I think you have to be careful with this sort of claim.
I was a customer of WotC during the 4e era, and WotC consistently gathered good will from me, in the sense that it published useful stuff for the game at wanted to play, and sold it to me at reasonable prices. I get the sense that many 4e players had a similar view.
I think by "customers" of WotC you mean potential customers, or perhaps D&D players. WotC is very different in this respect from Paizo: no one would think of me as a "customer" of Paizo, because I've played very little 3E and no 3.5 or PF (I have 3E books on my shelf, but for adaptation to other systems) - even though I'm a 30+ year RPGer who still tries to get a game in every fortnight to three weeks. Whereas plenty of people who weren't playing 4e, or aren't playing 5e, still get labelled "customers" of WotC.
Of course, the benefit of this to WotC is revealed when they start selling a product which those potential customers are interested in buying - they leap almost effortlessly to the front of the RPG market pack.
Fair enough. There's certainly a distinction to be made of how we define "customer" in this instance, or "customer" versus "potential customer." But can anyone realistically look at D&D in the hands of Wizards of the Coast between the release of 4e in 2008 and the release of 5e in 2014 and not include the word "tumultuous" in the description?
From the critical backlash against 4e from a broad swath of the fanbase, to the yanking of PDFs even from existing clients who had already paid for them on legitimate digital distribution sites, to the misguided marketing, to the GSL release fiasco alienating third-party publishers, to the massively over-promised and under-delivered virtual tabletop, to the pulling of the character builder behind the paid web application wall, to the "We still can't figure out what they were trying to do even 5 years later" release of the Essentials line.......
I appreciate that you individually felt a warm sense of regard for the products Wizards was producing during that time period. But any honest outside viewer can easily argue that 2008-2014 was not a time period of positive customer outreach for WotC. Even vocal proponents of 4e decried the approaches taken for the character builder, VTT, and the overall quality of adventures.
Is it possible that this narrative is overstated in its effect? Possibly, but on the whole you'd have to be looking at it through some pretty skewed glasses to say that it's inaccurate.
To be sure, you could also include the positive descriptor of "innovative" in terms of the rules. Whether 4e worked in the marketplace or not, it certainly brought about some unique thought advances around RPGs as a whole. I personally owe a great debt to 4e, as the change from 3e to 4e was the impetus for me to really begin questioning some of my deeply held assumptions about why I played RPGs at all, and how an RPG system can facilitate or hinder the gameplay style I want to engender in my groups.
Have you been playing any BW? My campaign is about 8 or 9 sessions in.
Sadly no! And truthfully, I'd love to pick your brain on how you got your group to adopt it, and to really dig in to the rules "crunch" to get it going. I'd be absolutely gung-ho to dive in and GM it for my group, but I know for a fact they'd look at the density of the rule book and blanche.
I absolutely LOVE everything about the core assumptions of play outlined in the system. I just have to figure out how to get my group to play it.
