They are in any event. But my claim here is that brand name D&D has structural reasons that make “act as a good compromise game/base to compromise from” a primary design goal that don’t apply to other TTRPGs.
If I make a game that 10 people love and 10,000 people like okay and put it on itch, I move 10 copies (and hopefully those 10 people find each other lol.) If I make a game that 20 people love and 9,990 hate to their fuckin bones, I sell 20 (to the extent that selling is really something I care about at all.) The calculus is the other way around for WotC.
My contention would be that I don't think 2024 is doing a particularly good job of acting as a "good compromise" or "base to compromise from".
The issue here stems from two things:
1) A lot of the stuff being put up to playtest by WotC is peculiar, and doesn't seem to match up with any vision of D&D, nor with anything players have actually asked for. It's very peculiar stuff.
2) The surveys are being answered by about 0.01% of WotC's estimated current playerbase. That is not a good sample size. You have to jump through hoops and sign up to even answer them, that they are then incredibly tediously long, that their questions are not at all focused or thoughtful or specific, but utterly generalized and generic, and soon. This means that I suspect that 0.01% is largely the same sort of people - mostly grogs like myself - who answered the DND Next surveys a decade ago.
I.e. not the main bulk of the playerbase of 5E currently, which is new players. I just really doubt many people in their teens and 20s are filling in the literally dozens to hundreds of needlessly detailed yet unfocused questions asked by the surveys. Yet they are the largest group of D&D players now, by far.
What we're getting isn't a compromise among the desires of the actual playerbase of 5E. We're getting a compromise with the grogs once more. We're getting "apology edition 2.0", where good ideas, which would have proven popular with the 20+ million newer players are thrown back in the fire because some 40-50-something grog like me, representative of about 10% of the playerbase at most (the 40+ section), wants D&D to change as little as possible, and thus some essentially good idea got 60% instead of 70%, and WotC are throwing that baby straight out with the bathwater, right out the window.
Put it like this - if I was in charge of making sure D&D kept making money and stayed popular, I wouldn't be relying primarily on outdated surveys of 0.01% of the playerbase. I would be aggressively conducting research on the people who played my game and what they actually like/dislike/see as missing (which probably won't be very similar to the surveys, I note). There will be some who say, "Well maybe they are!", but I do not believe that for one second, because when companies are doing that kind of research, they're extremely proud of it, because it's basically a good thing for the customers. And Crawford loves to talk - he'd have mentioned it. Instead it's surveys, surveys, surveys.
