Also, on a larger philosophical point, truth and knowledge are basically bullshit, because while we can generate self-consistent worldviews, they are garbage-in garbage-out. We can use logic to prove what something being true or false implies about the truth value of other things, but it can't generate something from nothing and starts from things we merely believe to be true. This is mostly considered unimportant because we like to start with stuff like "A thing is the same as itself" that people are willing to accept without proof. However, for nearly all practical applications we work with less certainty than that. For instance, it is technically possible that 99.999% of the time like electromagnetic charges will attract, and we simply have only seen times when they repel. We could actually calculate how likely that is. It would be a number so small we couldn't actually represent it, but it would not technically be zero, because we have observed a finite number. You can totally get into peer-reviewed journals claiming something to be true with data that would occur 5% of the time if it were false.CaptPike in his first post wrote:4e was a wildly successful game that sold at least as much as 3.5e did in dead tree form
In this particular case, no, we do not have all the data, and if we did technically everyone who recorded it could have been hallucinating. However, we do have some data, which does include WoTC's actions, and can confidently make inferences about the rest of the data based on that. A DDI subscription is of no value without access to the core rules. I am willing to admit that it is possible someone bought one for no reason, but given prior human behavior they almost certainly make up a tiny percentage. The number of subscribers is thus at most negligably higher than the number of members of 4E groups+people who have at least one rulebook but never played. The average group size is generally considered to be 5. Obviously, they aren't static, but they also are not disjoint. As discussed, at one point they had sold more than two hundred thousand but fewer than a million 4E books. Assuming each group had one copy of each book, that makes less than 340,000 groups, for 1.7 million players, capping the number of potential subscribers and giving a max income of 102 million per year.
If they actually got that, it would be a financial success. Less of one than selling 3e numbers of books and also getting subscriptions from everyone, but still very solid. However, all of my assumptions were exceedingly generous. Most obviously, not everyone who plays will have a subscription. I do not know how many fewer, though I suspect considerably fewer. The "one set of three per group" assumption is also overly generous. It's usually suggested that everyone have a player's handbook. Finally, we do have the data point that the head of 4e was fired every year for the entire run. Prior corporate behavior indicates that is extremely unlikely to happen to a successful product. Actually, it's pretty rare for it to happen to an unprofitable product. From that, I can confidently conclude that no, DDI sales were not large enough for 4e to qualify as a success.
Admittedly, much as I would like to for demonstration purposes, I can't quantify how likely that is. I mean, I actually know how to properly go about doing it, but I personally don't know most of the relevant numbers and there haven't been enough tabletop RPGs with subscription services to confidently project subscriptions based on book sales even if I knew the numbers for every other RPG that did that.
