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I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna 4E post, okay but it's not going to be about how 4E was actually good (because this is undeniable, objective fact, why would I post about how water is wet) but something I don't always see brought up a lot which is the narrative that 4E was a failure
"4E was a total failure that spooked WotC and that's why they tossed all of it out to play it safe with 5E" is the accepted narrative surrounding the decision to, well, toss out most of 4E and replace it with a blander, pandering 5E, but I'm not sure how true that actually is
It was a VERY commonly held talking point among 4E detractors that it was a failed edition, that its sales were tanking, that it was being outsold massively by Paizo, etc, but the thing is that WotC, Hasbro, et al do not release sales figures, there is no hard data whatsoever
The closest thing people had to bolster talking points were some ICv2 reports which represent, at best, a narrow cross-section of sales, and more to the point the ICv2 reports people point to where Paizo overtook D&D only occurred like two years after 4E launched
Now I'm not claiming that I personally have any greater insight into how well or how poorly 4E sold my own self, I'm as much in the dark as anyone, but I do think it's kind of shitty that this narrative which is basically founded on "well it MUST be, right" has become the default
Surely it makes sense that 4E was a massive flop or else they wouldn't have so quickly pivoted to 5E, unless yknow WotC laid off a lot of the design team, put a guy who didn't like 4E in charge of the line, made any number of dumb corporate decisions imaginable, who knows
As a side note, I mentioned it elsewhere but 4E's development history was notably riven with some of the most terrible luck and unfortunate circumstances imaginable which I'm guessing played SOME part in its actual and hypothetical failings as an edition
To start with, no 4E video game. Why? Because they literally couldn't make one due to Atari having a contract which gave them the sole rights to produce D&D video games, which they were squatting on and doing nothing with, which meant the window for a 4E video game was shut down
WotC would have to take Atari to court and would eventually force a settlement, but by that point it was 3 years after 4E's launch and it's hard to recover your momentum from that https://www.geeknative.com/22649/wizards-of-the-coast-and-atari-settle-legal-battle-dd-digital-return-to-wotc/
The other thing that happened was the lead for WotC's planned virtual tabletop and digital infrastructure killed himself and his estranged wife in a murder/suicide
That's not a funny "haha so dark" joke, that was actually a thing that happened, and as he was the only person running the project with nobody around to pick up the pieces (WotC has a notorious slipshod approach to anything digital) the project was shelved indefinitely
Another contributing factor to things was that 4E was being launched into a post 3.X world, which meant a post d20 bubble world. A lot of the brick-and-mortar infrastructure that had existed at the time 3E was new simply didn't exist anymore. Game stores, chain bookstores, gone
Some of that shrinkage in the physical retail space was the collateral damage of an oversaturated D&D bubble bursting, taking small businesses down with it, some of it was simply the changing retail landscape away from physical retailers to online shopping
I recall that when Mearls was put in charge of the line the highly touted D&D 4E Essentials was supposed to be a brand new "evergreen" line of books that you'd always be able to find on store shelves. That would be awesome maybe if not for the fact that Borders then went bankrupt
And on top of all this was WotC's absolutely stupifying decision to pull ALL pdf support, citing "piracy concerns," which meant that while 4E was being made it was literally legally impossible to buy digital copies of The World's Greatest Roleplaying Game
If you wanted 4E pdfs, your choices were A). grab scans from someplace like 4chan or B). eat shit
So let's take alllllllllllllllllll of this together, and we're not even really zooming in on things like WotC's regular yearly round of layoffs which were an ongoing process during this time, and holy fuckin shit could you stack the deck against a game any harder?
And we still, STILL, do not have any hard sales numbers! Despite all of this frankly unbelievable bullshit, all this inexplicably godawful misfortune and terrible timing at every turn, it's still entirely possible 4E was selling decently well, but we have no way of knowing
So I think what annoys me more than "oh people don't think 4E is a good game" which, like, okay whatever, having bad taste isn't illegal (yet) is the idea that 4E was objectively a bomb, an unassailable refutation from the fanbase and the market which led to the current design
That's definitely a narrative that people who disliked the game are comfortable assuming must be true, and I know a lot of people pushed it even when 5E wasn't yet a twinkle in Mike Mearls' rapist-befriending eye, but it's never ACTUALLY been demonstrated
It feels kinda "shitty neoliberal" of me to arch my eyebrow and go "fake news???" but it does kind of bug me how what's effectively a bunch of best-guesses and "common sense" takes hold and just becomes the accepted fact of the matter without much in the way of actual facts
Now I don't know, maybe there's some more concrete sales data out there that I don't have access to and I'm always happy to shown that I'm wrong, if you happen to have it by all means let me know, and hey, if you used to and/or do work for WotC and you want to leak anything...
I am very discreet, just saying
