The profit reports don't lie, the new OneDnD edition isn't just DOA, it may have done worse than doing nothing at all.
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Worse than nothing at all?

So they didn't even recover the money they invested into the creation and marketing of the new edition, that nobody asked for?

The problem for D&D is Hasbro doesn't know how to use D&D. 

The only reason they made money in the last couple of years is due to Larian Studios who went out of their way to get the D&D license.  Larian was rejected on their first bid, it took an exec (Mearls) playing Divinity Original Sins 2 who called them back and gave them the D&D License.  And then Hasbro pissed away Larian studio and they won't work with Hasbro again.  Hasbro brought in the Tranny that was hired to shut down Bioware and direct Veilguard to write the next D&D video game.

4E was the woke edition of D&D and it failed hard.  5E was the mostly normal edition of D&D for mechanics and game play but there was a profound lack of lore (leftards fighting to kill it) and then the 2020 race riots was used to fire Mearls and put out a blanket racist charge on anyone who worked for D&D from 4E and earlier.

Now 5.5E is again back to 100% mechanics and shit lore.  The mechanics sucks.  Why would you write for D&D now when they'll call you a racist and Hasbro can't control D&D and let it get in the hands of literal race marxists.

I'm hoping with crowd funding and other games being viable that we see the steep decline of D&D in Hasbro's hands.  There is still interest in the game and it can be saved from Star Wars and Marvel's fates.  But five to ten more years in race marxists hands, Hasbro will have a worthless product no one will play the game as a new player.

D&D has so many problems at the moment it looks to be impossible to fix, but the big one I see is that they've wound up courting an impossible to please userbase. I have no idea what a perfect version of D&D looks like, but no matter what they do, some grognard on the internet will be upset with it.

The other thing I've noticed is that it looks like WotC has no clue how to manage technical debt. When it comes to WotC products, anyway, I view myself as more a Magic player than a D&D player--I only ever dabbled in D&D and never stuck with any version of D&D, but I still play a fair amount of MTG to this day. My recent experience with Magic isn't particularly confidence inspiring.

But the real cause is probably macroeconomics. This is probably a case of, "woke leftist organization is shocked by the effects of inflation." The Bureau of Labor said that the inflation rate during 2022 was 8% and Wotc, being good Woke NPCs did their projections based on those figures. The rest of us knew better.

Well, as it turns out the inflation rate was closer to 18%--yes, the inflation rate was old enough to vote--and now that Trump is in office the BoL is willing to un-cook the numbers. Alas, that means that WotC spent two years thinking the inflation rate was between 5% and 10% off of where it actually was, which means their customer disposable income wasn't cut by 15%, but by 50%. And of course, by now it's way too late to adapt.

This exact mistake of trusting the Bureau of Labor's official statistics has probably doomed many big businesses because they are about to go multiple quarters missing projections by huge amounts. I find a certain amount of irony that many of these corporations were democrat donors, and because they believed the lies of the politicians they put in power, they are about to lose many times more money to macroeconomics than they ever donated to politics.

"Get woke, Go broke" was a prophecy, not an observation.

Hopefully, 5.5E will prove to be a huge jumping off point; just as 4E was.

There are so many other options for gaming.  There are numerous opportunities to keep playing an authentic D&D lore RPG.  There are many alternatives to that, too. 

WOTC owns the name, but not the experience. 

/slaps on the hi-fi
/starts dancing, shaking up a brewski
/cracks open brewski to spray the adoring crowd

Quote from: honeydipperdavid on February 28, 2025, 10:03:30 PM4E was the woke edition of D&D and it failed hard. 

How was 4e woke?

I didn't care for 4e because of how it played with my group, but our complaint wasn't that it was "woke" in any way.

Quote from: Man at Arms on February 28, 2025, 11:23:25 PMan authentic D&D lore RPG

Some want to play a game and don't care about the lore. That's perfectly fine.

Quote from: Fheredin on February 28, 2025, 10:30:23 PMThis exact mistake of trusting the Bureau of Labor's official statistics has probably doomed many big businesses because they are about to go multiple quarters missing projections by huge amounts. I find a certain amount of irony that many of these corporations were democrat donors, and because they believed the lies of the politicians they put in power, they are about to lose many times more money to macroeconomics than they ever donated to politics.

Retail sales fell by nearly a full percent in January, which seems to have everyone's attention at the moment, obviously showing that discretionary spending is way down. I myself have really switched up my spending habits recently, focusing on necessities and quality over more trivial things. I ripped two pairs of cheap (name-brand, even!) jeans in the same spot and found myself remembering eating moldy pinto beans during the pandemic before admitting to myself that I needed to prioritize clothing and food storage before more 'fun and games'. During the pandemic it was easy to blind-purchase random gaming PDFs and fund obscure Kickstarters, especially since items like clothing didn't even really matter when you didn't interact with real people for literal days or weeks, but various factors have me considering my budget far more closely now, even/especially with stable work now and finding meaning in living more normally and connecting to those around me in the community. How you look and how you eat matters for survival a lot more than keeping oneself entertained, though it is obviously a large part of a fulfilling life higher up Maslow's pyramid.

All this to say-- 5E was riding a nice wave for the last half-decade and various factors all bolstered it in a sort of upward spiral. Hasbro doesn't seem to understand that tabletop gaming is a far different sales model from computer and card games. They didn't realize they were in an economic bubble (and to be fair, many entertainment companies didn't realize this either, with Warner Brothers racking up an enormous amount of debt with video-steaming hype, which the Max app is nowhere near recovering as they also move away from physical releases). People were voted in who only had experience with video game sales, and even those aren't doing as well, especially on the physical side of things. Now that things are winding back down, they've invested all this time and these resources into a new half-version of D&D that no paying customer has any real incentive to buy into, diluting down and dividing up the remaining customer fan-base. Imagine new players joining right now, showing up to their first Tuesday night AL session, having everyone they meet argue over which Player's Handbook or website they should even use to get started.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/14/economy/us-retail-spending-january/index.html

https://gamerant.com/video-game-hardware-console-sales-drop/

Quote from: HappyDaze on February 28, 2025, 11:56:39 PM

Quote from: honeydipperdavid on February 28, 2025, 10:03:30 PM4E was the woke edition of D&D and it failed hard.

How was 4e woke?

Woke may not be the right word for it, but it is the first edition they had plans to have the $$$ digital integration like Beyond is now. And they did have internal drama (homicide/suicide) with the lead developer who had ties to Microsoft and such. It was certainly the beginning of a terrible legacy which 5E partially escaped out of necessity to scale back and focus on the customer for a second. The end of 5E feels very familiar to the handling of 4E.

https://www.enworld.org/threads/the-failure-of-gleemax.227608/

I can't help but laugh a little.  Ever since Tasha's, D&D has been taking a nose dive and there had been plenty of feedback as to why.  "The customer is wrong about what they want" is the dumbest thing stance a company can take.

Inflation in 2022 was actually 24%, not 18%, so Wizards were even farther off the mark.

Quote from: Cathode Ray on March 01, 2025, 06:04:43 AMInflation in 2022 was actually 24%, not 18%, so Wizards were even farther off the mark.

It was a lot worse than that. One stroll through a grocery store would tell you that. A tub of butter that had been $3.99 for quite a while-can now be yours for only $9.99. A $3.50 bag of chips suddenly $7.00. You don't need to be a math wizard to see these increases left 24% in the dust.

Quote from: honeydipperdavid on February 28, 2025, 10:03:30 PM4E was the woke edition of D&D and it failed hard. 

Woke didn't exist back then as this was before the more diverse rebranding from "politically correct".   No one for the most part complained about it being that either that I can recall (and I was quite active on all the usual big forums from enworld to rpg.net to WOTC's own back then).   The complaints were about the shitty wannabe fusion of a boardgame and WOW game design and boring samey hit point sponge gameplay when it came out.   I say that as someone who played the hell out of 3.x as it was my head first deep into the pool gateway into D&D and as someone who also enjoyed the Star Wars Saga Edition half way step that was the testing ground for what eventually mutated into the 4e abomination.

Watched the vidya and prof DM's. And I'm happy that it's crashing....at this point the blue hairs can say they've destroyed another fandom and add another notch to their belt.