Huh? You believe WotC isn't going to release it? That's an ... unusual... opinion.
I suppose. I've held that opinion since at least April.
A new edition never made much economic sense from the perspective of Hasbro. What is the winning situation for a new edition? It isn't going to bring a lot players back from 3e. That ship has sailed. The SRD/OGL was designed right from the start to ensure that D&D in that form would never be killable regardless of what a company did. It belongs to the fans, and when WotC divorced their existing fans to create 4e, it was messy and most of us got over our broken hearts and fond a new partner that we are now invested in. Or maybe more to the point, we kept the old partner and just waved bye bye to WotC as it walked out the door on us.
And the 4e people, a system I felt then and now was a system designed to appeal to people who didn't like prior incarnations of D&D, they got largely what they wanted to save that that relationship was over too soon and they are feeling abandoned. But most of them aren't moving on, and if they are its in their own direction.
In point of fact, the WotC staff is just way behind the design curve on this. Competitors are getting their product to market faster and in a more innovative form. Any innovations 4e or 3e offered have been well assimilated years ago and are informing brand new designs from artists and innovators that aren't constrained by a corporate culture who don't have the costs and overheads and needed returns of a WotC product launch and who frankly are sometimes bigger names in the industry and the geek world than almost anyone WotC has left on staff. WotC has put it self in economic competition with its fans, and it's losing.
Ultimately, 5e in whatever form is just going to strike 95% of the player base or potential base as just someone's house rules and one of many many different possible very natural rule set variations to adopt. WotC no longer owns a monopoly on consensus play. There is no longer one core rule set that you can count on, and basically I don't get the impression of widespread excitement or dismay or anger or slobbering passion that existed prior to 2e, or 3e, or 4e. Frankly, I'm not sure that many people care. The EnWorld boards are like haunted empty mansions, echoing in silence, compared to the frenzied party and online convention that was hosted here in days of yore.
And I don't see a lot of evidence of a rival in interest in PnP from the younger set. No evidence of a gaming fad, and if there was going to be one, it's not at all clear it would center around 5e and that the release of a new rules set of all things is going to spark it. The biggest failure of WotC in the 3e era was the failure to realize that the value of their IP was so much greater than the value of their rules, and that the biggest investment should be focused on increasing the value of their IP. By this point though, whatever the merit of their rules smiths, the IP content creators have gone elsewhere, and in terms of roping in new players they'd be far better off creating Twlight the RPG, or the Mockingjay RPG or anything else that lets young people today play the fantacies that inspire them, rather than trying to sell young people in IP based on the works of L. Sprague de Camp, August Derleth, Abraham Merrit, Fritz Leiber, and a bunch of other musty authors your average young person has never heard of and certainly doesn't relate to.
So, the logical conclusion is that the last gasp of 5e is going to fail economically and that even before releasing it, or shortly thereafter, Hasbro is going to closet the division or project as a bad cause. I can't see any possible positive outcome for the new edition.
