I am also left wondering why this matters so much to folks who didn't switch to 4e. I mean, in a hypothetical world with paper Dragon/Dungeon, these would still have been 4e magazines - not 3.x or earlier. There's no hypothetical world in which Dragon/Dungeon would have reasonably kept pushing out 3.x content. Would you really have kept your subscriptions? As far as I can tell, you're down a few magazines either way.
Two things:
1) Having a reliable stream of high-quality adventures (and, critically, one or more Adventure Paths) delivered to me on a monthly basis would have made me and my group much more likely to switch to 4e. And at the time of the cancellation I had nearly 3 years left on my subscriptions, so that's pretty significant. (Indeed, with fact that those subscriptions converted to getting 14 issues of Pathfinder 'free' went a very long way towards making me a long-term subscriber to that product.)
2) I've actually
used virtually nothing from Dragon. I was always more interested in reading it for the sake of the content (and especially for the regular drop of information). Articles like the Demonomicon and Sean Reynolds' series on deities were the ones I most looked forward to, for the information and flavour rather than for immediate game use. So, provided those articles had continued, I would almost certainly have continued to subscribe (and certainly would have for the nearly three years I'd already paid for!).
But, rightly or wrongly, I always saw the e-magazines and the DDI as a
new product. I had no inbuilt loyalty (and always had a strong preference not to read long columns online). So they had to sell me on the DDI from scratch, and having failed to sell me on 4e already, they had no chance to do that.
Me either, but digital publishing's time has come since 2007. Tablets and eReaders are becoming more and more commonplace, and they'll only get moreso in the future, with growing competition in the $200 range. I think WotC was just a few years early on switching to digital-only.
What I'm saying is, even if paper publication of Dragon and Dungeon hadn't stopped 5 years ago, they almost certainly would have by now, anyway.
There's a lot of truth in this.
I do think WotC made two key mistakes, though:
1) Rather than being a few years early, I would say they were a few years premature. The time to switch to electronic magazines is
now, with the iPad and similar coming into very wide use.
2) I also think it was a mistake to go online only in one fell swoop. Paizo have shown the way here - start by offering them as both physical and electonic versions, with the e-version made available in both compiled and per-article formats (and released on the same date). Initially, have subscribers to the physical version get the e-version as a free extra... in time, you can then start to offer e-version-only subscriptions, and then probably start to phase out the physical versions entirely as and when your customers vote with their dollars.
) I'd say the articles are mainly fluff now with very few mechanics.
