The shill channels are cutting videos on the new WOW tie-in book for Official Edition.
Told you that this was a defacto merger strat. Now you're seeing it in action.
You can expect more of this when the Mouse Wars book hits.
The Networks are merging.
The end goal is that THERE IS ONE ENTERTAINMENT MONOCULTURE where all IP engagement is corpo-controlled across ALL media.
People refuse to look past their own noses, so I won't be surprised to see people being unable to comprehend this being the objective, but it is.
WOW Forever pioneeers official controller support for the MMO. That can be done with a Steam Deck, which means it's a half-step away from being playable on mobile.
Tabletop, via Official Edition, is also moving to being playable on mobile.
The mobile app for Official Edition is a few years away. The merging of the two games into a single property briding over multiple media is even further away, but it is now clearly on the table; Fortnite paved the way, and this is the next step in that same business model.
I underestimated how bad the commercial side of the cataclysm that came upon the Cargo Cult is, and how devastating this damage shall shake out to be.
The legend returns. This man couldn't be bothered to stay with Retail all this time, and he wasn't around much for the Classic releases, but here he is now for this.
Yes, the memes flowed.
But if someone who, now middle-aged, is willing to come back into the public sphere then there's sufficient enthusiasm to carry the launch forward into the long-tail business model that Blizzard promised.
Reports out of the Beta confirm that this edition of the game is sufficiently changed to make this no-FOMO, no-GOGOGO play paradigm practical and achievable. Explicit shutdowns of whines by Retail Andys about things in the Classic vein, coupled with implementation of systems that guarantee economic stability via strong gold sinks (Black Market Auction House) and solid price ceilings (vendors selling rare materials at a fixed gold cost, making it impossible to corner the market on them to jack up the price- no more Devilsaur Mafia bullshit).
I am impressed with what's there so far. I even think Air Elves are going to be fine, especially if they do tie them into the Thunderfury story somehow.
I'll put up a longer thinkpiece on this video at another time, but for now know that the woman who exposed Lester Del Ray as the man who made "Fantasy" a thing has a new (and very good) video- especially if you have children or grand-children under your care.
I may narrow this down into something for gaming in particular, since there is so much remedial work that needs to be done.
Do note that other language cultures have works of similar seminal status; if you're in or of that world, adjust the plan proffered above accordingly.
"With this federal grant, faculty plan to weave wargaming more deeply into the intelligence curriculum, allowing cadets to encounter simulations throughout their four years rather than only near the end of their studies."
https://today.citadel.edu/learning-how-to-lead-under-pressure-and-in-a-crisis-new-250k-federal-grant-expands-wargaming-at-the-citadel/
It's not like the beneficial effects of professional wargaming are not known.
What is not known is that there remains a relationship between Professional and Hobbyist wargaming. The dysfunction of one side is mirrored in the other.
"Anecdotally, after interacting with new game designers, the greatest difficulty is the equivalent of "writer's block". Getting started from a blank piece of paper or empty whiteboard is a significant challenge.
An effective method to overcome this initial blockage, kickstart the creative process, and inject the art into the wargame is by way of the Red Team."
https://www.mors.org/publications/phalanx
What I've seen by observation is that, while it is not flashy or fast-acting, you are far more likely to get effective and lasting (if not permanent) results by working indirectly and doing things via manipulation of Second Order Effects. A lot of the faggotry and stupidity we see in the commercial and hobbyist sphere can be, and will be, solved by fixing the professional side and thus creating the incentives and pressures that will make the commercial and hobbyist spheres get back in line.
In this case with machine-aided translation work, making it far easier and thus cheaper to translate non-Anglophone literature into English (and vice-versa).
In the last week, one of the biggest such projects hit the stands: fff
THE EPIC RETELLING OF A CHINESE CLASSIC
Yoshikawa Eiji's Sangokushi is the most widely read retelling of the Three Kingdoms saga ever written. Serialized from 1939 to 1943 in the Chūgai Shōgyō Shinpō newspaper, it was read by tens of millions and has remained continuously in print for over eighty years. Where the original Chinese Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a historical chronicle, Yoshikawa reimagined it as a living novel: his Liu Bei is not a symbol of virtue but a complicated man struggling with ambition and doubt, his Cao Cao is brilliant and terrifying in equal measure, and his Guan Yu and Zhang Fei are as vivid as any characters in modern fiction. It is through Yoshikawa, more than through any other writer, that East Asia's greatest epic entered the mainstream of modern Japanese culture and, from there, inspired the manga, anime, films, and video games that have carried the Three Kingdoms story around the world.
The Peach Garden begins in the last days of the decaying Han Dynasty, when the empire is rotting from within and peasant rebellions are consuming the provinces. In a marketplace, a straw-sandal weaver named Liu Bei meets a fugitive butcher named Zhang Fei, and shortly after, a warrior named Guan Yu who is on the run for killing a corrupt official. The three men swear an oath of brotherhood in a peach garden to live and die together, and to restore justice to the realm, then set out with nothing but their pledge and their weapons to make a place for themselves in a world that is coming apart. From that oath, everything follows: the rise of warlords, the burning of cities, and the first stirrings of the war that will tear China into three kingdoms.
This original Castalia House translation is the first volume of a complete English translation of all ten volumes of Yoshikawa's Sangokushi.
Currently available only in Kindle, you can expect a print version to become available at a later date- thought you may want to subscribe to Castalia's newsletter to ensure that you get told when it happens instead of relying on Amazon.
Checking in on the state of AI content creation. Skyebrows dropped this a few weeks ago.
Naysayers are going to have problems with their objections.
This took 400 hours. Check his channel. This is what he is able to do now; it is not what he could do earlier this year. The models and his own acumen have advanced so much so soon that he--and other so capable with these tools--are going to surpass the average professional going without AI assistance or tools by the end of this year.
Couple this with the sort of tools we're seeing with AI-assisted writing and publishing and we are going to see not only one-man publishing operations, but one man IP farms within a few years. The combination of Agentic AI, workflow automation, cross-platform operation, and integration with known tools or services like Stripe and Canva are going to make it possible to do all of the following entirely in-house.
Develop your own stories at speed and adjust them on a dime and bring them to market in manuscript form entirely on your own.
Produce prose, comic, audio, and visual adapations of your own material entirely in-house in multiple languages without needing outside talent.
Design and publish your own merch entirely in-house without needing to hire outside talent or maintain overhead.
Establish, administer, and update your own online storefronts by yourself without any expert coding.
Do all your own Public Relations without needing to hire an expert.
Do all of this without working 80+ per week, but closer to 20 and thus be able to maintain a healthy home and civic life- you'll be able to raise your kids and be involved in local affairs so Commies can't bend you over without you knowing.
I said that your new skillset is Project Management, not grunt work, going forward. Seeing how the tools are working, and developing fast, towards that reality will force you (and everyone else) to contend with the oncoming reality of a changed economy where no you don't have to put up with Jeets and Girlbosses and systematic discrimination in the job market and all that horseshit.
As the tools get better, and the friction involved in learning and mastering them decreases, the reason to bother with the declining institutions fades away.
It was a good time to go indie a decade ago. It's becoming a great time now, if you can afford the tools and be bothered to master them.
Lots of problems solved by their Cargo Cult and Theater Kid priors being taken out back and shot.
Meanwhile, over at Substack, Jeffro recently talked about unfucking this crap.
Why would you “convert” your game to a Braunstein? This is just weird framing all around.
Consider:
1) You can delegate monsters to an adversary player in order to work out how a particular entity will respond to player activity.
2) You can set up a session Braunstein in a single region of the campaign map and then fold the results into the overall campaign state.
3) You can run more traditional style adventure scenarioswhile exploring a mix of competition and cooperation both during session play and also in down time.
4) You can set up a fluid conflict between two distinct adventure parties to be played out over several sessions.
5) You can run a sessionless battle scenario over a span of several weeks with troop movements and a mix of strategy and tactics.
None of these options require a consensus or significant cooperation from more than a handful of people for any length of time.
The only person preventing you from doing this is you.
Not there won't be resistance, but until the AI DMs come online it's Dexter or Death for these people so wear the black hat and Dexter them for their own good.
That resistance has its root in its wrong assumption of what this hobby is, as Rule of Thule explained.
It’s not an objection to something happening elsewhere, it’s an objection to something real happening—to the game being actually played.
Consider an abstract game played in a vast abstract space. Within the spaces are two kinds of players: Navelgazers (Ns) and Conquerors (Cs). The Ns believe that all players are Navelgazers and have a shared common understanding of rules that don’t actually exist in the game such as “don’t be unkind towards the pieces of other players” or so on.
The Ns are playing a fundamentally different game from the Cs because they presume restrictions and protections etc. which do not truly exist (i.e. they are not actually rules of the game). When they see something that is the product of real play, they will immediately identify that it doesn’t accord with their presumptions. “No one who was trying to Avoid Unkindness [or other such presumptive descriptors] would have engineered this situation.”
As soon as they see signs of the game being played to win, they are immediately on the defensive. This explains much of the maligning of powergamers, as Meffridus intuitively understood, because they represent the same threat: that someone will undo the fake game by leaning into the real one.
David Sirlin talked about this concept in the context of versus fighters. There are players (he calls them “scrubs”) who come into a tournament with the idea that e.g. certain moves are “unfair” or “cheap” and, despite the obvious signs that these moves are clearly powerful, will be shocked and appalled when they are blasted to pieces by other players “abusing” them.
The scrub’s false internalization of the rules has caused him to become blind to the game’s actual rules and has led him, on his path of player development, to not only navigate false spaces but to arbitrarily close doors whose opening is necessary for him to achieve his real potential.
In the arena of RPGs, we see that scrubs have found ways to form coalitions. They have the ability to aggregate in collectives. Their particular internalizations are not only sanctified by Rule Zero, but each distinct collective can claim membership under a united Rule Zero collective—so long as they acknowledge all the others—and they feel emboldened to claim that no one can tell them they aren’t playing the game, even when they’ve thrown out half the rules and added others.
These coalitions are akin to a rogue tournament scene where everyone involved must abide by the new made-up rules, and anyone who insists on following the plain rules can be exiled. We can see the effects of this everywhere. I think it’s no coincidence that Sirlin’s book is titled Playing to Win.
Last week and over last weekend, Gamza laid bare what Games Workshop is doing and why.
The TLDR is that GW is doing this:
Which means this.
This requires the infantilization of the audience, and Cult Psychology is the proven method to achieve this state.
By doing this, a successful Brand Cult (a Pop Cult) is able to get away with ridiculous things without relying on technical architecture because you make it emotionally painful to contemplate Doing It Yourself instead of swiping the card to buy the Approved Merchandise.
Couple that with deliberately and frequently unbalancing the game and creating a competitive environment--and no, you don't need a playmode of direct PVP to do this; compeititive PVE can and will do this just fine as the MMO world proved over 25 years ago--and you have what you need to create the very Pay To Win conditions we see today in so much gaming media.
Wizards of the Coast's many announced changes will have the aim of creating this effect within its own Walled Garden, and because it is already a proven business model it will succeed and part of that success will come from privledging sweaty tryhard Whales over everyone else- just as we see with 40K, MTG, World of Warcraft (Retail AND Classic alike, and spread successfully to FF14 too, via Race To World First events).
You cannot maintain a commercially viable operation in such an environment, anymore than any MMO game could after WOW hit big. The pattern, repeated across generations and across continents, proves that once this takes hold in whomever wields the Network Effect it will dominate that entire sector of the economy and culture thereafter in a positive feedback loop.
The changes are already felt; every would-be competitor to 40K and Fantasy end up having its players demonstrating the behaviors that make copying GW's moves a no-brainer, just as every MMO post-WOW ends up aping WOW sooner or later because that formula works.
You cannot avoid this now and stand a chance of winning in the commercial space. You can only go non-commercial as a glorified hobbyist or be a grifting faggot like Colville and stay in the Cargo Cult. Otherwise you have to quit the Cult entirely, abandon all pretension of being Le Hecken Game Designer, and just be a hobbyist at the Clubhouse.
Last Thursday Chubby Funster cut this video on the new Vampire edition.
Aside from dumping the offenders face-down in a ditch or giving them one-way trips to the Titanic, there are ways to gatekeep.
The first, and most obvious, is to (a) stay within the Network by (b) either using a previous edition or (c) putting our your own fork and filtering out those who do not- and making acquiring copies of that edition piss-easy to do. You are competing on pre-existing presence being your means of lowering friction. If your edition is easy to acquire and use than the new crap, you seize control of the Network and now YOU control what Is and what Is Not.
This is how you win: make your edition less frictive than theirs, take the high ground, seize control (and thus the gates), then freeze them out.
The man behind Star Wars Theory put out a fan film that clowned on the Devil Mouse.
I am not exaggerating; compare this to what we saw out of D23 for the new season of Ahsoka and you can see that it does make Disney look poor by comparison. SWT isn't the Axanar gang; he doesn't have professional actors, costuming, practical sets, etc. and the expense that goes with it. He's made a CG fan film, but he did it right and thus it puts to mind the trailers for SWTOR that Blur did years ago- trailers that also clowned on the official live-action media.
This is what is coming.
No, Disney can't stop this- try as they might. The savvy will just lie about it, then upload it from jurisdictions that tell Disney's lawyers to pound sand to ensure that once up it stays up (even if you may need a VPN to access it).
"But Muh Copyright!" stops meaning anything when you have a global Internet and several countries that are more than happy to host this stuff Because Reasons. Couple that with the ready availability of hardware to burn things to disc, flash drives being cheaper than batteries, and all other forms of DIY distribution being available (including Torrents and FTP servers) and you have the conditions for the long-awaited Fan Coup.
Network Effects are real. Fighting within them matters. This? This demonstrates Proof Of Concept, and with it comes the test of what defines Uncle George's Space Opera now that Uncle George has abandoned his creation. You can argue that this should be spent on original creations, but then I must respond with the Enemy's words: "No one will watch it."
The people want the Brand. Now the tools are here for the people to make their own Brand media, and they will with increasing skill and frequency henceforth. Revealed Preferences are Revealed.
Vee dropped a reminder to us all on Sunday last weekend.
Normies run off vibes. They are the low-T men and women of the meme.
And we know that Commies Always Lie, thus fulfilling two other memes.
Thus do Commies always run off vibe-fuckery to get and keep power. They are a Christian Heresy based on Envy and Resentment, run by Elite-class cohorts that are on the outs and with dim prospects for fulfilling their class ambitions otherwise- same as it ever was.
They are your enemy. They hate you and want you dead. They hate God and side with the Enemy. They made their choice. Give them their just reward: flame and fire.
Vidya continues to make the Cargo Cultist offering look as bad as it is.
Light No Fire in particular is a threat to Temu D&D and even to Official D&D because you have a Domain Game.
Better than others like it (Valheim, Enshrouded, Pax Dei, etc.), this threatens the Cargo Cult in particular because of--you guessed it--reduced friction compared to Cargo Cult play and it being full of fake and gay lameness.
Want to play solo? You can. Want to get the boys together? You can. Build up your own domain? You can.
Lots of what makes Vidya in general a superior alternative to Official D&D and Cargo Cultist knockoffs is here, is refined, and is going to be far easier to acquire and play (and get others to play with you) at a cheaper price compared to Cargo Cult non-gaming.
Unlimited L Works, Cargo Cultists. All the Ls. All for you. All the time.
On Tuesday of this past week, Wizards of the Coast confirmed what we all suspected about the Dark Sun revival.
This was not a surprise. This was merely a disapponting confirmation of what was expected.
The entire point of the product release is to push Communist propaganda, removing all of the nuance that existed in the former edition of the setting in the process; you can count on the writers imposing their inverted morality upon the setting's moral compass.
The fantasy that is being sought here is the fantasy of the Party Vanguard establishing the Communist Uptopia. That is it being done in a wasted world where iron and steel is more scarce and precious than gold, where the conditions of life are so precarious that it only compares to Arakis, and as such the implied anarchy championed by the Revolution is Extinction with extra steps.
You'd think that this was willful and deliberate on the part of WOTC and its partners, but no these Dangerhaired Dipshits are not that cunning or savvy. They are the Useful Idiots that get shot when the Revolution is achieved, the Genestealer Cultists that get eaten when the Tyranids arrive, the Chaos Cultists that get used as ritual fodder when their masters need to summon something with power into the world or meatshields when the Inquisition comes calling. They are the minions, not the masters.
They are mask-off with this because they believe that they have achieved the Revolution, at least in Tabletop, and in this they are mostly correct in that because they hold the Network Effect and have successfully achieved an Enclosure of the Commons through erecting the technical architecture required to seal up the funnel that Cargo Cultists rely upon to acquire customers and thus 100% capture the commercial side of the hobby (and with it most of the hobbyist acquisition) into their Walled Garden.
So long as this is deemed Brand Safe by WOTC's C-Suite this is going to continue.
That is the only form of leverage you have left. You must convince, by word and deed, that this direction IS NOT SAFE FOR THE BRAND!
If you are neither willing nor able to do that, then your only other option is to leave that entire model of hobby organization for the older model revived by the Bros.
Or you can quit, which you will inevitably do if you do nothing because you're going to lose players over time and be unable to replace them.
We are past the Collapse now. You either follow the majority into the Walled Garden, you change your ways and earn your place in the Clubhouse, or you're done. Choose before it is chosen for you.
Vitality/Wounds got rejected for a fucking reason, retard: it was more bothersome than the problem it claimed to solve.
Consider the normal way it works: Roll Damage, Track Hit Points. Crits don't matter unless and until they impose additional effects; recovery is equally standardized.
Now: Did I crit? No? Roll damage, Track VP. Yes? Track WP. Took WP? Complications on recovery.
What happens next? Anyone serious about being effective optimized for crits. This happened in previous WOTC Star Wars editions. It happened with Spycraft (and its deratives such as FantasyCraft), and it happens every single time this is implemented because PEOPLE FOLLOW INCENTIVES YOU FUCKING MORON!
What did you do with this? You introduced a means to bypass the ordinary damage capacity mechanic, which rewards those who are better able to achieve that bypass effect with superior combat performance, which incentivizes players to optimize for achieving most-consistent-bypass-performance and thus compels opposition to do the same lest all sense of challenge disappear.
Congratulations! You just made the game into Stealth Archer Rocket Tag. Everyone has to become a Stealth Monkey just to stay alive. Combat comes down to Who Can Detect Whom First; the losers get Alpha Struck with Overkill levels of Firepower and get the Swifty One-Shot Macro treatment. When players saw this in action 20ish years ago, they rejected it en masse which is why it disappeared from d20 Star Wars and Spycraft ended up losing hard to competing offerings.
No, it didn't make the game more fun. No, it didn't speed up gameplay. No, it wasn't fun to be on the wrong side of. No, it got boring to be on the shooting side of in short order too. It also lead to Narrative Faggotry when things went against the players, further degrading the integrity of the game and the hobby.
You should have been bitch-slapped for even thinking about this failed idea, DD. It failed for damned good reasons, such that even the obstensible source (HERO) is notorious for being janky and wonky in the execution of it- thus part of why HERO remains obscure to this day vs. The Only Game That Ever Fucking Mattered.
Let’s talk about the game in which all of these games took place in. The one in real life.
I was, ultimately in a kind of prisoner’s dilemma with a couple hundred people throughout this process. Lots of people opted for betrayal along the way. How did this manifest?
A) Cutting videos to relay key revelations from my efforts without saying my name.
B) Making a lifestyle about complaining about me and calling me a fool. Or calling everyone that has something nice to say about me a dummy.
C) Publishing a book that plagiarizes my work.
D) Going to people privately and telling them not to speak with me or associate with me.
E) Attempting to get somebody to make a Kickstarter Boondoggle based on my efforts while crediting my ideas to an enemy of mine.
F) Being ugly to me while I was attempting to run a game session with the purpose of trying something new that wasn’t fully understood yet.
You can probably cut some of these people some slack. If you were charitable. I mean… at every stage, it was not obvious how significant and even historic this effort was going to be ultimately. And I can tell you that the vast majority of the people in the vicinity of this work could not even admit that there were problems with what we were experimenting with, much less accept that there might be solutions to any of them.
Some of these people that opted for betrayal make a lot of noise. But the one thing they could never make was a lasting contribution to game design that can stand the test of time.
While I don't know all of the parties, I can suss out some of them. Respectively:
Earthnote, Tenkar, Grifting Beast, and the rest of the YT Oldfag Crew and the newfags riding their coattails.
Griff
The fake Appendix N book and its authors: Ann VanderMeer (ex-Tor, so a Commie) and Peter Bebergal (another NYC Commie fag). Tor's kept a hand in on Tabletop for decades due to personnel having current or past experience therein, and thus maintained contacts with Fellow Travelers at Wizards of the Coast and its orbiters like Paizo, so when Vox Day (Tor's enemy) decided to publish Jeffro's book they had to respond with their own to attempt control of the Narrative.
Also Griff
Would not be surprised if this was also Griff
Not a clue here
Freezing out Jeffro, and by extension the #BROSR, is Narrative Warfare. This attempt to retroactively take credit for all of Jeffro's work, all of the Bros' work, means that the Cargo Cult can steer the hobby back into the Cult Compound- the same thing that got done to George Lucas, by the way, as the Fanatics never forgave him for shattering their hold on the Narrative.
We're seeing the same reaction in Tabletop. Jeffro and the Bros broke the Narrative, such that enough hobbyists can see it and apply it, and that's too much for the Cargo Cult since Wizards of the Coast is giving them the shaft from the other direction at the same time by rendering their entire business model defunct.
Fuck these OldFags. Sideways. With a shovel covered in shit and burs.
He completely ignores player-directed development.
Braunstein does this better, and because the receipts are being shown repeatedly the influence spreads without pause. Oldfags have to get out in front or get rolled over, and so we have channels like this trying to steer things back on to the reservation.
I said a long time ago that Normies don't work for their entertainment. They sure as fuck don't do homework.
This is not how it's done.
Normies have a toleration for two prior movies or series before they quit in big numbers; this is known to the Hellmouth, which is why Trilogies are a thing and long-running franchises have soft resets between them as well as recaps/reintroductions and why there are few exceptions to this rule.
Feige could easily sort all of this continuity stuff in the opening minutes of this movie--Bond films have used the opening credits sequence to do this, and Jackson did this with the LOTR films with the loredump as the sequence--but he's turned out to be a collosal retard so no we have to witness this incompetence in action.
This applies to Tabletop.
As Macris noted recently, most Tabletop products are bought to be read and not played; they are not real gameplay products, but instead disguised Setting Bibles and Adaptation Pitches with extraneous game shit attached.
This is why, in addition to the Cargo Cult, we have the majority of buyers being Lore Nerds and Worldbuilding Wankers who inhabit a space without engaging with it at all and get mad at anyone--publishers and players alike--that do.
Cargo Cultists that play hate being constrained by Lore as it gets in the way of their autonomy. Real Players, being The Man In Command with agency, make the lore their bitch by assuming the roles of those able to shape it and then doing so.
The reality is that players only care about what happens in play. Everything else does not exist. This is why making players run all actors with agency in Braunstein forms is the hobby that works, why Cargo Cultists keep crying about shit games, and why publishing publishes disguised Setting Bibles because the real hobby does not need or want what they find viable commercially.
No one wants to do homework for entertainment. Feige's just the latest to figure this one out the hard way.
Last Sunday, the 2nd, JD Cowan dropped a post about the Enshittification of Culture.
He saw in that, thanks to the very pretentious faggot at Write Conscious, that the same pattern whereby Commies turned Adventure Fiction into "Sci-Fi" and ghettoized it into a forum for their fetish faggotry got played out across all of the Culture Industry.
The blueprint for the sort of literary takeover that destroyed OldPub is epitomized by the siffy cultists way back in the 1930s, who then seized the industry in the 1940s and turned a market for normal people into their own fetish playground. The pulp revolution over the last decade specialized in the rejection of their frame of "Don't Read Anything Before 1940" to discover just how much fantastic writing was buried for petty political reasons and deliberately left out of print. You can read more about this specific problem in The Last Fanatics where I discovered it for myself as I was writing about it. If one cares about art at all, OldPub is a failure at preserving any of it.
For a more general picture of what is going on now, I suggest the above video showing how the Literary Cartel used the Fanatic blueprint to do the same thing to the wider industry. Books about nothing written to no one and heavily leaning upon gimmicks and the promise of becoming a micro niche celebrity is what the Literary Cartel decided to do to their industry. It's like its own Oprah's Book Club, complete with the advertisement of religious cult figures for whatever ideology OldPub wants to foist on you.
The video in question, by the way:
There is no saving this without exercising State power to seize the industry, cull the enemies therein, replace them with sane people while in receivership, and forcibly reform the industry back into something functional and sustainable that can justify its existence.
Network Effects, motherfucker. You WILL grok this.
What did Dancey say?
TLDR: "Most people only ever played D&D. It's D&D or Nothing."
Then he explained why by introducing, for most of us back then for the first time, what a Network Effect is and how it works.
That's how the Open Gaming License, the d20 System, and the best time for Cargo Cultists to be around and making money came to pass before he got replaced at Wizards of the Coast and Yet Another Retarded MBA Faggot ruined the good thing.
Ryan, as he explained at the time, was being magnanimous. He wanted everyone to enjoy the prosperity that The Only Game That Ever Mattered brought, so he made it piss-easy to play nice; save for a few outliers, most Cargo Cultists did.
What Ryan downplayed, but did not omit, is that most of Tabletop, well past the 80/20 threshold, is UTTERLY IRRELEVANT.
Cargo Cultists did not believe him them. As most of them are Oldfags, they still don't; they think that somehow not being bankrupt and out of business means they are relevant.
Relevant means "Can be found in Walmart or Target, and is readily played by everyone in a manner that doesn't invite mockery by mainstream media."
No one on Stranger Things played Theater Kid Fag Non-Game or Temu Oldfag Houserule Non-D&D. They played The Only Game That Mattered.
That understated fact, backed up by data at the time, was never contradicted after the fact. The one thing that has not been talked about, but plays a huge factor into the strength of a Network Effect, is control over friction.
The holder of an Effect controls competition within the network by controlling the friction generated by non-compliance.
Friction, in this context, is measured by inconvience. Tabletop is notoriously inconvient; if you're a commercial operation, solving that issue is your top priority, and nothing is more inconvient than getting people to play at all followed by deciding on what to play.
WOTC's new pivot solves BOTH. Going mobile-first solves the Schedule Your Fun part; you can play whenever, however. Going All You Can Eat Brand Crossover Buffet solves the what you play part by standardizing the form of play while increasing the options within it.
Going against this increases the friction, exponentially so now that WOTC will be mobile-first, which is detrimental to convincing people to go with your Temu Tabletop offering over Official D&D in commercial terms. Only non-commercial alternatives, which don't compete on the same level, are viable now- and no, that doesn't mean serial busking on Kickstarter. That means going with a different organizational model entirely, such as the Clubhouse, which solves the same problems differently.
Don't take my word for it.
This is, of course, terribly frustrating to those of us who release products intended to be played. But the reality of the network effects and switching costs of RPGs is inescapable. If people didn't buy for art and lore, there'd be almost no indie industry at all.
These people would be better off making this shit as glorified Coffee Table Art Books like Dinotopia, with playable notes as a separate PDF for download.
This is why I say that Tabletop is no longer commercially viable. There is only non-commercial alternatives and delusional Cargo Cultists.
