Helldivers) so they did the smart thing, cut Casper a check, let him be Rico for a minute, and then cu to footage of the game.
Will it be good? Fuck if I know. The last one got the Very Okay judgement from Arch, for what that's worth.
But if you want the target audience--who knows the movies, not the book, and the same is true for the devs--this is how you do it right. You spend some of that money on Casper doing his Rico thing, you go hard for that first movie feel (because Verhoven did a big Task Failed Successfully there), let folks make all the inferances that the devs paid attention to the competition, and then shut the fuck up.
That means that Management is aware of who they need to target for this to work, and they look to be positioning this as "The game you play to take a break from Helldivers while you wait for new content to get patched in."
If the Helldivers team has the sense God gave a sloth, they'd take the opportunity that this game's launch presents and use it to polish up a major content update so that when the launch window closes Helldivers is ready to go.
IF
We know that people not being stupid in Management is a problem. Hopefully they Save vs. Dumb.
They don't need to be hands-on. They just need to do much like they did with Baldur's Gate 3, maybe even less, and reap benefits far beyond what Tabletop can offer.
Remember, even the insufferable twats of Current Edition Tube had to admit that BG3 is bigger than Current Edition and thus brought in FAR more revenue for WOTC than Tabletop does. Even if these two aren't big hits, it's still better Return On Investment than Tabletop does.
Also remember that WOTC's big money maker is Magic, not D&D, and Magic already shifted to being digital-primary. The C-Suite knows where the competition is, and thus where the money is, and with it the clout; Tabletop is a necessary legacy operation needed to maintain control of the IP.
Expect more of this for D&D going forward as WOTC pursues a mainstreaming strategy. More videogames. More TV shows. More movies. More not-just-Tabletop under the Brand.
These are the sorts of videos that the Professor does best.
TLDR: A combination of algo fuckery, Network Effects, and Black Swans force the Professor to axe categories of content from his channel. This would be confirmed by Derik on Roll For Combat.
As much as most people with the sense God gave a diseased donkey would take the hint and close up shop, let's engage with the Professor's understated position--he's staying up, but shifting content focus--and be charitable about it.
SILO HARDER!
That's what YouTube rewards above and beyond anything else. You must niche, and niche hard, into a very narrow content silo to succeed on YouTube; this is why that Simon guy has so many channels--Warfronts, PoliticalFronts, Places, Into The Shadows, etc.--where he can take the same event and churn out several videos because each channel focuses on a very narrow content niche and his team knows that sensationalism sells so they get clickbaity with it.
The day of a channel being at all broad in its content is long over; that the Professor didn't do this sooner shows that he's like most in education and not as bright as he'd like to believe.
This is his business. He is approaching this as a business. Good on him; that already makes him better than most on YouTube trying to become the next Mr. Beast or Dr. Disrespect. One of the things to recognize is that businesses can and do fail, and do so through no fault of their own, so there is no shame in just closing shop and moving on; the smart folks in business do this as soon as they see that it's not feasible to continue. Take the hint, Professor, and close your business; you already have Patreon, where you busk instead, so use that and be done with it.
You want more signs of the collapse? Here they are. I said this was an outside-in collapse pattern; that applies to the influencers like the Professor as much as it does to the publishers and merchants. He said so himself: the channels with the biggest Network Effects are the ones that will endure, while smaller ones like him either close or conform by siloing harder into more narrow niches.
Yes, JDA, I hear you: "Niche harder, make more channels, and get on with it" is indeed the entrepreneural response to this but the Professor doesn't have it in him to do that. He wants his one channel to pay some of his bills so his dayjob paycheck as a school teacher goes further, and that's not going to cut it anymore- and YouTube wants it that way.
Close up, Professor. You're better off retreating to Patreon.
YouTube is being a faggot, to no one's surprise. Bother him for how to get it since YT thought saving lost media is piracy and made him cut it out from the video.
Get copies. Figure out how to spin up servers; get that shit running. MechWarrior: Living Legends and especially MechWarrior Online needs the competition.
This is not a game. This is someone's bitchfest disguised as a product.
Fantasy Heartbreaker: The Boxed Set.
"I can't be bothered to play Baby's First Tabletop Game, so here's something even more mindless" is all I hear because that's all this is. You would be better served buying HeroQuest, Gloomhaven, Frosthaven, Dungeon!, or Descent.
Or a videogame.
Those will get played. This? Not unless you're the Forever Referee and you bully weak-minded wankers into it. This reeks of delusional BubbleThink.
I do not care about people using bots for commercial ends. Jon Del Arroz gets into why, sentiments I share.
The thing that naysayers don't want to admit is this: no cares about anything but the result.
Furthermore, the Culture Industry, and several segments within it individually (e.g. artists), have no one to blame but themselves for LLM-driven tools to be able to poach their positions as they are doing now.
"But the writing-"
Is trained on the metric tons of mid-as-fuck copy churned out by hand over the last several generations written by people. Fiction, non-fiction, technical, etc. it's there and it does the job required of it.
"But the art-"
Is exactly what it trained on, with the capacity for remixing.
"But folks can-"
LOLno, they can't. You have to fuck up really hard--that's a PEBKAC error, meaning HUMAN error--for anything bot-generated to be so obvious that Normies and similar mass audiences will notice, and even minor mistakes will be overlooked by all but the most obsessive or expert observer/reader. (No one's noticed the flaw in yesterday's cat pic, but I did because I know the subject matter, and I left it there because it's a comedy enhancement.)
This is why I don't care that Wizards of the Coast is using it. WOTC, for all its faults, still is more Mammon Mob than Molech Mass and they have to deal with all the retardery that too many "creatives" aligned their way are prone to doing.
Which leads to a few other things people don't want to admit that the bots are really good at delivering:
Folks want "The same, but different", which bots are fantastic at delivering. Revealed Preference shows this in the success of franchises and series over original IPs, and those IPs that do succeed do so by being "Like (X) but (Y)".
Tabletop, being wholly and utterly reliant on Network Effects for value generation, is all about "The same, but different". Too divergent? Commercial death, every single time. WOTC, not being run by total morons, can do basic pattern recognition over time and notice where the drop off is and hard stop there.
Players, especially the Current Edition cohort, are long-trained to see Conventional Play as a place for FanFic Fappery and--as The Second Story recently explained in detail--Fanfiction Ruins Everything.
The result is this: The reason for the bots being able to take over is because the people already made bots of themselves, so all that's happening is something that can do the same thing faster and with less cost/liability that we saw with automation in manufacturing and other forms of mechanization.
The consequence is that this is contributing to the collapse of the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play, which is already non-viable commercially outside of WOTC (because all of you lying twats go cap-in-hand to Kickstarter/Indiegogo/etc. to beg for money; that's not a business, that's--at best--busking with extra steps).
Maybe you should consider that you're in the wrong business, that Tabletop's commercial viability isn't in pushing product, and that you should earn your sustainance elsewhere if you refuse (like OldPub) to adapt to the new reality and Do The Meme while it all burns down around you. WOTC is not, which is one of the reason they'll still be around when all else has fallen down.
And for the hobbyists? This is how you get tools that produce equal-quality work, at a fraction of the cost, so that you can compete within the Network and win.
Just look at what I did in minutes adapting the Colonial Viper to BattleTech with Grok. All I'll need to do is double-check the math.
The TLDR is that the reason for bot-takeover of a lot of media production is because it replaces the mass of mediocrities that struggle to do Good Enough by deadline to spec, and man are a lot of "creatives" showing their asses by objecting to this fact; they can be--and are already being--replaced by men who are not afraid of the tools but instead recognize first the reality of media production as a business and then recognize that the value they add is not in the grunt work of churning out bitchwork material but in the managerial end of project management and editorial oversight.
That describes most of the Tabletop people out there: mediocrities struggling to do Good Enough on time and to spec.
It is no surprise that those with the acumen necessary to lead projects from start to finish are increasingly embracing the tools that allow them to quickly reach the point where hands-on human intervention adds value to the final result. This reduces costs, reduces time to market, and increases quality while sifting out liabilities (usually in the form of dead weight, unreliable actors, or trouble-makers- the folks behind a lot of DEI/BRIDGE/SJW bullshit, as it happens).
If you want to know why I say that the future of the hobby is a return to an underground existence as a non-commercial hobby, shit like this is part of the reason why. There is no need to pay people for products when you have all the tools needed to generate what you want, when you want, how you want for free.
