>>72723025Genuinely speaking?
We've hit a time where you an easily create and publish an RPG, allowing people to throw indiscriminate amounts of money at ideas that they like. However, the flip side of this problem is that their are a lot of games now, like a fuck ton, each taking up their own small bit of market share with the big boys on campus (namely D&D) solidifying their key markets through aggressive business practices.
What's going on is that there is a lot of goddamn products and ideas out there, but few of them get any remote amount of traction outside of small, core, groups. So we have a lot more focused games that attempt to cater to a specific audience rather than a game attempting to appeal to everyone. This phenomenon has created such games as Sigmata: This Signal Kills Fascists, Refined OSR's, and "Asian Acceptance" (as much as that's an RPG) which focus on a single core idea to get across on the table.
To double down on that, we've seen a massive increases of online games, meaning that people are more than able to GET a game, but the ability to KEEP a game is becoming harder and harder a GM can easily swap out players for new players (as the ratio is always skewed for more players) or allow players to find a new GM (as there are always GMs out there wanting to run).
I could wax philosophically about the nature of the market, but I won't.