I wasn't referring to just the day-to-day low-level noise of worry and griping. We have a panic in progress every time WotC makes an announcement. It is like a reflex arc.
This strikes me as being a very disingenuous way of looking at people's reactions to WotC over the last few years.
Businesses, by their very nature, don't generally make statements of fact regarding their corporate health and viability; they tend to talk in marketing and PR. Now, there are good reasons for this, but it means that people hearing these messages will guess, interpret, and speculate about what the actual state of the company is.
And over the last several years, there's been some real cause for concern.
Businesses don't die instantly, save for the rare catastrophic incident. Most expire over years of losing money, often while making rapid changes and shifting plans in hope of drumming up new revenue to avert the spiral they've fallen into. Looking back at the state of WotC over the last few years, it's not hard to wonder if they've started into that kind of spiral.
When they fail to meet stated project goals, that's a cause for concern.
When the president of the company is replaced, that's a cause for concern.
When they lay people off with semi-regularity, that's a cause for concern.
When they cancel multiple products at once, as well as entire product lines, that's a cause for concern.
Now there may be good reasons for why all of these have happened which don't impact WotC's health at all. We don't know; but because we don't know, we speculate to try and get a better understanding of what's going on.
Given that, and given that it honestly does seem like most of the news about WotC - rather than the news they themselves are releasing - seems to be bad, it's completely understandable that people are seeing them falling into that spiral that dying companies go into.
