Steel_Wind
Legend

It’s happened before (and it will happen again): an edition of the D&D game is phased out and the product and its associated accessories inevitably hit the clearance shelves, significantly marked down in price. With the announcement earlier this year that 5<sup>th</sup> Edition is officially in the works, the impact of that announcement on the book and hobby trade has been predictable. I can confirm that the effect of that announcement is now showing up at the retail street level.
Once the announcement of a new edition is made, distributors of products start getting very nervous that they will be left holding a lot of inventory they will not be able to sell at all. While WotC has much greater control in the United States of the sales of its books and accessories in the hobby trade, they do not have anywhere near that same level of control in the book trade. And it appears that the book trade has pulled that trigger and is now aggressively dumping inventory -- in Canada at least. I can’t imagine this is a unique situation confined to Toronto. If you live in the USA, it's happening where you live too -- or it soon will be.

Priced to clear, brand new 4<sup>th</sup> Ed hardcovers are selling for between $8.99 and $12.99 with over a dozen individual titles on the shelf. Adventures were also available for about $7.99. While I’m not a great fan of 4E adventures, there aren’t too many full color adventures with maps written for ANY RPG system which aren’t worth $7.99, if for no other reason than for the maps and inspiration alone. So hell yes, I grabbed a few.

I don’t know about you, but I would happily drop a $100 on a large collection of D&D Master Set dungeon tiles for $10-$12.99 each. Hobby trade sellers know their products far better and are unlikely to liquidate D&D Dungeon Tiles at that price – but the book sellers will, so watch for this stuff over the coming weeks and months. It surely won’t last long when it hits the shelf. The same thinking – and pricing -- applies to collection of monster counters for those who prefer to use counters during play instead of miniatures or pawns.

Lastly, given this sort of liquidation, I would expect that the amount of new product leaving WotC to distributors in the book trade since the announcement of 5E is very low if not approaching zero. While I don’t have reliable reports of the sales to the hobby and game trade, I can’t imagine it’s appreciably higher. Those sorts of anaemic sales that come at the end of any edition of the game simply underscore the urgency of the need to get the new edition of Dungeons and Dragons into gamers’ hands as soon as possible.
If you are a gamer who is betting that 5<sup>th</sup> Ed won’t be released until 2013? That’s a bet I wouldn’t take – playtesting be damned.
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