Jim Kramer wrote:Bear Stearns is fine... Bear Stearns is not in trouble. Don’t be silly... don’t move your money.
People do not go on Jim Kramer in order to say their product, company, or brand isn't doing well. They do it to pump up their stock prices by shilling to rubes.
Now you may wonder why, ten years after the Great Recession, Jim Kramer still has a job. And that would be a real puzzle if his job was to be an Oracle and make accurate predictions. But it's not. Jim Kramer is a
priest, and his job is to make pronouncements that the ruling class want to hear. Accuracy is beside the point. Indeed, if mere accuracy would make 1%s feel good about themselves and their future, they wouldn't need someone like Jim Kramer.
Now on the specifics of this interview, the WotC guy is obviously using very strange metrics, so we can probably safely say he's talking out of his ass. What the actual fuck is a double digit increase in new players? That appears to mean that whatever calculated number of new players from one undefined time period is at least 10% higher than the calculated number of new players from some other undefined time period. That's... better than it being the other way around I suppose. But we're still in a period that comes after the collapse of fourth edition. There was a period when there wasn't any D&D product being released at all, and the number of new players was probably quite small.
Another issue is the idea of Dungeons & Dragons being more popular than ever before. People only really stop being aware of D&D when they
die, so while there is definitely a non-zero attrition of D&D people every year, for the foreseeable future it would be really weird and bad if the total number of D&D-aware people didn't go up. D&D's "popularity" should go up for several decades. The teenage players from the big expansion in the 80s are in their forties and fifties, and they won't experience generational dieoff for a few decades. It should be at least twenty years before there's any year when there's much of a chance of D&D being "less popular" than it was the year before.
-Username17
