I am perfectly fine saying that 4e was shortchanged, needlessly vilified, victim of a smear campaign, hamstrung by marketing missteps rather than actual lack of game quality (there's that word again), or even just released at the wrong moment when people weren't really done with the 3e.
That and a handful of other things--a really REALLY bad economic situation (remember, a year before release, we went into a major recession, and less than a year before release, a major bookstore failed), internal development problems, almost certainly pushing 4e out the door about six months too early, and the horrible murder-suicide that took out their DDI programming lead.
This is not to say that 4e did not err. It did, in several ways. But the fact that it did as well as it did is impressive, given how thoroughly the deck was stacked against it.
Thing is, WotC still did cut the game lifecycle short, right (or is that a contentious statement too)? Eight year lifespan for 3e and 4 for 4e.
It is contentious, mostly because of 3.5e. While it wasn't a full edition change, it absolutely was a "you shouldn't use books from before 3.5e" change (unlike 4e's Essentials line, which was 100% compatible, albeit often lower in power/more biased towards traditional "caster" classes.)
If you count 3.5e as a breakpoint--which, to be clear,
many people did so, and often complained bitterly about it, even before 4e was a twinkling on the horizon--then the numbers look rather different. 4e ran from June 2008 to December 2013 (when the final Dragon Magazine article was published), five and half years. Even compared to all of 3e, that was still a pretty good run; the 3.0 PHB was July 2000, 3.5 PHB was July 2003, and (as far as I can tell) the final book published was March 2008, which actually came
after the final 3.5e Dragon articles. So that's a bit shy of 8 years but a bit more than 7.5 years. (split into almost exactly 3 years and not-quite-5 years). By that standard, 4e did just as well as 3.5e did, if not slightly better.
If 4e made more money than 3e (or sold more units, or whatever metric they used -- which again I am genuinely trying to find) why do so (the one thing I think we can all agree with about WotC is that they wouldn't shut down a profitable revenue source that people only thought wasn't doing well*)?
Well, in a certain sense,
they didn't. One of the things that the "4e failed" narrative always ignores is
DDI. You know, the digital subscription. For a long while, it was actually possible to get solid numbers on subscriber counts, because there was a forum group thing on the website--if you were a subscriber you would be added to it, if you weren't, you would be removed from it. It wasn't a perfect 1:1 match, but it gave us numbers to work with. DDI, even though it failed to realize its potential, was still a major source of steady income.
That, more than anything else, is likely why they chose to switch to 5e. They knew they could rely on the core of DDI subscribers. And, keep in mind, it was still possible (albeit progressively more and more
difficult) to use the DDI subscription for
years after 4e "ended." I want to say it was only like three or four years ago that the tools were shuttered entirely.
That's why I want context. What doesn't make sense to me is a game that is actually pretty good and so woefully mistreated in the court of public opinion and over before its' time and oh by the way secretly more profitable that then one before it (but they shut it down early anyway... for reasons). I think we all (most all?) in-thread have concluded that neither popularity or profitability directly equal quality. That just makes me all the more quizzical that, a page or two past this post, we're back to people talking about 4e as the second most profitable edition, and I don't see where that was shown.
*If you want an example of that, find some old 90s White Wolf employees talk about Hunter the Reckoning -- the collective wisdom seems to be that it was a misstep and that what gamers really wanted was and expansion an the Hunters Hunted VtM splatbook and that because it wasn't that, it tanked. The employees generally say, 'No idea why you think that, it sold great! The company was slowly dying, but not because of that product line.'
See, there's some missing context here. 4e wasn't just trying to be a new and successful edition. Obviously, we have little to no insider information, but we have relatively solid evidence and circumstantial corroboration that Wizards of the Coast tried to position D&D as a Hasbro "core brand," alongside Magic: the Gathering and other such things. Their model was threefold: pitch a new edition that fixed the (many, widely-known and oft-criticized) problems with the current game, corner the VTT and digital-tools market that was just beginning to really take off (e.g. this was around the time tablet PCs were starting to become a Thing), and create a valuable and valued
subscription model that could achieve broad and sustained income. (Though many make disparaging comparisons to World of Warcraft, the fact that WoW had become SUCH a big deal was absolutely on everyone's mind and the idea that D&D could become a competitor in the subscription market
genuinely had legs.)
So, from one perspective, 4e did extremely well, outperforming time-equivalent periods of previous editions and generally receiving praise. The problem, of course, is that it was
incredibly ambitious, and those ambitions didn't pan out, for many, many reasons. Some were to do with unfair disparagement from people who wanted 3.5e to keep going forever (because yes, there still are some of these folks today--PF1e remains more popular than PF2e, for instance.) Others were to do with mistakes on the designers' parts, excessively lofty expectations, mismanagement,
awful marketing, etc. Still more were due to the terrible economic context of the time. And, as noted, a few were unforeseen tragedies.
From the standard of "did it perform well as a published game compared to TTRPGs generally?" the answer is unequivocally "yes," because even if it fell to 2nd place around the time
it stopped publishing new books, being just behind 1st place in the TTRPG market is a Big Deal. From the standard of, "did it perform well, at least in the first 2-3 years, compared to other editions of D&D?" the answer is again yes. But from the standard that its corporate overlords used--"did it meet or beat the revenue expectations set out for it?"--the answer is, unfortunately,
no. That, more than anything else, is what killed 4e.
That's kind of the point. The divergence point where everyone agrees is a primary component of what makes a game Quality is so close to qualifying as a game at all, that discussions of quality almost inevitably will have some level of caveats to them, be highly subjective, or be arguments predicated on 'if you agree with a pre-premise that...'-type statements.
I disagree. I think we can get much more specific, while still remaining 100% objective. For example, D&D is a
cooperative game. (You can
choose to play it competitively, but that's never been what it was designed for.) Being a cooperative multiplayer roleplaying game induces a variety of expectations and limitations that are
significantly more specific than "is it literally at all possible for someone to use it" and "is it literally at all possible for someone to enjoy it."
What do you mean by unacceptable? Who gets to decide what is acceptable or not? Your own personal standard? Okay, I guess, but then so be it. I'm really not clear the point you are trying to make. A game that actually can be used at least some of the time is probably a game. A game that permits its users to enjoy its use is probably subjectively a good game. Is that what you're going for?
When we make the only standard of quality something that is
literally impossible to fail, the conversation becomes
completely pointless. That's why it's unacceptable. You have reduced the conversation about "quality" to a triviality; this not only accomplishes nothing, it is actively caustic to actually productive, interesting discussion.
Since I don't get your point, this might be heading off in a completely tangential direction. However, my thoughts, and central premise are this -- TTRPGs are closer to Jazz performance or horror movies than they are like burgers, much less automobiles or timepieces. The functional threshold for 'do they do a good job of performing their basic primary function?' is so close to automatic that discussions of their quality almost immediately scatter into either subjective criteria, or at times ordinally-measurable qualitative metrics that are not universally agreed to being primary measures of quality (or, even if agreed to within a group, what their relative importance is). Thus reviews of RPGs can often look closer to Siskel and Ebert movie reviews than to rocket engine performance tests or structural engineering reports of bridge health.
Again, I completely disagree. There are
several functions beyond the "cooperative TTRPG" example I gave above that are useful for honing in on the design purpose of D&D specifically. Among them: "roleplaying" is clearly a factor, and that tells us things about what the rules are supposed to do; the "three pillars" (combat, exploration, socialization) are explicit design purposes, literally the designers saying what D&D
is about (whether or not players
use them is their prerogative, but the designers have been very clear that that's what they made 5e "for," and I have no reason to think this is not true of any other WotC edition); the need to be open to homebrewing, and yet also
somewhat standardized so people can do things like "organized play" and "discuss the game on forums"; the overall thematic focus of the game being
fantasy as opposed to sci-fi, horror, romance, or other themes; etc.
