I felt like they were producing content just to produce content. I had a DDI subscription, for the character builder more than anything else, but again, ongoing fees for access to that material seems a bit questionable in retrospect.
4E certainly seemed more predatory in that sense. Endless releases, subscription based services...all designed to keep people spending money.
That wasn't my experience of 4e at all. I bought a fair bit of 4e stuff, but not all of it (only a few of the modules, no Eberron because I'm not into it, no Draconomicons because I don't really like dragons that much). I didn't subscribe to DDI except for a couple of months at the end of the edition's run, so I could download the magazine PDFs.
I never felt "presssured" into spending money, And I feel pretty satisfied with the use I've got out of what I paid for: an 8 year campaign that is still going, plus a new campaign just recently commenced.
Speaking in a broader marketing sense rather than as someone who played 4e (so I don't have an personal opinion either way about 4e vs. 5e and the quality of the content) -- you've hit the nail on the head with your use of the word "predatory".
I know from experience that too much of this kind of thing can and does drive consumers away from your product.
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That WotC switched directions from this kind of strategy makes me think that they decided that the D&D brand has excellent long-term potential as a AAA ("Triple A") game that finally needs promotion among other giants of gaming.
I've enjoyed your posts in this thread, and it's nice to have some sensible comments about marketing strategy!
But I don't think the characterisation of 4e as "predatory" is apt. The closest I can see is the Encounters sessions that required new content to participate - but while that may have been a failure from the point of view of promoting the game (because it discourages new entrants who don't want to buy the necessary stuff to joint the game) I don't think it is preying on anyone. (Ie not all unsuccessful business/marketing practices are predatory ones.)
A striking thing for me about 4e was this disclaimer in The Plane Above (p 97) about the need to engage with metaplot in one of the Dragon adventures:
The Scales ofWar adventure path, presented in Dun8eon magazine as a part of 0&0 Insider, takes an alternate view of githyanki history. . . . Part of the story arc in these adventures deals with the return of Gith and the breaking of the pact with Tiamat. Though the adventure path uses these assumptions, they are but one way that events could progress. If you design a campaign of your own featuring the githyanki, remember that the Scales of War path presents just one interpretation of the future of the githyanki. You are free to use or discard that version as you see fit.
Actively telling your customers that they
don't need to buy everything; that they are free to make the game their own; strikes me as the opposite of predatory. It is treating the RPG experience as one where player authorship is primary and the published works are there to help with that, rather than to constrain or direct how the customers engage with the game.
That's not to say that there aren't obvious differences between the 4e and 5e business models - but I don't think preying on customers is one of them.
The cost to buy every WotC product on the part of the consumer was far far higher in 4E than 5E.
Instead of selling a main product to a massive audience, they wound up seeking g to a smaller audience, and made up for the gap by producing as much material as they possibly could. The 4E approach meant that they needed to keep producing large amounts of new material in order to get the established audience to continue spending.
This seems like a reasonable description of the business model - and also, therefore, of an explanation for why they changed it. But I don't think this shows it was
predatory, because no one had to buy all that stuff to play the game.
I must be as hardcore a 4e player as anyone on these boards, but I didn't have a DDI subscription except for two months, and I don't own every 4e book. I only bought the ones that I thought would be useful to me (which is more than half of them, but not all of them).
Every edition of D&D has been for beginners. You aren't required to know each and every option in order to play the game so I don't buy your argument.
This just seems obviously false. Moldvay Basic is for beginners, and still has (in my view) the best GMing advice of any published version of D&D. AD&D is not easy for beginners, though - the preface and introduction are written in a way that assumes the reader is already familiar with the game - and OD&D is practically impenetrable even to someone who is very familiar with concepts from RPGing and wargaming.
I'm a huge 4e fan but I don't think it is especially beginner-friendly, as to get the most out of it requires a fairly sophisticated engagement with the action resolution mechanics, and their interface with the PC build rules. It also depends upon the GM having an imagination that bridges between mechanics and fiction - ie can envisage some fictionally engaging situation or scenario
and also envisage how that would play out in mechanical terms - and I think this is not so easy for beginning GMs. (The number of posts I see by people complaining about "cookie cutter" 4e certainly makes me think that a lot of 4e GMs didn't master this particular element of the game.)
