There is a distinct difference between artistic and capitalistic games. How I use these terms has an important distinction which is "for lack of a better term":
Artistic: Product of a steady authorial hand that have a game, resource, or adventure to share. The "product" produced by this. The creator wants to and continues using their product long after it has been produced and is sold to it's consumers, who are expected to be gamers who use the product. This is of interest to the creator, who maintains a relationship and gathers feedback for their art.
Capitalistic: Product that exists solely to be sold. The person or group who wrote it were not under any circumstances interested in the product's gameability. Just the illusion of gameability, preferably in a slick package that draws interest of consumers. The people who produce products do not care if their consumers actually use their products. Just that they buy them.
These are not binary traits, and also are not mutually exclusive. It's really a spectrum. There are many, many products that are capitalistic first and artistic second. I've spent a lot of time learning how to smell out where on the spectrum games may lie. This is why I make statements like Mophidius and Free League are scam companies. Maybe not outright scams but their products all lean HEAVILY on the capitalistic side. Same with all these fake OSRs either sitting unbought on itch or ennie award winners that should be sitting unbought on itch.
D&D has been sliding down that spectrum for decades, and the new 6th edition is the most capitalistic and least artistic than it's ever been. Early 5E was a reprieve. It's first couple years was a trend back toward artistic. Not perfect, but not as bad as it could have been and definitely a damn sight better than 4E. Then came the blue wave of TDS. And it came for RPGs last out of most media. Anonymity helped, meaning Critical Role and Stranger Things HURT and sped up this process. We might could have sailed under the radar if only we'd have been a niche hobby for nerds when Orange Man was deemed Bad and began extending his real-estate mogulhood into every blue-haired activist's head rent free. Sadly companies that had no financial stake on D&D marketed D&D better than WotC had in over a decade, and here we are.
D&D (6E) isn't a game anymore. It's lost all of it's artistic merit. It is now merely product. I didn't think it would get this stupid. I could not have forseen that the woke infection of WotC would get so deep that they would steer directly into oblivion and literally nobody watching the bank accounts said "Uh, hey, guys we're not going to have a job tomorrow if we make this pile of shit."
That's because nobody working at WotC knows what a game is anymore. They aren't gamers. When gamers weren't at the top of TSR anymore, that's when it FUCKING DIED. When WotC bought TSR's corpse, it hired GAMERS and specifically gamers with bonafides and credits within TSR products and without to create WotC's initial edition of the game. So even at that point, we had a proper gamer hand steering the game design ship.
And I'm not talking about Monte "Overrated" Cook. I'm talking about pre-2000 Jonathon Tweet. They both have TDS now and are complete mush-brains but at the time you couldn't find a better gamer who was a designer than Jonathon Tweet. The entire indie game design movement spang from Jonathon Tweet's Over the Edge (1992-95), and nobody has produced something that plays better than what he produced. He built a game for WotC that people would want to play. It wasn't D&D really, but it was something new that people would and could get invested in for decades. Those still playing 3.0, playing houseruled 3.0 pretending it's 3.5, or Pathfinder 1E (same thing) are testament to it's longevity. Yes, nobody actually plays 3.5. That would require Rangers to have d8 HPs. Nobody does that because everybody who plays 3E loves the ranger as much as Paizo does, or at least did in 2007.
The point being the last gamer left the building when Mike Mearls "quit" via gunpoint. And at the time he "quit" he was relegated to sweeping floors and cleaning out bins. He was managing Jack and Shit, and Jack left town. He existed for a while because having Mike Mearls on the payroll means you can say you have Mike Mearls on the payroll. At one point they decided that wasn't necessary for optics anymore. Or maybe he got bored and really quit. But I have a feeling I'm pretty close to the mark on this one, as he exited just as Kyle Brink exited and we know he was merely a stooge and fall guy.
So that's it. 6E blows, everyone apparently knows it, and WotC has kept calling it "D&D 5E 2024" so they can eventually backpedal and rerelease a proper update of the 2014 version called "D&D 5E Classic" or some shit in a few years. Worked for Coke. It's a bold strategy Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for 'em. Let's see if they can get corebook money again for the same game they already produced. Let's see how fucking stupid the 5E audience really is. Apparently they aren't stupid enough to go for 6E in all but name.
