The Culture: New Tex Talks BattleTech Today

Today, Tex and the Black Pants Legion premiere a new video.

3pm Central Time today. Be there.

The Culture: Catalyst Trying To Poz The Robot Game Again

Catalyst trying to poz BattleTech again.

To which I must remind people that Razorfist made the perfect rebuttal years ago.

Oh, you don't need minis at all to play. Chits, counters, and 2D standees are just fine. They're better because you can download the art, print them at home, and carry them around in Ziplock bags to go with your vintage FASA rulebooks.

The Culture: We Are Now Seeing Second & Third-Order Network Effects

Late last weekend, Jon Del Arroz cut this video on the end of Rise of the Merlin.

Near the end he makes plain the same thing that Professor DM did with regard to his YT channel: if you are not talking about The Dominant Thing YOU DO NOT MATTER!

YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Google (i.e. SEARCH ITSELF) deliberately tanks whatever is not the dominant thing in a niche; this is a Second Order Network Effect because what is happening is that one technology utterly dependent upon Network Effects exerts its power over a lesser (and yes, Trek is lesser than Social Media in itself) Network by culling all discussion within its network of anything but The Thing On Top within that niche.

This is before any deliberate manipulation. The technology, by its nature, does this.

You can't blame Elon, Dorsey, the lizardman at Meta, the Illuminati, or whatever for this. This is entirely on the Nomries themselves. What the technology did is give real power in real time to the Revealed Preferences of the anonymized mass of Normies, Tourists, and Casutals that dominate all niches within the global culture industry.

You are seeing, in real time, just how difficult it is to fight against an undesirable position when Network Effects are so strong a factor in How Society Works.

No, you can't Thousand True Fans your way out of this; mass media, by its nature, cannot be splintered down to such small silos that you can have that be a viable option and yet maintain the mass media cultural institutions- nevermind seize control of them.

What this means is that a lot of discourse about the corpo-controlled mass media brands and their Network Effects is 100% wrong.

Paramount gave no fucks about JDA's book. Paramount brought out the big guns against Axanar, and Paramount is dog-fucking Seth MacFarlane over The Orville. The Revealed Preferences are the tell. Books DO NOT MATTER. Comics DO NOT MATTER. Film, Television, and Streaming matter.

We see this repeated in Tabletop. WOTC ignores most of Tabletop because Not-D&D DOES NOT MATTER. Games Workshop only cares about minis (still, for now, the cornerstone of their business model) and tie-in mass media (i.e. videos and Vidya). Not-40K? DOES NOT MATTER. Not-Fantasy? DOES NOT MATTER.

Normies, et. al.--i.e. THE AUDIENCE YOU'RE AFTER--will not, even if God Himself said so, turn away from the Brand until it is so disgusting and repgnant that it triggers a critical mass of them all at once; then something equally ruinous (for us) happens- they switch off THE ENTIRE CATEGORY permanently, barring successful rehabilitation attempts (rare, expensive, but possible), and nothing will convince them otherwise- and no, you're not going to rehabilitate it.

Network Effects are the strongest Walled Garden system that there is. They reinforce Brand Loyalty by making the friction for defection so high as to be ruinous for Normies to do so, until it is preferable to amputate that cultural element entirely than suffer futher.

If you want to win, you have to be seen by the people you're fighting over. Like it or not, "Complain about Brand, then offer The Same But Different alternative actually fucking works and moves the needle. No one would care about the Bros if we didn't talk about D&D. No one cares about what Josh Strife Hayes says if he didn't talk about World of Warcraft. You get the idea.

You are not fighting this war as an equal. You are waging an insurgency. Your job, right now, is to generate and sustain support by the population. You cannot do that outside the Network, so you cannot succeed outside the Network; you have to learn how to leverage it to your advantage- the Bros successfully did this by changing the discourse about The Only Game That Matters such that YT grifters try so hard to either steal them for their own gain or to defame the Bros to the same end.

Therefore a different approach must be taken, one that well-meaning dissidents will balk at, but the tells from the corpos show--by their fears--what needs to be done.

Make your own Branded material. Corpos play dirty; you gotta play dirtier to win, and the tools they use--information disparties, global arbitrational arbitrage, etc.--are now at your command also.

Make that 40K fanfilm. Host it where GW's lawyers get told to pound sand. Hide your names behind global privacy rules. Learn how outlets like Caribbean Thule publish and distribute actually banned books and shamelessly copy their methods; this includes their finances. Make that Trek series; host it where takedown requests get routed to /dev/null. Make a 40K rulebook that isn't shit, share the PDF freely and include a POD-friendly version so folks can run off their own copies at-cost via unlisted Lulu uploads (or something like it). You get the idea; this is Samizdat Territory, so act like it.

Then promote the hell out of it; show off your hardcopies on your socials. Screen it at cons; have QR codes on hand for folks to access it online. Get folks to donate to Uncle Gene's Better Space Literature Society and be surprised (LOL) at getting your own copy of The Trek Show That Paramount Won't Make arrive in a 20 disc BD boxed set a month or so later.

"But that's-"

No one cares. Normies run off vibes; corpos went hard after Axanar because it has better Trek vibes than anything official so the Normies embraced it as legit. That is what must be done; make things with superior vibes and shove it into their faces. Trek, Star Wars, D&D, 40K- you name it, it can be done. Now YOU control the Netwok Effect, and that vast mass media audience will default to listening to YOU.

That's what the enemy understands--go read Edward Bernays; this has been in the open for over 100 years--and it's time to face that these are the rules of the game.

The Culture: You Don't Play Stardew Valley To Engage In World Conquest

It's time for the reminder.

Robotech the RPG, had many other vehicles that I'm sure most GMs never even thought of using besides the Veritechs or Destroids.

GM, there is a whole world out there besides Pew Pew Me Mech that is so rich if you only open your eyes. pic.twitter.com/ezOVw5HuXm

— Lutra Gaming (OtterPops) 🦦 (@Lutra_Gaming) January 31, 2026

*ahem*

NO ONE PLAYS MECHA GAMES TO NOT GET IN THE FUCKING ROBOT!

BattleTech understands the assignment; that's why everything other than a BattleMech is a deathtrap, and barring very specific situations you will lose if you aren't in a robot when the other guys in their robots come a-stompin'.

So no, there is nothing other than Robot Go Pew-Pew. It's like being in anything other than a Mobile Suit in a Gundam series; unless your name is "Bright Noa", you're fucked. It's why Star Wars is really about the space wizards first, the flyboys second, fleet commanders third, and everyone else a very distant Doesn't Fucking Matter (N.B. Andor/Rogue One is EXACTLY the DoomerPorn Bleakfic that Star Wars was made to combat, you shit-eating bugmen; Blake's 7 did that better decades ago on a shoestring and a prayer.)

There is a core premise to a game. Not fulfilling that premise is a Failure State. Saying "But you can not engage in the premise" is no different than saying "But you can smoke crack and fly by leaping off the roof" in that you're saying words, and even a coherent statement, but it's still meaningless gibberish nonsense that misses the point.

There ARE ways around this, but not in Conventional Play; for that you need to play the Real Game, and that's only possible in the Clubhouse.

The Culture: Behold Insanity In Action

I can't blame them for doing this. I can still say that it's a waste of time; these were Roll For Combat's end-of-year filler streams.

What astounds me is the continued resistance against the logical conclusion to Just Play D&D and dump the Also-Rans, Never-Weres, and Never-Wills by Stevie, Derik, and Pat despite acknowledging this state of affairs.

No, they even acknowledge that there is no competition for The Only Game That Matters. They acknowledge that everyone else is wasting their time and money pretending that this is not so, but then carry on in the same breath as if they didn't just confess their own insanity.

If they weren't trying to pretend that they were viable commercial operators, I wouldn't care; non-commercial hobbyist publication is how things ought to be in this hobby. The objection comes from the insistance that there is competition; there isn't, and they keep refusing to accept the conclusion that they ought to just shut down and do something else or openly become solely motivated by fulfilling patronage demands- i.e. being paid to do what someone else commissions them to make for them.

These people can't crash and burn fast enough.

You compete within the D&D Network Effect, which means only Past Editions can compete with Current Edition.

Not knockoffs. Not Temu D&D. Not Just So Theater Sports. Real D&D Editions.

Everything else is better off shutting down commercial operations and going non-commercial hobbyist publications or going with neo-patronage and just fulfilling commissions.

The Culture: More Mecha By Hobbyists By Hobbyists

The Game Formerly Known as "BattleYolk" has a new Jon Mollison video.

The game gets attention from The Last Redoubt in a recent article also.

"With the first set of turns done, we’re taking a pause. The broom managed to completely screw up shooting at the red ‘roo, and lost all of its chaingun ammo. The ‘roo in the meantime badly dinged up the jalapeno. Also, after chatting with the creator of the TTS module, they intend to provide an example terrain key, and also moved/shot chits that were overlooked. One feature of AESMAG is that there are not a lot of rules in place for terrain, but the basic language of rough terrain, and partial and full blocking of LOS allows for a lot of flexibility out of whatever is crafted. They also hope to have tiles and or more options / models available to place terrain on the table."

I'm pointing this out for a reason.

The origins of this hobby was that hobbyists made games, wrote up rulesets, played them, got feedback, and then revised them until the game hit that Good Enough mark to lock it down and go to print.

This was the 1970s. You couldn't outsource things to a bot, or even have any word-processing software, so it was hand-written notes rewritten into something to reference before you sat at a desk, put a sheet of paper and a fresh ribbon into a typewriter, and transformed those hand-written notes into a manuscript that could be mimieographed or (later) photocopied (back when that was a big deal) and the better ones formatted into two column standard layouts. Any illustrations or other graphics had to be done by hand, often by the author or by one of a few collaborators; if you see anything by Palladium Books made originally in the 1980s, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Today? That's easily done by one man by himself with free tools. Need a wordprocessor that can format? LibreOffice. Illustrations? Pick a LLM-based bot and learn how to use it. Flowcharts or similar tech manual graphics? MS Paint is part of Windows, if you want to do it by hand; you can also use free online resources for that- like you can for assembling a cover for Print On Demand printing (instead of mimiegraphed/photocopied copying, or paying for print runs). You can save in PDF or EPub in LibreOffice, and then use another free tool (Calibre) to convert to MOBI for those Kindle users out there.

In short, the tools are now free to make stuff by hobbyists for hobbyists. You don't need to beg on Kickstarter. You don't need to get loans from a bank, or to save your pennies to pay others for things/services, either. Get it made, formatted properly, put into PDF (and, if demand is there, Epub/MOBI) and put it up at DriveThru/Itch/Wherever and (if you have one) on your Patreon/Subscribestar/Whatever page.

In the ongoing collapse, there will be no commercial viability in product production outside The Only Game That Matters within a few years- just a lot of people mainlining copium like they're terminal patients needing to be doped to the gills to dull the pain. Distribution will follow, now that Diamond's gone under as that will destroy most of what retail is left out there, leaving only the largest options to weather that storm. (Yes, Amazon will be fine; WOTC's storefront will be fine, maybe DriveThru, but others? Doubt.)

That will flush out those out only for the money, especially as making a living will again be refocused to the real economy and not the bullshit service economy due to rebuilding of industrial capacity and relocalization of supply chains accordingly coupled with remigation of unwanted aliens and foreigners and the imprisonment/execution of the 5th columnists bringing them in.

Wizards of the Coast--and thus Current Edition D&D also--will remain on top, but everything else is vulnerable to destruction due to economic collapse wrecking their business models. The Clubhouse will thrive as it is not based on that model. Non-commercial games will thrive because they don't need to do anything but fund themselves; non-commercial games that are Real Games, using Clubhouses for organizing and play, will beat those that do not- so optimize for the Clubhouse going forward if you want to be someone after the changes have done their damage and the collapse concludes.

The Culture: Tex Talks The Black Knight

At long last, we have a new Tex Talks BattleTech video.

Now, at the end of 2025, we get to send off the year with a new BattleTech video from one of the best around. Tonight at 7pm Central Time.

I could not have asked for a better send off, or a better set up for what I have to announce for this weekend.

The Culture: Catalyst Relies On Outsiders To Sell BattleTech

Been wondering what Sven van der Plank has been up to? Lots of Mechwarrior 5 based lore videos.

That's a Playlist. You have well over a day's worth of videos, the last of which by itself is over 9 hours.

Notice that this--like with Tex and the BPL--is from the videogame side of the property, and not the Tabletop side; Catalyst can't be bothered to do jack shit to promote the game they licensed, relying instead on the fans to do that for them.

The problem (for Catalyst) is that no one needs to give Catalyst money to play.

Meanwhile, these faggots beg on Kickstarter.

Razor was right when he cut that video and he is still right now. Cut Catalyist out, and that includes 3D Printing of any minis you want (not that you need them; standees or counters will do--and have done--just fine.

If used products aren't good enough, Captain Harlock will hook you up with the PDFs and Lulu's happy to print off new copies based on those PDFs (with a few conditions).

The same means are useable for every other Tabletop publisher that steps out of line- yes, G-Dubs, that includes you. You don't have to give money to people that hate you, so pirate away- that is one way to compete within the Network Effect.

The Culture: Good News, MechWarriors!

We have good news.

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.

The Culture: Behold This Eggcelent Game In Development

Jon Mollison did a pair of videoes on a game in development.

Brian Renniger's blog is here.

As you can see, this is a loving satire of BattleTech.

Everything is a Work In Progress, but a promising one nonetheless, and just the right sort of thing when you want to have some silly stompy robot fun.

The Culture: Told You New BPL Was Soon

Right after I mention it, the trailer drops.

SOON!

The Culture: Your Only Move Is To Stop Giving Them Money

G-Dubs, WOTC, whatever. So long as this remains true nothing you say matters.

Games Workshop stock has been taking off the past month. Up 27%.

Sales have been brisk.

If you want GW to change, you really need to stop buying the plastic crack. pic.twitter.com/D1DSey0sfb

— Grummz (@Grummz) November 26, 2025

STOP GIVING MONEY TO PEOPLE THAT HATE YOU!

They do not interpret your complaints as valid so long as you buy their shit- any of it.

This is why they go after third party alternatives, legal and not alike. This is why they enforce Official Product Only and maintain their Cult of Officialdom, and why they turn on fan channels on a dime.

They want to establish and enforce Fear of Missing Out and There Is No Alternative. If you would only ignore them and just print your own minis, use counters, and just use PDFs downloaded for free you'd starve these people into compliance with your will.

Again, BattleTech fans know how this is done; learn from them. You can play the game without giving Catalyst a penny.

You can do this, but you have to actually put in work and maintain discipline.

The Culture: Countdown To Uncle Tex's Next Stompy Robot Profile Video

It's been quite some time since the last Tex Talks BattleTech.

We are due for another. If what I saw earlier holds, this will be about the Black Knight.

No, Sven hasn't dropped anything new in a while other- aside from his Mechwarrior streams (big deal if you're wanting to know if it's worth the money). Big Red has, but his videos about as long as the BPL and Sven's now so they too are few and far between (aside from news videos) but he did drop one recently. Mechanical Frog is far more frequently--weekly, usually, on Mondays--

But everyone knows that Tex's videos are the Big Event. Soon we'll get another. SOON!

The Culture: A Call For Aid Regarding Lost BattleTech Media

Mage Leader has a request.

First, fuck Catalyst.

Second, receipts for his claim are here.

Third, this is a big deal. The tools are now here for small, dedicated teams to not only preserve this lost media but to bring it up to a state where it is stable on current systems and thus make it available again. This is the sort of thing--like MegaMek and Living Legends--that is what makes BattleTech truly owned by the hobbyists and not some shit-tier corpo cockgobblers (dangerhair optional).

The Business: Network Effects Dictate If You Win Or Not

We're doing this. Too many of you either forgot or didn't get the memo.

YOUR LIFE IS GOVERNED BY NETWORK EFFECTS!

Tabletop is utterly dependent upon Network Effects for their value. Your fucking product is USELESS ASS-WIPING PAPER without a user network.

The reason that The Only Game That Matters is Dungeons & Dragons is because D&D has the largest user network. Every single user is connected to EVERY OTHER USER because they all play the same game. This is what Ryan Dancey got on about 25 years ago when he pitched the Open Gaming License to Wizards of the Coast for D&D3.X; time proved him correct and continues to prove him correct.

Every other competitor to The Only Game That Matters that did not tap into the dominent network faltered and continues to falter. The utility for anyone coming into the hobby to learn ANYTHING other than D&D is a diminishing utility that is fast eroding as macro-level economics and global geopolitics continues to collapse and shift. Why? Because this is a hobby billed on being dirt-fucking cheap to get into and stick with, which sets very firm AND very low expectations regarding cost- this is why D&D Beyond, despite everyone and their uncle complaining about it or about WOTC, is still where the majority of hobbyists are and remain to this day.

You cannot compete within the hobby while being without the dominant network. YOU CAN ONLY LOSE SLOWLY.

"but-"

You have the apperance of competition because people somehow think begging on a crowdfunding site is not actually begging, and because publication costs are so low now that very small operations can--even after the tarriffs--can crack out product without needing to be Big Corpo, but that it all it is: APPEARANCE. Seeming. ILLUSION!

In reality, there is D&D and there is Fuck You Get Lost.

The reason? The utility of a Tabletop product is physical; you can't play by yourself, so you must have others who agree to play and that means that the game that gets played is the one everyone agrees to play. That's going to be D&D 99% of the time. It's just a matter of what edition to play, and the rest is details.

Therefore there is only competition within a network, especially in Tabletop, which means there is only competition within the D&D Player User Network and the further you get from that core--centered around Beyond--the worse your commercial viability becomes. Wizards of the Coast does know this, which is why the smarter people in the corporation decide to exploit that position at every turn; they just suck at succeeding at exploiting that position, but it doesn't matter because--contra D&DTube's Usual Faggots--alternatives to The Game That Matter are irrelevent because everyone does not agree on what to play other than D&D.

You have legacy subnetworks out there--Palladium being the oldest surviving one that still matters--and they survive by tapping into that D&D network through familiarity or similarity to a D&D edition, and you can slot the OSR into this for the same reason; it's why so many of them are/were B/X clones or built on those bones (e.g. Mutant Future cloning Gamma World).

The few other notable Tabletop properties out there are likewise Old As Fuck and remain on top because they are the dominant property through a dominant Network Effect, and so many of them have reached Escape Velocity where it no longer matters if the game itself is in print or published by this or that corporation or whatever; BattleTech was an outright dead game for years at a time and it still dominated Giant Robot gaming in Tabletop, with Heavy Gear only ever as a Number Two, and that's how D&D is overall.

(N.B.: This is why Star Wars in its d6 form remains so dominant despite there being d20 and Whatever That Fucking Abomination Is. Furthermore, it shows that 40K and Fantasy can be maintained should G-Dubs ever completely lose the plot.)

Tabletop has not been a Blue Water economic sector for generations; it was saturated by 1980, and crowded by 1990. The last serious shake-up was D&D3.X and Dancey's attempt at applying Copyleft principles to Tabletop, and we saw what happened as soon as he was out of the picture; at least that fuckup ended with the release of Current Edition into Creative Commons, and the forking of 3.X into Pathwanker, but in terms of actual "I am a serious businessman pursuing serious commercial endeavors" Tabletop hasn't been shit for dick since 1980. If you're not a Boomer or a Joneser, you're not a real player and you never were.

The hobby's commercialization was a gross mistake, one that entropy itself is now correcting, through the relentless power-flexing of the Network Effect. It no longer matters what WOTC does or does not do; D&D is now the Forever Game, with a Network Effect that cannot be beaten because it has escaped the control of any IP owner or controller, and thus it is to Tabletop what Xerox is to photocopying or Google to search engines- no, even worse.

This is why I say "Just play D&D". If you actually want to play, that's how it is and now that's how it will always be. The next Traveller edition will (again) be built on D&D's bones, and all of them will in due course. You go where the action is, and the action is the Network.

The Business: The Collapse Means No Competition From Without- Only Within

Three elements to this sandwich.

I said quite some time ago that we were in for a collapse.

That hit a few months ago. At the time I thought it would be confined to Tabletop; I was wrong- it's across all media. What I did get correct was that this would be an Outside-In collapse pattern of implosion, where--despite the Professor attempting to gainsay this--the historical pattern was, and is again, that Normies (the majority) and their adjacents (Tourists and Casuals) will abandon everything but the top brands in that sector: they are going to retreat to the safety of Brand and Dominant Network.

Why? Despite that too being dogshit, why?

Because it is What Everyone Knows And Agrees Upon. Everyone will collapse back on D&D in Tabletop. Everyone will collapse upon Mouse Wars (which is going to blackpill so many). Everyone already has returned to World of Warcraft. Magic, 40K, etc. are all going nowhere while all of their competition within those niches are increasingly falling away: they're shutting down, downshifing to a self-funding hobby, or (vainly, as it turned out) attempting to swap media to remain viable.

Viable, that is, as a commercial enterprise (i.e. as a business) and thus as a means of farming and accuring prestige and status. All of that is over unless you're The One That Matters.

It doesn't matter if you have talent, or grit, or even acumen and the intelligence to fuel it. You cannot command the attention required because you are outside the dominant Network and its associated Brand.

There are only two ways to fix this, both of which you cannot pursue: be backed by an institutional player (thus negating all risks you otherwise must face), or be independently wealthy (so this is already just a hobby for you), but if you are chosen by one or the other then you can compete from without that dominant Network.

You're not.

Therefore you must learn to compete from within the Network. This is the realm of the "spiritual sucessor" and the "legally distinct not-a-spinoff" where we can and do see success arise, sometime where the offering is a quality work (Xenonaughts) and sometimes not (whatever that not-a-Potter-smutfic thing BookTok femcels are getting off to as they complain about how Wrongthink it is about as of this post). It is this ill-acknoledged element that led to the success of RetroClones in Tabletop; they cloned (a past edition of) The Game That Matters, so folks played them when Official Game did the same stupid shit that WOW did with Shadowlands and Warlords of Draenor (and came back when WOTC did what WOW did with Legion and Dragonflight): come back in greater numbers than what left.

We are a civilization dominanted by Network Effects in all things, from entertainment to firearms ("Does it take Glock mags?") to geopolitics (rail gauges, yo), and more.

The collapse we're seeing are the marginal players and non-aligned actors going first- those least loyal or least valuable to the dominant Network. The collapse will stop when everything surplus to requirements, defined as "Not 100% aligned with the Network", has fallen away or been rendered irrelevant. Convenience, ease of end-use, and conformity to the standard are the measures for survival; successful competition leverages these while tweaking on the margins, like we see with private WOW servers or D&D retroclones.

The bots--"AI"--will only accelerate this process, and it has already begun.

The Business: G-Dubs Fires Another Lawfare Volley

Games Workshop sicced the attack lawyers on an Italian miniature studio.

No, this is not a clean act of hubris; we do have issues that need to be sorted out here as Arch's video makes plain.

That said, Northern Exile is correct is that if G-Dubs wins this--by judgement or by forcing the targets to fold by financial pressure--the hobby side is dead as there will be full legal capture by G-Dubs which they will use as a legal cudgel, fully assisted by the United Kingdom and European Union's digital and copyright regimes, to destroy all competition.

This is not the same route that Wizards of the Coast pursues to accomplish total capture of revenue from their Network Effect Dominance, but it has the same objective: making the corporation owning the IP itself the sole merchant for goods and services regarding the Network.

I remind you that most tabletop wargaming is 40K. Not Warhammer generally- just 40K. Fantasy (including Age of Sigmar), BattleTech, and everyone else (including historicals) are the minority. G-Dubs shutting down anyone that makes mins on the claim that they are to be confused with 40K-legal models, which includes ALL OTHER MINIATURES as they can be from places in 40K's galaxy, is not a trivial threat.

If G-Dubs gets its way, it's going to force miniature companies to move juridisctions to places where UK (and, by extension, Western) law and judgements can go pound sand- and that is prohibitively expensive, which kills all but millionarie hobbyists doing this as a self-funding hobby, which is Good Enough for G-Dubs.

The Business: You Can't Ignore Gravity Forever

Conventional Play is aware that there are too many products chasing too few dollars and buyers.

What they are not accepting of yet is that "too many" is "More than a handful, after D&D". Most of Conventional Play is not commercially viable; they are delusional, but increasingly unable to maintain that delusion. I am now seeing that those able to break their delusion soon will be able to downshift to a self-financing hobby successfully, using crowdfunding to finance operations and offering premium quality books for backers while going POD thereafter to eliminate overhead. Everyone else will fold and shit down; no one will follow WOTC to Vidya.

Other Tabletop sectors are set to follow this trend as Network Effects play out there to the same end. Miniature wargaming is 40K, BattleTech, and Random Shit No One Plays; historicals are already well down that path, with Napoleonics still on top overall followed by World War 2 and Random Conflicts Most People Don't Care About. CCGs? Magic, maybe L5R, and Shit No One Cares About (which is sad, because Shadowfist is not a bad game). All of them are already showing signs of doing more or less the same thing: going self-funded hobby mode, defacto or de jure, and downscaling thereafter to conform to market realities. (CCGs would benefit greatly by selling the actual card graphics tied to a user-only print-at-home license, provided that they are printed on proper card stock.)

The realities of the market can't be ignored forever. Only The Only Game That Matters is truly viable; others can struggle to make a fragile niche, but they'll never break out of that struggling state and as soon as the one figure keeping it together is gone so is that other thing.

Not ever cultural artifact needs to be profitable to be worthwhile.

The Culture: Oh Sweet Jesus, BTech Writers Had No Sense Of Scale

Sven van der Plank released a new video on the last campaign of the Third Succession War. It's long, but good.

We're seeing units with 85 and 95% casualties taken.

I see you, VetBros. Yes, that's insane. Yes, that's 40K levels of "Dude, what the fuck?!" Fighting like Vraks, but it's not even close to Vraks, is insanity- and thus, bad writing, because even given certain allowances there is just so much Nope going on here that cannot be justifed.

All this over a Star League Defense Force supply cache, by the way. They thought it important enough to send hundreds of BattleMechs, entire Air Wings of fighters, entire squadrons of DropShips, and six-figure or more numbers of personnel to one planet and--because of leadership that is decidedly pre-Modern in sensibility--they kept going well past the point of practicality which was the same as throwing good after bad and making things worse.

Sven did a fantastic job; I can't wait for him to do the Fourth Succession War, 3039, Clan Invasion, etc.

The Culture: We Have Recovered The Real Hobby

The Black Pants Legion and Sven van der Plank inadvertantly explained How To Run A Real Campaign.

You start at the top where players control The Great Men, then go down to the bottom to play as The Grunts, and ocsilate between the two perspectives in a Perpetual Feedback Loop until someone wins or everyone loses.

As these video selections go, that can take a very long time- both in-setting and in real life. (And yes, the Warhammers and the Five Ringers and the Secret Warriors are all the same thing in terms of campaign play structure.)

That is a good thing.

It is also good that players can choose to only play on a given level; some only care about the big picture, while others only care about the man in the thick of it. Conventional Play cannot, by design and admission, accomodate this and many products pushed by publishers don't even try.

You want a hobby by and for functional adults? Use the original model that didn't chain you to a fucking schedule like it's your job. We want more of the below, and less of the freak show.

My wife after being taken to a game convention with a sizable wargaming contingent (zero 40k):
“Wargamers are COMPLETELY different from other gamers; they seem to be functional mostly married adult males who are intelligent and can focus for long times and aren’t slobs”

— grim schneider (@grimschneider) May 4, 2025

That's why "But this doesn't work for me" is a bullshit complaint: the campaign IS NOT ABOUT YOU. You're not the only man; you're one guy running one table and there's a lot more doing that in a real campaign, all playing on the same map in the same campaign, with mans and players floating between them as they will.

Which is exactly what you see in the BattleTech videos above, when translated to Real Gamer terms.

That is why the #BROSR is the leading edge; we brought back How Things Actually Work, how the machines work and how the social dynamics work- we are #ObjectivelyCorrect.