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[Darrin Drader]

Originally Posted by evilref

A) All available evidence (from inside and outside of WotC) suggests that not only is 4e selling very well, but that month on month it's outselling 3.5, 3e and 2e.

No company is going to admit that their own product is not selling well. To do so is suicide for the product line. Companies will tell people how well their product is doing right up until the week before the product is canceled. You cannot take the self professed success of a product or line at face value from any company.

B) For it to be a PR blunder is an entirely subjective opinion and would also require vast numbers of people to say that they're not going to buy 4e solely because of the GSL. I've not seen that, and I doubt you have either. Moreover given the above sales, that PR blunder can't exactly be vast.

There's evidence here and all over the internet that shows that up to 50% of the current player base has no intention of switching to 4E. Assuming that those numbers are real (and I'm not going to bother debating whether or not you can believe the validity of internet polls) then if there's something they can do to get more people to switch, it would be wise to consider that option. Making the license more open lowers the barriers preventing publishers from porting their existing brands to 4E, therefore potentially bringing in players who are loyal to those publishers and product lines.

Mostly though I just found it a cheap attempt to make a snarky comment that doesn't actually have any supportable evidence behind it (I'll give you PR blunder, but not vast).

There's no supportable evidence that I'm wrong either, and it was neither cheap nor was it an attempt. It was free and it was pure speculation, and as people like to speculate about things they have no real information about around here, there is nothing indicating of "bad reasoning or logic" at all. In fact, in this thread's twin, other people came to exactly the same conclusions on their own. Are they equally guilty of bad reasoning and logic?

The tiresome '4e is selling badly' as so much independent argument against it that it's gone into pure fantasyland (it might well be selling badly in A store/X stores but globally it's selling very well).

4E could very well be selling badly. We don't have access to their sales data. We do not know what how many copies it has to sell for Hasbro to consider it a success. Since we don't have access to this information, it's ridiculous to point to any one piece of information and proclaim it a success or failure at this point.