The Pundit reported early last week confirmation on what I've suspected is the play out of Wizards of the Coast.
WOTC is going Digital Primary. Beyond is the primary outlet for The Only Game That Matters going forward; print is now depreciated and no longer considered important.
This is part of the larger shift to D&D (and Magic) as Lifestyle Brands.
As I said would be the case many times over the last year and change, WOTC knows that their Network Effect is so dominant that they can start squeezing out everyone else from the hobby entirely. This will work over time.
The reason is friction. If you go with the flow, friction reduces to zero. If you go against it, friction increases well past your Quit Point. The mass audience does not go out of their way for anything; they abhor friction like it was the plague. They will applaud the Walled Garden and be grateful for it; this means they will adopt it and do so with enthusiasm and in great numbers.
WOTC will cease support for Muh Rule Zero within a few years accordingly because Normies Hate Calvinball and Corporate wants Normiebux. This is how WOTC gets their Billion Dollar Annual Revenue Brand for D&D, and boy are the Conventional Play Cultists going to get mad when they get rugpulled.
There is no future for the Cargo Cult. There is only Official D&D, be it Current Edition or Past Edition.
I'd mentioned previously that my interests intersect with some moneyed people now and again. One of them, pitching his business incubator, had this as his sales copy. I've edited it to remove the hard sell salesman vibe. Just imagine this with far more obnoxious formatting.
Let me tell you the simplest way to make money online. Not the prettiest. Not the sexiest. But the one that actually works.
Because the truth is most people trying to make money online are doing everything backwards. Here’s the reality: you don’t need a funnel, you don’t need followers, you don’t even need to know how to solve the problem yet- you just need a market with money and a problem they desperately want solved. That’s it.
Here’s the simplest system on Earth.
Find a market already spending money. Competition is good. It means wallets are already open. Trying to invent some genius, never-seen-before niche is the fastest way to starve. Instead, find a group already being sold to such as realtors or local businesses. If people are selling to them then there’s money there.
Identify their #1 painful problem. Every market has one. You don’t even need to know how to solve it yet. Just identify the pain.
Send 50–100 personalized messages every day. Instagram, X, Email, LinkedIn, Cold calls- doesn’t matter. What matters is this: don’t talk about you; talk about them, their problem, what it’s costing them every month. Then tell them you can help fix it.
Give them a call to action. “Want help with this?” “Want to talk more about this?” “Want me to show you how this works?” Simple.
Follow up. Most deals happen in the follow up, so follow up until they say “yes” or “please fuck off.” Both are useful.
If you can’t solve the problem, find someone who can- seriously. Partner with someone. Hire someone. Contract someone. Just make sure you know your costs BEFORE you price the offer.
Collect payment. This is the part where it becomes a business.
Do everything possible to get them results because results create the next step.
Ask for testimonials and referrals. Now you have proof. Now the flywheel starts spinning. Clients → Results → Testimonials → More clients.
Simple. That’s it. No funnels. No ads. No viral content strategy. Just find problem → offer solution → talk to people.Every day.
This is NO ONE in Tabletop.
You think there would be--the VTT guys are closest--but no, they're not. Wizards of the Coast--as often as they shoot themselves in the foot--are still the closest because they, at the very least, have the language necessary to describe the problem while everyone else refuses to accept it: FRICTION.
Network Effects serve to reduce, and in time to remove, friction if you adhere to the Network; if you defy it, friction increases exponetially because you're swimming against a deep and powerful current.
The VTT guys were the last people to make any serious progress towards solving the Tabletop problem before the Bros came along to solve it by correcting the frame of reference; the only viable form of business in Tabletop is the one that reduces friction to ZERO, which being a PDF Merchant (yes, that means selling anything that isn't The Game That Matters) or YT shillfag (ditto; they admit that their own metrics punish them for going away from The Game That Matters) does not do.
What is the biggest friction point in Tabletop? Playing the fucking game! What does being a Rule Zero jobber do? What does not playing The Game That Matters do? What does ankle-biting the Bros do? Increase the friction by wasting time relearning a game!
Therefore the only viable business left in Tabletop is offering a secure Third Space with a curated, gatekept membership of committed participants. Not shilling on YouTube. Not shoveling product. Running the fucking Continental.
The only viable business left--if you deign to call it such--is the Clubhouse.
Remember the massive Proof Of Concept that proved the BROSR correct, the Drakonheim Campaign? They're back, they're on Dunder Moose, they're talking Winning Secrets, and they got Jeffro and Rule of Thule to come on with them.
You can all sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up now. The receipts are to the moon! You can read for yourself when you back Winning Secrets.
There's plenty of commentary to be had. Players deserve less. Frustrated Novelists deserve nothing. Muh 50 Years Are Always Wrong, and The Bros Proved Themselves Right.
It took a while, but they did hit on the core of the "problem": Wizards of the Coast, and TSR before them, used Economies of Scale to artificially set the price below what would otherwise be profitable specifically to get prospects into the Acquisition Funnel and thus link them into the User Network.
This means that everyone else has to get into that level or get dumped, and that's before "Who will play this with me?" comes in to derail the purchase.
The reality is this: Dead Tree--something you can hold in hand--has value, and intangible digits does not. Secure locations you can gather and play in have value. Useless widgets that exists only to Spread The Brand like you're appropriating religion to shill cheap crap to suckers does not. The entire "industry" is in the Upside Down and needs to be brought upright again.
This is why not only do I not fear the collapse, I welcome it; this should never have become a Consumerist pursuit of Pop Cult Idolatry, but here we are and it's long past time to smash all the idols- and, so doing, restore the hobby back to its roots as a hobbyist avocational pursuit as it was back when this got started. We need the Clubhouse and the Real Game, not whatever that is.
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.
This one is good when it comes to Jeffro going on the attack.
He's good about hammering this point: Dungeons & Dragons is a Braunstein.
He's also good about hammering that wankers like Grifting Beast constantly try to steal from the Bros in order to get in front about the parade. His culture commentary is some of the best partes of this Winning Secrets promotional tour.
Sunday saw Jeffro go on with the Superversive crew.
Winning Secrets is going to be a world-shaking book, first in Tabletop and then--because Tabletop exercises stupidly-outsized cultural influence globally via Dungeons & Dragons--into other culture-shaping media, where it is not out of line to conceive of Jeffro being a hidden pillar in the future culture to come by the end of the century as Gygax and Arneson was for the 20th (and preserved that of the 19th via Appendix N).
This not being a Gaming show, we get to see Jeffro talk about the intellectual and spiritual side of the hobby.
You want the other side of the matter? You'll get it here.
