Whenever there is some big blow up online in the gaming community it sounds like affects everything. But then when you look around your local gaming community it becomes evident that most people either don't know about it or simply do not care one bit. For me I rarely ever saw anything local reflecting the opinions online.
Until Wizards of the Coast pissed in their own bed.
Working at a game shop I saw some immediate results. Some people coming in asking how it will affect them, or asking if we keep carrying DnD material, etc. Then we saw people voting with their wallets, and did they ever.
We sold more non-DnD games over the last three weeks than we usually move in six months. Games I didn't think would ever move like the new Stargate SG-1 book. Pathfinder sold out so fast it was like blinking and poof no more books, we would still be selling the corebooks if the distributors weren't sold out.
Cyberpunk RED, Forbidden Lands, Sla Industries, Conan, Fallout, Monster of the Week, Numenera (much as I hate to say) and so many more. We had to just keep restocking.
I've seen people leave DnD before. Back near the tail end of 2nd edition before WotC bought out TSR and then again during the 4th edition era. With 2nd ed we saw a lot of folks just leaving the community altogether. Stopped gaming and moved on to another hobby. There was no internet and little ways of finding new games other than an ad in Dragon or whatever the local ship happened to carry. With 4th ed people seemed to mainly just to stay with 3.5 and then jump ship to Pathfinder once it hit the shelves.
None of that happened this time. From what I can tell people are surging out into lots of other games. Nobody is leaving the hobby just changing who they give their money to. This is a great thing. Part of me is actually hoping Wizards/Hasbro does something stupid again just to keep this change going.
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