Introduction
In 2014, Perspectives On Politics published "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens".
You may not recognize the publication or the title, but you likely know its chief conclusion:
"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism."
I bolded the key takeaway there.
Dissidents that are not bullshitting grifters, and actually want to win (a combination that is, sadly, lacking), need to take the time to grapple with this conclusion- not an easy thing to do given the emotional investment that many have in the popular democratic process.
It is not hard to see that this study's conclusion applies outside the United States. The same lack of influence is obvious throughout the West now that we know what to look for, and it has long been the case in the Third World as well as throughout the East and the Second World.
But what has not been acknowledged is that this is a fractal matter: if there is no influence on the national or international level, then what about smaller levels? What about "public policy" sorts of decisions outside of government, such as influencing a corporation and its business decisions?
We now have a very good example to look at regarding this question, and I will tell you up front what the answer is: NO!
Setting The Stage
Wizards of the Coast is a subsidary of Hasbro. These corporations are owners of entertainment brands arising from toys and games, but over the last 20 years both companies have attempted to increase the value of their stock (and thus value to shareholders) by leveraging the strengths of their brands in entertainment media other than those that those brands arose from. G.I. Joe movies, Transformers movies, many videogames, branded merchandise of many kinds, etc. are all part of this.
Wizards of the Coast owns Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering, the dominant brands in (respectively) the tabletop role-playing game and collectable cardgame markets. Wizards has followed its parent company's lead in attempting to leverage these brands, to varying success (and failure).
Wizards has long known that its tabletop RPG business is difficult to make acceptably profitable; the business model puts most of the expenditure on 20% of its customers- the one in five that administer gameplay at the table. Wizards has long wanted to get more money from the other 80%, and mostly failed to do so.
Wizards saw the rise of Virtual Tabletop applications as a way to fix this, but it ran into a problem from its own past.
In 2000, a man by the name of Ryan Dancey worked at the corporation. Using Open Source Software as inspiration, he recognized that tabletop RPGs are (for all intents and purposes) software code in documentation form; using this analogy, and explaning Open Source Software's model, he explained to Wizards' then-leadership that D&D's dominant position was entirely due to the Network Effect and by making the code--the rules--of D&D Open Source it guaranteed D&D's dominance henceforth.
The leadership agreed, and so the Open Game License became a reality and D&D's 3rd Edition (in slightly redacted form) was released under it. The results were as Dancey claimed, and then carried foreward from there to create an entire business ecosystem of D&D-alike games that catered to forms or styles of play that D&D found unprofitable to bother with.
The license still exists. It is a perpetual license, and it was intended--and understood by all until recently--to be irrevocable despite that not being explicitly stated because that was not necessary at the time.
Turnover in leadership at Wizards resulted in D&D having an edition turnover by 2008. The leadership now was opposed to the Open Game License, but could not claw it back; they instead kept the 4th Edition out of said license and attempted to force the entire sector over to a more restrictive one. That instead resulted in the creation of Wizards' biggest competitor in the RPG business (for certain values of "big"; this is akin to an aircraft carrier being "big" compared to the glorified fishing trawlers around it).
This was not to last, but this early episode pointed to what will be shown below: popular outcry and complaining did nothing; only when Money (in the instutional sense) talked did anything get done.
When Wizards released D&D's 5th Edition, all that fled to the competitor returned overnight because this new edition was released under said Open Game License and with it all the hangers-on who wanted to be with the dominant Network and profit from those Network Effects turned their coats with no shame whatsoever.
Observors noticed this, and it was remembered. This set the stage for what just went down.
Corporate Contempt In Action
A couple of events happened in the last few years that matter here.
First, both Hasbro and Wizards had leadership turnovers; Hasbro in particular has been under pressure to be perform by institutional investors and similar stakeholders. Hasbro got taken over by Wizards' CEO, and his replacement came from outside the sector entirely--a total non-gamer--with past experience at Amazon and the tobacco industry among other Red Flag postings.
Second, with the rise of Virtual Tabletops and the explosion of their use during Wu-Flu, a network of users and customers struggling with atomization turned a mostly in-person hobby to a digital one and with it came the specter of microtransactions and Game As Service.
Wizards' new leadership came under pressure from Hasbro, especially after its recent--and entirely situational--surges in revenues to finally make good on that monetization problem. The new leadership decided to do so by forming a plan to pivot the brand out of its legacy business model entirely.
This meant replacing the legacy customer demographic for a new one, one that is far larger and already proven to be compliant and pliable with regard to monetization and Game As Service business models. The new edition of D&D would be all-digital, entirely online, in a proprietary Walled Garden application. This is "OneD&D".
Seattle's Xanatos Gambit
The leadership knows that, despite complaints, every edition--with one exception--saw the vast majority of existing customers switch over to the new Current Edition. Anyone with a Master's of Business Administration knows that this is Brand Loyalty in action, and anyone with knowledge of Network Effects knows that this is the Network Effect in action. The current Wizards leadership has both.
Therefore the leadership reasoned that the opinions of the legacy customers DOES NOT MATTER. It is preferable to bring them along, but it is not necessary.
What is necessary is to deal with the roadblock, which is the Open Game License. Here, again, the leadership acted within reason: the license does not explicitly state that it is irrevocable, so--as their lawyers say--it is not and therefore they can do so.
What just concluded was a failed attempt to directly revoke the Open Game License.
Note what I said, because I mean exactly that; the actual effect of the result will be to make it irrelevant going forward, which is an indirect revocation.
In an attempt to ensure that customers sign on to the new digital application, all support by third parties under the existing license for the current edition was to be terminated and a new--more restrictive--restrictive one put in its place with all such parties signing on or going under due to inability to do business.
This was just confirmed today; DriveThruRPG (a major storefront for this business sector) was to choke off non-compliant businesses, and Amazon would be sure to follow, the combination of which kills 90% of the sector).
What happened instead was that everyone with a YouTube channel, a Twitter account, etc. started complaining about this.
Guess what Wizards' response was? Nothing. They didn't move an inch; they instead showed contempt by glad-handing the responses with non-answers and platitudes.
Then someone suggested cancelling subscriptions to the online convenience portal, D&D Beyond, which Wizards monitors closely in real time. Only then, and no sooner, did Wizards make any serious countermove at all, and even that was a contemptuous half-measure intended to bamboozle those upset into quieting down.
Wizards' leadership, correctly, figured this was a temporary upset--a tantrum--and it would blow over soon enough. Had it stayed at this, that would have happened.
Then AltaFoxCapital--an institutional investor, a HEDGE FUND--got involved by publicly critizing Wizards and Hasbro over this mess and the misstepts leading to it. That was a few days ago as of this post.
Then, and no sooner, did Wizards drop this entire plan of attack and shift to Plan B.
Plan B was to release the System Reference Document for D&D 5th Edition unto the Creative Commons License, to cease trying to revoke the existing Open Game License, and to SHUT THE FUCK UP about all of this.
Celebrating Too Soon
The complainers think that they've won.
No, they didn't.
Nothing happened until Money talked. That was the Beyond cancellations. Nothing THAT MATTERED happened until Real Money talked. That's Alta, the institutional investor. Many of those cutting videos are still high on the delusion that they made this happen; they are being told--shown--how wrong they are, and we'll see who among them can deal with reality and who cannot soon enough.
Had no one with Real Money--no institutional player, or an individual on that level--intervened, Wizards would have continued with their Public Reations management while going ahead with the direct revocation plan and making what they wanted to happen go down as they wished because everyone else lacks the power to stop them.
As it is, Wizards plan to do as I described above with D&D is not affected at all. Instead, internal dissent at Wizards is crushed because the leadership now has what they need to compel everyone else to get behind the plan or get yeeted out a window.
Going forward, Wizards now has no reason to bring legacy players along; they will be abandoned, all brand failures will be blamed on them, and all marketing of the legacy format will be ended- which imperils competitors due to their inability to do such marketing or customer acquisition themselves, being so dependent upon Wizards as they are.
In the eyes of the population at-large, "D&D" means "RPG, so Wizards has the power to define what a RPG is and have it stick due to Network Effects. Once Wizards pivots the brand out of the legacy model of playing with a group around a table with physical products--books, dice, sheets, etc.--and even makes it seem lame and unacceptable to do so the masses and the Brand Loyalists will toss everything else away as garbage.
And there will be nothing the others can do about it. They are not on the level of institutional players; they cannot influence corporate policy anymore than they can influence government policy.
Conclusions
This entire episode is a validation of Elite Theory in practice.
Barring the employment of violence, the common individual is as hapless to influence a corporation as he to influence a government agency. Only by being organized into a unit by an elite, and acting in an organized and disciplined manner, can anyone in such an environment get anything done.
This is how a organized minority, operating in a ruthless and persistent manner, comes to dominate a less-organized and disciplined majority. That is what an institutional investor--Real Money--is in practice.
Secrecy, patronage networks, etc. are part-and-parcel to being effective actors and getting what you want done. What's going on right now in Disney shows this in action.
This has terrible implications because this obsfucation and impermeability has come down to a far more immediate and local level than many in the West suspect. Couple that with the miseducation--deliberate I suspect--to the contrary and dissidents great and small will have a hard time getting wins against the enemy.
Thank God that, sooner or later, they succumb to hubris and wreck themselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment