About rules foibles and minor design flubs? Sure.
About an entire edition?
Cuz that's what we're talking about here. WotC reps, in light of Pathfinder's glorious success, saying "We screwed up by releasing 4e, we're looking at how, and we'll try to do better."
Somehow, I don't envision them saying that. Even if some of them secretly believe it to be true. At the very least, they won't want to burn bridges with the people who really do like 4e (even if those people are a tiny insignificant slice of the market) by calling it a "screw up."
If you can realistically imagine them doing that in response to a truly dominant Pathfinder/lackluster other sales, you've got a stronger/more delusional imagination than me.
I CAN imagine them saying, "DDI has been a great success!" or something, regardless the veracity of that statement, just because it's not exactly falsifiable, and therefore passes the marketingspeak test.
I could also imagine them saying, "4e hasn't gone exactly as planned," or something, if they were attempting to address the issues of people not buying enough 4e stuff, or the Edition Wars, or whatever.
But "We shouldn't have released 4e?"
Whatever, I was just trying to point out that no one actually knows how the hell any company is actually doing overall, period, because we're not actually privy to that actual information. All we know from this thread is that Paizo is selling more books than anyone else. That's probably good news for them. Any attempt to extrapolate that into "MY EDITION IS BELOVED BY MILLIONS AND CAN BEAT UP YOURS, WHICH IS FAILING AND SLIDING INTO OBLIVION" is a sort of weird jingoism at this point.
We will probably have both games for quite some time to come, and I think the edition warriors on both sides will need to make peace with that at some point, or just become grumpy old malcontents.
Frankly, at this point I wouldn't say that 4e was a mistake - they did listen to a portion of their audience, and that portion
is happy with 4e.
Perhaps not the game for either you or me, but it does have its fans.
It is
not 'failing and sliding into oblivion', though I think that it may be stagnating at the moment.
I don't even think that 4e was a mistake, anymore. There
was a vocal core that were not happy with 3.5. Perhaps a minority, but certainly not a small minority.
I think a bigger mistake might have been discontinuing 3.X - that having both games in tandem might have worked better for WotC than 4e on its own. That they were counting on a larger number converting to the new edition. My worry about 4e is based
only on local observation that sales are stagnating, and that local stores are coming to recognize it. But I also think that is temporary, that 4e
will recover.
On some level Essentials
was Wizards saying "4e hasn't gone exactly as planned".
I had thought that Essentials, in particular the Red Box would do better, locally, than it did. I don't know why it didn't do better, aside from the apparently lackluster Red Box. It has an attractive price point, it is in a format that book stores would
much rather deal with, and from the few folks that I know who looked at it Essentials is
not a bad version of the game. Maybe closer to D&D 4.25 than 4.5.
If I were going to be tempted by 4e at all that would be my choice - the price point makes it an impulse buy, something all too rare in gaming these days.
I think WotC cutting back on their release schedule is a good thing, that fewer, but stronger, releases will help more than the Splat-A-Month schedule.
I think that there is room for both, and
both groups of edition warriors need to acknowledge that both games are here to stay. The audience has split,
so live with it!
And, despite my soothing words, I
am a grumpy old malcontent,
and don't you forget it! Grrrr.
My take on Pathfinder doing well is that it means that there is plenty of room for both games, I can set aside my sword and shield... no wait, sorry, playing a paladin, I need those.... Rather, I can pick up my dice and play, I can go to Borders and find material for my game, that I have lost
nothing, even if 4e gets over its apparent slump. Seeing Shadowfell on the shelf does not mean that Ultimate Magic is not also on the shelf.
The Auld Grump, and again, grrrr.