Generally not. Mearls is a liar and a knave. He takes a lot of time coming up with things to say that are technically true (the best kind of true), and also just plain lies when he isn't smart enough to come up with a way to stretch the truth as far as he wants it to go. See our old Skill Challenge argument where he lost the plot entirely and eventually just started shouting that my critiques of Skill Challenges were invalid because of communism (really).Ghremdal wrote:I hate 5e as much as the next guy, if not more but is it possible that Mearls is right? That 5e actually sold more books then 3.0?
The 4e people did a lot of weird shit in order to back up technically true claims that sounded like 4e was selling well. Like, making extra print runs so tiny that I've only ever heard of one person on the internet who has even seen one in a store so that they could truthfully claim that they had gone through X many print runs. The 5e shell games started before the books even came out.
They gave people almost half off the cover price if and only if they purchased through Amazon rather than a brick and mortar retailer or even other online retailers. And then they talked about Amazon sales as a proxy for total sales, when they were obviously way skewed. They were paying people twenty dollars a book to support their preferred sales narrative!
When Mike Mearls gives a sales statement with a lot of commas and embedded clauses, the baseline assumption is that he is using weasel words to get people to believe false things while trying to be technically not lying. Because that's all he's done for ten fucking actual years. His claim about lifetime sales is too weirdly convoluted for it to not be a verbal shell game. If he had genuinely positive news, he would have said something simple. Fuck, even if he had said something simple, the best assumption would still be that there's a surprising shell game going on such that the obvious plain meaning was being subverted (like with the new printings of 4e books that turned out to be meaningless).
-Username17