Listen, I don't want to diminish your celebration over the D&D Beyond walkback, in fact if I were at all invested in the playculture of D&D5X, I would also be celebrating it with you because it's a pretty decent example of a corporation listening to a vocal client base, could we remember this time, could we maybe retain some awareness that
the call is coming from inside the house?
Like, this is not some hero narrative of weirdo outsiders pushing a gouging enclosure upgrade scam on the poor beleaguered geekfriends who just wanna make a widdle fantastygaem for folks oopsiedaisy but some heroic community manager saw the outcry and managed to speak up on their behalf hurray!!!! or the like, this is just... literally what they do. This was a calculated move to make money (by stopping database maintenance on deprecated material) that they walked back only because they figured the total capital they'd lose would be worse overall than the gains for one reason or another. This was an internal move.
This rankles me because already my twitter feeds and other social media and gamedev discord channels are full of "yaaaayyy good guy WotC has our back, haha, hurrah, suck it, we know they'll take care of us, see they have our best interests at heart" and like... this is the same fuckery as the OGL debacle just last year, met with the same grassroots propaganda of "wahoo the good guys at WotC defeated the corporate fuckery we win, we win, they like us, they ARE us" when in fact they just... stopped turning the dial, stopped pushing the button for a minute to relieve pressure and regain some credibility.
Like none of this surprises me? Corporations going to corporate, this is par for the course, this is basic market-dominance capitalism shit. But what bothers me is just how quickly people frothing about "grrr how dare" turn to full-on "look they have our back, we love them, they love us" recuperation, every time, especially the ones they get away with - I've lost track of the number of writers I knew who quit the market entirely when their complaints of "wow, a 50% or higher cut is REALLY STEEP, DM's Guild, that's a HUGE cut for such an unoptimized, hard to search, unreliable platform" were met with angry fans yammering about how they should feel lucky to be allowed to create for D&D, isn't that reward enough, you ungrateful heathens, now your next book should be bigger with more art and cost less, hop to it, and they just keep getting away with THAT one, there's no walking back in sight
And WotC defenders keep pretending they don't realize that the call is, was, and always will be coming from inside the house.
