Nes. Yo.
5e isn't particularly special in
most ways, and it's gotten a HUGE leg up because:
Tons of free advertising, like this is impossible to overstate how beneficial free advertising is
The rise of the "podcast" era making D&D "actual play" podcasts a cultural phenomenon
Not releasing at the start of a recession which caused the closure of one of the US's largest booksellers, but rather at a time when the economy was doing rather well
Major change in the cultural zeitgeist, where nostalgia for old-school nerdiness is in like Flynn
The "hopepunk" subgenre taking root
I'm sure I could list more. Point being, literally zero of these things have anything to do with 5e.
But
@Ruin Explorer has the right of it: 5e is accessible to players relative to past editions, and is the second-most DM-accessible edition yet (it's a
massive step down from 4e, but still a major step up from 3.x or any edition of TSR D&D.) Accessibility was
the characteristic 5e needed to have in order to capitalize on all that free attention and cultural zeitgeist. Essentially, the designers got lucky by choosing the right characteristic for the time.
If we consider a world where, for example, the 2007 recession never happened, 4e released a year later to fix issues of polish and presentation, and there
wasn't a horrific murder-suicide that devastated the digital tools team, things could've ended up incredibly, almost unbelievably different. Imagine that, in this world, WotC actually made a VTT--and not just any VTT, but a
good VTT, one coded to be flexible so you could build integration for older editions. A VTT that pre-empted the rise of Roll20. Now, also imagine that WotC didn't
shoot themselves in the foot, and instead negotiated a solid licensing deal with Paizo, who launches their Golarion setting as the premier, WotC-VTT-supported alternate setting for 4e D&D, with Paizo embellishments and rules alterations integrated as standard. Pathfinder as a game system never happens in this world. WotC becomes the primary source for VTT options, and expands outward, turning that VTT into something flexible and modular, creating rules packages that (eventually) allow you to play a Chainmail game or a 4e game or a campaign for any edition between them.
In a world like that, where all the rules minutiae gets swept under the VTT rug and WotC doesn't
create their own successful opposition, 4e would still be going strong today (or might have gotten a 4.5e/"merged in errata and fixes" update around 2016, with a prospective shift toward a "new, streamlined" edition in 2024 to line up with the 50th anniversary.) It would be accessible, not because the rules had been made any more or less opaque, but because you could offload all bonus-tracking and number-crunching to the computer, and
just play what you want. There would, of course, be people who complain about "having" to use the digital tools to play the game, but with the massive spike in internet- or computer-based play, those voices would almost certainly be outweighed by those who find the official VTT just too useful to pass up. And, with WotC actually supporting older edition play (with a subscription, naturally), they could even openly claim the "big tent" perspective.
This is, of course, a pie-in-the-sky dream. It's me wishing away all the problems, expecting WotC to show extreme foresight and accurately predicting both the problems they ran into with 4e and the successes others were about to have and jumping on them first. But we're already talking about an idealized world where other editions get the same level of massive attention and hype that 5e got by accident, for free. It doesn't seem like that much of a stretch.
Keep in mind: even at 15 million players (roughly half what 5e has allegedly achieved), a $10 a month DDI sub would translate to 10*15*12 =
$1,800,000,000 yearly income from DDI alone. If 4e had managed to pull in numbers like that? Hell yes, it would have survived. It would have been hailed as the greatest success D&D has ever seen, bar none, hands down, no question.
