Branding is a false promise used by advertisers to steer consumer behavior

(Branding is a false promise used by advertisers to steer consumer behavior by utilizing subterfuge, in a way which benefits the merchant while functioning as a detriment to the customer. TL;DR You're getting screwed by people using old psychology tricks to mess with your head without you knowing they're doing it, and then you think they're really nice people for screwing you.)

Just now I was driven to comment on DM Glen's latenight rant from about a year ago. He was talking about new games, and addressing the apparent influx of comments that he should get into the new Fifth Edition D&D.

My gripe with 5e I think goes more to the marrow. It's kind of like WotC is projecting that we must buy this thing because it has the trademark. Do trademarks really posses this much power over us? Just because a thing has a strong, recognizable name indicating its contents, does not necessarily anymore assure us of its authenticity. There is--like you said--an embarrassment of riches coming out of OSR, whereas, from what I see, mostly branding and (terrible) CG artwork coming out of the other. Why should anyone play 5e in this world where there has been a literal explosion of great new game systems? The real problem would be which free new system to choose except that the venerable Mythmere has done such a great job on S&W and Stuart Marshall on OSRIC. I think that going backwards might feel repellent to newcomers & youngsters, but once you analyze the progression of published games the last 30 years, it quickly becomes apparent that the whole pastime went off course (this is a universal story amongst every early player), making going backwards and returning to known-good gamesystems seem like not such a bad thing after all. The strategy is: Go back to last known good and then start over again from there, and that's exactly what has been going on. Great rant Glen.

Furthermore, I am realizing when thinking about branding here that there is a direct inverse correlation between companies that rely on branding to market their wares, and the quality of the actual product itself. Branding is a crutch used by the uncreative, or simply by those who are under a lot of pressure to generate sales for a thing.  This pressure harkens back to much more basic economic concepts that apply today over just about everything. When you too many shareholder expectations, and or the company itself is simply too large or spending too much money, then there is a lot of pressure to sell. This pressure can become completely debilitating to the product itself, because it ends up steering the direction of the product, and co-opting its message. This is *NEVER* a good thing.  It's always about core quality, always, and never really about the economics. 5th Ed. here functions mainly as a springboard for me to launch into an analysis of much larger phenomena whose tendrils have spread down and corrupted a great many things in the modern era.

The morale? Simple that growth for the sake of growth is an economic lie told by shareholders who own stock in products they don't care about, simply to receive remuneration for doing absolutely nothing. ([1] See Rushkoff's Google Bus book)


D&D
Where does D&D fit into this?  Well, everywhere and nowhere really. My disregard for any post-Gygax TSR/wotc D&D really goes back to just that: it's post-Gygax. Which is another discussion for another post.
I mean really, can it possibly be Dungeons & Dragons without E. Gary Gygax?