From a Mike Mearls twitter thread. Granted, mearls isn't with WotC anymore, but he still is someone who's opinion I'd trust as both informed and well capable of decent analysis.
Looking at Hasbro's 2024 results, I think this might be the first time that D&D tabletop RPG revenue has decreased with the release of a new edition. How'd that happen? It lines up with a lot of what I've seen in the marketplace: (1/5)
Fans just aren't excited. The OGL took the air out of the community around the game, and other than shaky claims of backwards compatibility the game has almost gone out of its way to avoid answering a simple question: Why buy this new edition? (2/5)
The audience is treating it like a new edition. Every TTRPG publisher relies on their backlist as a big part of their sales. Backlist sales have crashed down. Meanwhile, the lack of energy in the community has dragged down new player acquisition. (3/5)
I think we'll see them pivot to more player-focused supplements and increase the rate of releases, pivoting back to the 3e model to cater to a shrinking fanbase. (4/5)
Big picture, TTRPGs are growing as far as I can tell. I think we're entering an era where D&D is no longer the dominant cultural force in TTRPGs. (5/5)
Addendum: What about D&D Beyond? I think Nike shows what happens when you take a premium brand into a direct sales model. You might sell to your hardcore, but you lose the ability to reach the broader audience. You still need retails (digital and analog) for that.
I do think that what's left of the D&D buying audience is more digital, but that's more by attrition than actual growth. Coming out of the pandemic, we've seen TCGs and miniatures games hang on to a lot more of their growth than D&D.
I think the pandemic was something of a sugar high for gaming as a whole, but D&D is an outlier in tabletop for its inability to retain the audience it had during that era. I believe it lost those players *and* a big chunk of its core.
As some have pointed out, D&D's performance is notably not mentioned in the annual report, although Magic: The Gathering's is, as is WotC digital. Clearly, I'm not really a customer of WotC, and haven't been since late in the 3e era. I doubt I've bought a new WotC product since 2006-7; almost twenty years ago. Although I have picked up a lot of used market stuff on the cheap longer after it was either out of print or at least out of regular circulation. In fact, I deliberately went back and bought some missing 3e titles recently to round out my collection, and I've bought lot batches of some 4e and 5e stuff just to read for the fluff—although it's not like I'm doing so quickly. And clearly none of that is bringing a single red cent of revenue to WotC. Which doesn't bother me much.
The replies, or at least many of them, to mearls' post seem to hint at that too; there's a lot of frustration and anger at WotC specifically for their behavior both with regards to the OGL and mistreatment of fans, but also with regards to woke virtue-signaling and mistreatment of the creators of the game and founders of TSR and the brand.
I think the biggest problem is simply that it's the wrong update at the wrong time. Nobody asked for it, nobody needs it, and few people are very excited about it. On the heels of plenty of other bad WotC behavior and mid (or worse) WotC products over the last couple of years, and people are starting to look around at what else is going on in the industry and discovering that maybe D&D isn't really all that after all.
UPDATE: Listened to this stream too, over the weekend. Pretty good stuff. I'm not sure that I agree with him that 4e is super abstract, but I guess it's a question of context and what you compare it to. Certainly the combat is way too detailed for me, even moreso than 3.5 in many respects. And the meta considerations, or non-diagetic, maybe; the engagement with the system and mechanics rather than immersive engagement with the world via your character, is very much not to my taste.
In fact, there's so much to unpack in this interview that I almost need to sit down and watch it taking notes and do a whole reaction video or post to it. It's highly recommended. Great content. I'm not a huge Questing Beast fan, even though I did back his kickstarter and I like Knave 2e well enough. But this is good stuff.
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