Are the small booklets where they proudly announced the sacred cows they slew part of this campaign you guys are talking about? Things that mentioned their disdain for "forced symmetries" and introduced the new streamlined cosmology and metaphysics and things like that? If so, I'm of two minds about those. On the one hand I feel like the ideas were interesting and I would really like them if those ideas were released as a non-D&D product, but I think their attitude of "we fixed all the things you liked about the game, you're welcome" really blew up in their face.
I don't even remember those booklets, so no, not just them. They sound like yet another facet of one hell of a spectacular crash-crash. A lot of it was presentation. You might not have been there, but 3E also did a whole thing where it slayed a ton of sacred cows and crowed about it, but it did it with much better judgment and presentation.
It was a whole top-to-bottom thing, including but not limited to:
1) Releasing two D&D 4E trailers, neither of which really explained what was good about 4E. I can't find one of them anymore, which I think was edited version of the other one (shorter and with more footage of 4E). Anyway, the longer one managed to feature:
- A 4 minute "D&D through the ages" video in which 3 minutes were spent ragging on 1/2/3.5E D&D, on the basis of "crap minis" for 1E (which presupposed we even used them), "THAC0 sucked" for 2E (sure but that was a solved problem), and for 3.5E, "overcomplicated rules" (which was more reasonable, but ironically what they mocked was almost as bad in 4E).
- No coverage of what was good about 4E at all (the shorter video might have had a bit). So they only attacked other products.
- They're shown using programs to run 4E that were not available at release, or indeed ever.
- All four players are shown as bro-nerd-type 20-ish white men. In all eras. And yeah by 2008 that was absolutely bizarre. The '90s was the last time something like that would have made sense.
- The presentation was by a guy with a snooty faux-continental (French-ish) accent, who was looking down on proceedings. It really seemed like a bad Simpsons bit, but it wasn't intended as a full on joke/ironic, it was intended that you agreed with him.
I've seen a lot of marketing go wrong over the years, especially in video games, but if we're looking at a single, ill-judged piece of marketing, this is maybe the worst I've ever seen. Normally bad marketing aligns with the product, but the broader audience doesn't like it - like a swimwear advert in the UK which was seen as just nasty towards anyone not super-slim/athletic, but frankly, the swimwear wasn't marketed to them, so it probably didn't damage sales (though it did damage the brand longer-term, when they tried to expand beyond that). This was just bizarrely and incomprehensibly self-destructive. It's like if, say, Bethesda put out an advert for Elder Scrolls 6 (I.e. Skyrim 2), and went out of its way to say how Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim all sucked nuts, and suggested that people only liked them because they were "of the period", then said the new TES game would be better, but didn't show how, except for maybe a screenshot of content which ultimately wasn't in the game. If you were actively looking to sabotage 4E, this video would be a good thing to release.
2) A general barrage of marketing across various channels which was to the tone of "4E is better than your dumb previous editions". Now, if D&D was coming off an then-unpopular edition most people had already mostly abandoned, like say, 2E, that might have flown. But 3.XE had been vastly popular and people had invested literally thousands in it, across both WotC and 3PP projects. So just calling it dumb and actually emphasizing incompatibility, that was a bad, bad move. You've got to make people think it's their own idea to change, not insult them. There was a generally "get in the car, loser, we're going to 4E!" sort of vibe, which was not smart.
The booklets were probably part of this.
3) Various tone-deaf comments from D&D and WotC management and designers. There were too many to record here, but the most spectacular one was a senior WotC guy comparing 4E to World of Warcraft, and talking about WotC's digital ambitions. Now, the actual statement was not unreasonable, and I think matches WotC's long-term goals still, but the specific language, and the vagueness created the "4E is WoW" meme (even though he was referring solely to digital/retention ambitions, not gameplay), and that really opened up a giant can of worms.
4) A series of other animated videos which were quite well-animated and charming, but didn't really sell 4E, and obviously were not aimed very well, and served to add to alienation more than subtract from it, especially in the context of the other bad messaging. If the rest of the marketing had been good, they might have been okay, but they added insult to injury, really.
5) The change from GSL to OGL and how it was presented. 3.XE was extremely 3PP-friendly. It was actually revolutionary in how 3PP-friendly it was, via the how OGL and d20 business. It had a massive impact on the market, and made a lot of D&D players really 3PP companies and desire products from them. WotC worked with 3PPs like Paizo, letting them handle Dragon and so on.
With 4E, that all changed, and they handled the presentation of why/how it was changing really badly. First they were extremely mysterious, and all we and the 3PPs knew was "things were going to change", then they announced their plans, and they attempted to extremely low-key with them, and to make it so only the 3PPs knew, but obviously that would never work. So fans found out, and were frankly appalled, because WotC was charging 3PPs to be onboard for 4E's release, getting rid of the OGL, and basically setting up the GSL so 4E wouldn't be attractive to 3PPs at all. And WotC very poor and limited marketing/PR around this, and never explained any benefits to customers that would come from it.
I could go on, because there was more, and that's just the marketing. A lot of other issues might have been far less significant if the marketing hadn't been so spectacularly badly handled though. I'd go as far as to say that if the marketing had been actively good, instead of actively terrible, Pathfinder might never have been more than a niche thing, and whilst I think parts of 4E would always have been controversial, I think they'd have been different ones, and smaller ones.
I've always been absolutely stunned by the number of sock puppet accounts, some more than a decade old, that people trot out to get around being banned or to try to say stuff they absolutely, 100% know isn't acceptable.
