D&D 5.5E

Well, that seals it, D&D 2024/5.5E is a complete failure.

Wizards made an internal policy change: on D&D Beyond, they call it 5.5E, but outside the company (and in every book printed), it is still D&D 2024. I haven't heard of anything else changing, such as requiring books on DM's Guild to use "the latest version of the rules," and they are not reprinting or supporting D&D 5E books, so at this point, who cares? If they are still not officially supporting 2014 5E, what does any of this matter?

The 2024 name was terrible, since it is two years old now and will be three next year. This is as bad as songs that mention the current year, with lines like "It's 1990!"

Sigh.

An already terrible and confusing strategy gets worse, with the game being called one thing on your website and another thing everywhere else. Your partners have two sets of rules to work under. If we are publishing here, we can call it this, but elsewhere it has to be that.

I've seen less confused customers walk away from things that even slightly gave them pause. I've seen people not buy a car because of the sound the gas tank cover makes when closing, or how operating the controls feels. These little things matter so much, yet nobody gets it, or feels "they will ignore that."

They don't ignore that.

In fact, the tiniest things are often the biggest giveaways.

Why is this company even writing new editions of the rules? What they have are the best games ever written. AD&D should be treated like the original Monopoly rules, or a novel such as The Lord of the Rings; it is timeless and does not need updating or changing by sensitivity readers. Leave it be, and let people play. Support classic 5E, and allow people to publish for that. Get out of creating new editions of the game to support; it only gets worse from here with 6E, 7E, 8E, and 9E, and all the 0.5 variants of those rules, too.

We also have better, less confusing, better supported versions of the game out there, like Tales of the Valiant and Level Up A5E. Many have moved on to Pathfinder 2, Draw Steel, or Daggerheart. The OSR is huge. Even Dungeon Crawl Classics has a massive number-three spot in gaming (by GenCon game numbers). While 5E was a huge hit, the edition's end showed confusion, creative weakness, and a floundering strategy behind the brand.

But, by all means, keep playing 5E or 5.5E if that is what you like. "The game is dead" is just a temporary thing here in D&D land, and it has happened many times before. The only way D&D can truly die is if they keep printing new editions, and people grow tired of the entire confusing hydra of different versions of the game, all incompatible with each other. Here is another edition of the game; another head grows, and the fandom is again split into a group who like this one versus the dozen previous editions of the game and all their subflavors.

Like a multiverse, a multiedition game will die under the weight of customer confusion.

And you are inviting an Apple-like company to step in with an "it just works" strategy and steal all your customers. Someone will step in and "out D&D" you.

These tabletop game companies that think they are mobile game companies or OS vendors will always fail. D&D isn't a Windows operating system that keeps getting worse every year as features are removed and AI is shoved into everything from Notepad to Calculator, it gets arcane version and patch numbers, and all of a sudden, your favorite apps (or adventures) no longer run. Different computers only run different versions of Windows. You aren't sure when you buy a program if it will work, or how long it will work. You are constantly forced to deal with incompatibilities and workarounds.

Or wait, maybe D&D is just like Windows, and that is its problem.