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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9241727" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I mean, a huge portion of what affected both of those editions was luck. 4e got hammered by a terrible economy right out the gate, which killed one of the biggest booksellers in the country; the podcast revolution was still about five years out, so it made many of the right moves simply a bit too early; and then the murder-suicide on the digital tools team essentially killed all of their hopes for comprehensive product on that front, which is where they'd placed most of their hopes for monetizing D&D. The three major actually bad decisions they made were publishing too early (it should have waited another year), trying to force the GSL down the 3PP industry's throat (which is the actual reason Paizo made PF), and failing to account for presentation. But even despite all that...keep in mind that 4e was in fact financially successful (in part due to the steady stream of income from DDI subscriptions.)By comparison, 5e has had essentially every possible windfall it could get. Enormous amounts of free advertising from numerous extremely popular Actual Play podcasts, near-zero costs because they slashed staff and production (rather reminiscent of Gamigo type stuff) and outsourced much of the rest, catching the economic recovery pretty much as it happened, and then getting to ride the "everyone is staying at home bored out of their skulls" wave of the COVID pandemic just as things were starting to slump.That does not, at all, mean that 5e did not make some smart decisions. It did. I do not contest this. But to say that luck was mostly not a factor for either 4e or 5e is simply false. Good luck helped cover for several mechanical missteps with 5e's design (some of which are getting addressed with 5.5e). Bad luck crippled some of the most important parts of what 4e wanted to do.Though, as noted, WotC/Hasbro has pretty clearly figured out "oh crap, we're leaving a ton of money on the table by letting everyone else publish the splats we normally would." That was the whole point behind trying to put the OGL genie back in the bottle.I very, very much expect 5.5e to get a meaningful uptick in publication rate. It's not going to go back to the days of 3e--there's still too few people for that--but significantly more than "one split-three-ways book every year or two."</blockquote>

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