I was away for a full week for vacations. I'm catching up on the news, I saw this, and I felt really sad.
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I'll be transparent. I grew tired of 5E about three years ago and haven't touched it since. Solely for these reasons. But the whole OGL debacle and all the other red flags that I saw pop in the last week made it very clear that, interest or not in the rules, I ought to stay away from the game and the company owning it.
However, the game still has a massive influence on the industry and community of TTRPG so I take interest in the news. And seeing this preorder page is exactly what I feared would happen many months ago.
For context, I work in the video games industry. It's an industry that's incredibly creative and remarkable in many ways. But it's also an industry that has been strangled for almost a decade by rapacious capitalism and greed. Games get more and more pricier to develop and the marketing budgets are exploding, all in the goal of projecting value and convincing customers that your game is the one to buy. These high cost lead companies to hire rapacious CEOs that take away tens of millions of dollars in salaries, while cutting away employees in wave and cribbling games with questionable monetary practices. So many design decisions are taken not being it'll make a better game and give you more fun, but because it'll make you feel bad and get you to spend. It's a big disgusting.
And for those that don't know, there's been records massive layoff in the industry. Tens of thousands have lost their jobs in the past 18 months.
The image above? It's exactly the first step into the same model. I don't know how the TTRPG industry will react, the composition and balance of its ecosystem is quite different than video games; however, it cannot be positive. Less than a decade ago, a video game offering a DLC too soon after launch was questionable; did the devs cut some content from the game to make you spend more? Now, every release has such practices. Early accesses, different tiers, fear of missing out, exclusives.
You used to be able to buy one product. You buy the book, you have the book, you play the game. You want more book? There's more books. It won't be the same. And, rightfully so, many will say "but you can still just buy the book and ignore all of that!". The thing, is that if my experience proves me right, the kind of practices detailed above will be embraced and accepted by enough people that it will prove the executives right.
"That's where the money is." And it will continue to drift in that direction. With video games, you cannot just "buy the game" and ignore the naughty word. Your product is already cut in pieces. You pay the full price, get a part of it. And the design of your products is affected by it. They do not design the best product possible, they design the product they can monetize the most.
I guarantee that in a set number of years, it will all be subscription based and you will own nothing and be happy.
I will anxiously be looking at the general reception of all of this. I wasn't planning to, but I now know 100% that I will not buy any more Wizards of the Coast products. I cannot participate in telling them that this path is the best one for us, because it's not.
I will look even more anxiously to the rest of the ecosystem, the OSR, the indie games, the other systems like Call of Cthulu, Pathfinder, World of Darkness, etc. Will they follow suit? Will it affect it? How?
I can't be the only one shaken by this.
