It seems to me that people are approaching the situation from the perspective of customer response to the rules as the primary driver of editions/revisions. But I think this fails to account for what historically has been the driver: plummeting sales.
Not in the sense, mind you, of “sales plummet because people are tired of the game.” Rather because, historically, a new core book release sees a spike in sales, and then plummets. This was the case for 1e, 2e, 3e, 3.5, and 4e.
In 1e’s case, the spike came a little later than the release due to the Egbert affair, but after the spike in ‘81, TSR was in dire enough financial straits to depose both Kevin Blume and Gary Gygax in rapid succession by 1985.
In 2e’s case, the sudden plummet after 1989 was offset by TSR’s increased reliance on the Random House deal as an off-the-books line of credit.
When the game was taken over by people who actually knew how to run a business, it was immediately seen that “release an edition every 10 years” was untenable. So, 3.5 comes out 3 years after 3e, 4e comes out 5 years after 3.5, Essentials comes out 3 years after 4e, and finally 5e comes out 3 years after Essentials. To be sure, customer feedback reflected how those products were revised, but the revisions themselves were driven by the rapid decline of sales after release.
5e, for a number of reasons, finally broke this pattern by having sustained growth through most of its lifespan. Still, WotC knows it’s passed it’s peak, and sales will only go down from here.
But, what 5e and now the 2024 rules have that none of the other versions had, is a critical mass of subscriptions, WotC’s long desired holy grail. 4e had a prototype, but the digital market was still immature: VTTs were still in their infancy, and smartphones and tablets were not there to integrate digital tools at the table.
Now, WotC doesn’t just have a successful digital subscription service they can rely on for sustainable revenue, they also have their licensing agreements with multiple other digital platforms, another source of revenue.
And this is reflected in the changes to the rules. Not in the old bugaboo of changing the rules to make it easier to play online. But rather, in a new-found conservatism in rule changes. In the old paradigm, they wanted to drastically change the rules to force the purchase of new books—either by customers who wanted to keep up, or by new players who had no interest in the previous version.
Now they want to maintain continuity, to encourage people to stay subscribed, to keep good-selling ancillary products available for purchase, if only in digital format once printing becomes too costly.
But most importantly, having these streams of revenue reduces the financial incentive for a big rules overhaul. There will undoubtedly be trends in design iterations in the coming years, but they have no need to make anything that departs from the 5e rule set that they (and other 5e publishers) are iterating on.
