4 years of 5E on Amazon: same old same old

TerraDave

5ever, or until 2024

• Jul 15, 2018

• #1

4 years ago today the 5E Starter Set was released. It has been in the top 1000 of all books being sold ever since, easily making it one of the best selling RPG products of the last dozen years or so.

Well, except for a few others...

Overall sales rank on Amazon, as of this posting:

PHB 44
DMG 156
MM 157
MtF 312
XGtE 315
VGtM 447
S. Set 735

 

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darjr

I crit!

• Jul 15, 2018

• #2

Here is the sales rank graph from Camel camel camel http://camelcamelcamel.com as of today.

https://camelcamelcamel.com/Players...-Wizards/product/0786965606?active=sales_rank

 

Mercurius

Legend

• Jul 15, 2018

• #3

What encourages me about that is not as much the rankings of the core three, but the nice sales of the supplements, and actually that they are increasing in sales: Volo was frst, then Xanathar, then Mordenkainen. That bodes well.

EDIT: Oh nevermind. I thought that was overall sales rank since 5E came out. Of course it makes sense that the sales ranks are higher for the more recent books.

 

Last edited: Jul 15, 2018

ad_hoc

(they/them)

• Jul 15, 2018

• #4

The amazing thing we see in the camel graph is that the PHB is selling better now than it was on release.

 

Ath-kethin

Elder Thing

• Jul 15, 2018

• #5

I'm a bit confused by the PHB sales graph. It states that the worst point for the book was June 13, 2014, but the book wasn't released until August 19th (August 8th at WPN stores). Am I missing something?

 

TheSword

Legend

• Jul 15, 2018

• #6

If it uses amazon data it probably takes account of pre-orders. This would explain the immediate spike and then the drop off until the product we actually released.

 

darjr

I crit!

• Jul 16, 2018

• #7

It does use preorder numbers. However that huge drop is because WotC didn’t know how popular it was going to be and were caught by surprise and had to emergency print more. That dip is due to lack of supply.

 

TerraDave

5ever, or until 2024

• Jul 16, 2018

• #8

Mercurius said:

What encourages me about that is not as much the rankings of the core three, but the nice sales of the supplements, and actually that they are increasing in sales: Volo was frst, then Xanathar, then Mordenkainen. That bodes well.

EDIT: Oh nevermind. I thought that was overall sales rank since 5E came out. Of course it makes sense that the sales ranks are higher for the more recent books.

Click to expand...

Those are amazing numbers for supplements. Volos has been out for 20 months, and at that rank has outsold every RPG product on Amazon that wasn't a 5e one or, maybe, a PHB.

 

TerraDave

5ever, or until 2024

• Jul 17, 2018

• #9

In honor of the anniversary and all, I thought I would bring back some comparative numbers.

From here:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...ellers/page4&p=6526238&viewfull=1#post6526238

I use to use the wayback machine to get numbers like this, but then amazon put bots on it to stop that. Oh well.

Here is what I got:

4E PHB

Started at 33

Fell to 54

After six months its at 2,390

After one year: 6,435

That’s a big drop off. One issue could be other ways of getting it—there was a three book box set, a deluxe version, the pdf, and of course the character builder—but still, that’s a big drop.

We can also look at 3.5 PHB

After about 1 month its at 122

After 6 months 274

At the one year point it has dropped to 4844

But then rebounds, hanging around 1000, and reaching 969 two years after launch


5E is looking good compared to these, at least so far.

 

ad_hoc

(they/them)

• Jul 17, 2018

• #10

TerraDave said:

5E is looking good compared to these, at least so far.

Click to expand...

That is the D&D understatement of the year.

I wouldn't be surprised if the 5e PHB has outsold all other PHBs (or equivalent) combined at this point. If not, it's only a matter of time.