DSMatticus wrote:
EDIT: New dude, we don't have hard numbers, but we do have some signs of general shakiness; the speed of Essentials getting released, the speed of 5e getting announced, PF beating the sum total of D&D material sold on ICv2 sales data around 2010, the reprinting of 3e material during 4e's run, and the old "hundreds of thousands and millions" chestnut. Most damningly, it failed to beat its predecessor's numbers (which we had) and ended up losing to a bastard cousin of said predecessor.
When started printing essentials it does NOT mean that 4e was tanking, it does not mean it was losing customers. it just means that at least one person in Wotc thought it was a good idea, no more no less.
it is a mistake of the highest order to think that because a company did something it has a good reason to do it, and that the reason was both logical and well thought out. Essentials was a horrendously bad idea, it took a good product that was making bank and turning it into something that those who were loyal to the game would not touch, and those who were not would not know or care about anyway.
4e DID easily beat its predecessor it you count DDI, but even if it just broke even that does not mean that it tanked. The conditions were different. 4e was still the most popular (judging by the amazon top 100 list) TTRPG, the internet allowed for things that were not possible when 3e came out. D&D had real competition.
FrankTrollman wrote:Uhhh... the reason everyone believes that 4e failed is because every single product line of 4e got canceled, the head of D&D got fired every single year that 4e was on the market, and even when the company talks about great selling editions today, they talk about 3rd edition and not 4th. Everyone believes that 4e was a failure because the company that produces it believes it to be a failure and has sent perfectly clear signals that it was failing at every milestone along the way.
If 4e wasn't a costly fiasco, Heinsoo wouldn't have been out of a job in the first year, nor would the inheritor of his desk have been fired within a year every single time it got passed on until the chair got handed on for the entire run of the edition and its associated half edition. And then the expanded power sources wouldn't have scrapped (remember Elemental and Ki power sources?). And then the entire line wouldn't have been canned before the DMG 3 came out. And when Essentials did happen (presumably in an actual hole in the schedule rather than canceling everything for the rest of the year and rushing it to print), it would have gotten the expansions it was promised or even gotten its entire promised set of "essential products" rather than having all solicitations canceled after three months.
The fact that they never completed the Races of Renown series is indicative that things weren't going well. But the fact that they also didn't finish the [Blank] Power series or even the fucking core rulebooks just seals the deal. And all the collateral evidence points the same way: look how hard it is to find those "second printing" books that WotC was crowing about at launch, showing that those extra print runs they were yammering about were incredibly tiny. Or look at their court filings, where they state in a court of law that shortly after the launch of the PHB2 that all 4th edition books to date had collectively sold "hundreds of thousands" of books. Or the given justification for canceling pdf sales that they estimated that there were "more than 10" pirated copies of pdfs for every 1 copy sold... after proving that the PHB2 pdf had been pirated at least 1,238 times. There just isn't an argument that 4th edition didn't fail according to the standards of the company that made it.
WotC doesn't release its sales figures. But from what they say, what they don't say, and what they do, you can see in broad strokes how well things are doing. Like how we can tell that 5th edition isn't selling as well as 3rd edition did because the most boosterish claim they can bring themselves to make is that they believe it will do better than 3e in the future. With 4th edition we could see that they were in fact doing very badly. So badly that they sacked the head of the department every single year and canceled the line early twice.
Now comparing it to Pathfinder is more difficult. Obviously Paizo isn't a subsidiary of Hasbro and doesn't make Magic the Fucking Gathering or have any genre-defining trademarks to their name. They used to make some fucking gaming magazines on a licensed contract. So Pathfinder doing "spectacularly well" wouldn't have to beat 4th edition D&D. Paizo would feel pretty good about itself being the 4th largest seller in the industry, while Wizards of the Coast starts sacking people if they come in any worse than #2. The fact that Paizo has been rocking out with their cock out since 2009 doesn't by itself prove that Pathfinder has been doing better than 4e D&D. It just shows that Pathfinder has been doing well for a Paizo product even as 4e D&D was doing disastrously terrible for a WotC product with the D&D trademark on it.
Nevertheless, what information we have does show that Pathfinder not only was doing relatively better than 4e, but absolutely better. ICv2 only tracks distributor to hobby store to customer sales, and it's a survey not a census. But by the time 4e was finally canceled, Pathfinder had been in the #1 spot several quarters running.
4th edition fans seem almost religiously dedicated to the claim that 4th edition was a financial success. It very definitely was not.
-Username17
saying that "some people at Wotc thought 4e did bad, so they acted like it was doing bad" does not help, it provides me no new information. I do not know those people, I have no context. it could just as easily be that they had unrealistic goals, that were not met, so they were acting like 4e tanked even though by any reasonable measure it was a success.
by the time 4e was officially canceled it was well past life support, if you want to compare apples to apples you have to cut it off when essentials was made, by that measure 4e was dominating. was it doing as well as they wanted? no, was it doing as well could be expected? yes
DSMatticus wrote:
Check out the 5E thread. For the past two quarters, roll20 has been releasing raw data for their system, and when you look at it 4E is as dead as AD&D while 3.5 and PF are both probably going to be solid competitors to 5E throughout its lifespan (and possibly even outright kick its ass). Amazon best seller lists are basically worthless (small market, lots of fluctuation) and all of the DDI stats I've seen are wildly unreliable - but the fact is that even before 5E had finished its release more people were playing a discontinued edition AND someone's houserules for that discontinued edition (that's separately, not together) than they were 4E.
4E was undoubtably a commercial success, because commercial success is a low bar to make it over in this industry. But considering how quickly it died, it's difficult to take claims that it was a solid competitor seriously.
while interesting, unless I have some knowledge about how symmetric the relationship between people who play roll20 with a given system is with the number who play it world wide it is useless as a metric.
it was a commercial success that was the highest seller in its market. that really speaks for itself.
how in the world are you getting numbers for people who are playing at home on books bought years ago?
Also keep in mind there was a very long time where 4e was dead, but 5e was not out yet, trying to lump all that time as part of 4e is not reasonable. during all that time pathfinder has been putting out "new" stuff.
the only way I know of to compare pathfinder to 4e that would provide you with useful data is to look at the time when book for putting out new stuff regularly.