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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 8304010" data-attributes="member: 7026617">Marketing research. Its a non-trivial distinction, and one I stand by. They're quite good marketing itself.Many of them?  Of course they are.  Why wouldn't they be?  If you have an experience that's acceptable to you, why would you spend a lot of time finding a theoretical one that's better.  What percentage of people do you think do that for anything?Point at one.5e came when 4e had been seriously tanking for some time.  There were clearly a large number of people who had found what it offered undesirable, and that's not even counting the people who'd found even 3e undesirable (and the 5e lead up made a very deliberate attempt to court as many of those back into the fold as it could).  The game had a number of advantages over and above any systemic benefits (there were only three books, which is an attractive choice to anyone getting into it anew, it was available in places you wouldn't see any other RPG, and its only real direct competitor (Pathfinder) was also getting pretty long in the tooth (and PF's success was also an artifact in part of timing, since it took advantage of the people who found 4e a bridge too far).So a new, and manageable edition of the most well known game in the market arrived when a fair number of its prior fans had been turned off by the prior edition(s), was sold aggressively and very visible, and also landed when the popularity of geek culture was cresting.So it sold really well?  Shocker.Now I'm guessing you want to claim its sales were because it was such a great game.  But there's a problem with that.  Outside the D&D sphere (and the more intensely active parts at that), in the first few months most people aren't going to know that. They aren't going to have seen playtests, or had much opportunity to play it. Like opening weekends of a new movie, they're mostly buying blind (and this is even more true of new entrants to the hobby). At that point its going to be for a large part of those sales are going to be flying mostly off two things: Marketing, and knowing you can probably find other people to play it with.</blockquote>

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