D&D 5E Amazon: PHB has new competition and Tales from the Yawning Portal...

[darjr]

???

Not 2e or 3. 4e

 

[TerraDave]

Amazon existed in 2000 but so did gamestores and Amazon was a lot less prevalent. I would not bother comparing 2E and 3E Amazon sales. Yes Amazon and 2E overlapped.

Main point being gamestores barely exist now so Amazon sales would be up for that factor alone.

Yes, it was a 4E comparison (when 4E may have been at its peak).

But as to your point, I think in 2008 was the low for game stores. Now we are living through a massive hobby gaming renaissance. These days there are stores, and data posted on here on ENWorld shows rapid growth in sales at these stores, including for RPGs.

But it gets even worse. We can probably agree that over the years Amazon has sold more and more books. (there may be game stores, but book chain stores have disappeared from urban areas across the US). That means that a higher relative ranking means more absolute sales. Not less. More.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Worked for 1st ed. Adventure sales got very low in the mid 90s though. Sub 10k and even 5k units being sold. Dungeon magazine maybe u dercut them as well IDK. I bought very few but all the dungeons I could.

I loved Dungeon in the 2e era when I had a subscription. If they made a print version of that again I would subscribe in an instant. Every couple of month some interesting, generally stand alone adventures, that are just the right size (not campaign length, but not just mini adventure bites either) arriving in my mailbox for a few dollars.

As for TftYP

It seems to be doing better then CoS did.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...mber-1/page2&p=6849864&viewfull=1#post6849864

Which I think was the only other adventure to hang with the core rule books for very long (or at all). So, strongest debut for a 5E adventure yet.

EDIT: I just checked back, its at #76 and PHB is at #59.

I'm seeing a pattern here. We only have two examples, but since we don't have a lot of 5e adventures to compare it to, those two matter.

What do those books have in common? Nostalgia/established D&D tradition; and not a 1-15th level campaign-length adventure.

Perhaps if these keep selling WotC will find ways to shift their marketing more towards these and away from the "campaign in a hardcover" publishing technique. The tough part for them is just to figure out how to keep organized play doing what they want it to, and how to manage a strong transmedia tie-in.

 

[TerraDave]

...



I'm seeing a pattern here. We only have two examples, but since we don't have a lot of 5e adventures to compare it to, those two matter.

What do those books have in common? Nostalgia/established D&D tradition; and not a 1-15th level campaign-length adventure.

Perhaps if these keep selling WotC will find ways to shift their marketing more towards these and away from the "campaign in a hardcover" publishing technique. The tough part for them is just to figure out how to keep organized play doing what they want it to, and how to manage a strong transmedia tie-in.

CoS is basically a campaign in a hardcover, but an open one, and really for levels 1 - 10. TfrYP definitely is not.

Another common factor: not FR oriented. In fact, the two least FR oriented adventures they have done. PotA also has notes on using other settings, and it basically a valley you can put in most fantasy games, and I think that is the second highest rated adventure her on ENWorld after CoS. (Can't really say much on sales).

 

[Charles Rampant]

Princes of the Apocalypse was very well received as a sandbox campaign after the fairly structured (on rails, not sandboxy, whatever) Tyranny of Dragons; it was also written when the rules were finished, and had enough time to be a full sized book rather than two shorter ones. It - like Out of the Abyss, to be fair - seems to be less liked by people who actually ran it.

The adventures thing is really interesting to me. In 3e (and the White Wolf heydey) it was received wisdom that 'player books sell to the whole group, DM books sell only to one, so the former make the real money'. I don't believe that White Wolf ever had a big focus on adventures, beyond the occasional campaign one, but you could argue that their games never suited pre-written adventures. Meanwhile, presumably WotC could look at the data, and presumably determined from that that adventures were poor sellers; yet now 5e comes around, and suddenly big adventures are the big money makers of the edition. What changed?

Is it just that, in an edition with no player crunch, adventures are king? Or is it that 5e - the rules, the edition strategy, whatever - just really suits pre-written adventures?

 

[TerraDave]

It did it.

 

[TerraDave]

The adventures thing is really interesting to me. In 3e (and the White Wolf heydey) it was received wisdom that 'player books sell to the whole group, DM books sell only to one, so the former make the real money'. I don't believe that White Wolf ever had a big focus on adventures, beyond the occasional campaign one, but you could argue that their games never suited pre-written adventures. Meanwhile, presumably WotC could look at the data, and presumably determined from that that adventures were poor sellers; yet now 5e comes around, and suddenly big adventures are the big money makers of the edition. What changed?

Is it just that, in an edition with no player crunch, adventures are king? Or is it that 5e - the rules, the edition strategy, whatever - just really suits pre-written adventures?

One of the points of these threads is that so far the core books have far, far outsold the adventures.

CoS was sort of an exception, but it still faded eventually. In general, that old pattern holds.

I think its just that WotC wants to keep barriers to entry low, and a campaign in a book is an easy way to do that.

 

[LordEntrails]

I loved Dungeon in the 2e era when I had a subscription. If they made a print version of that again I would subscribe in an instant. Every couple of month some interesting, generally stand alone adventures, that are just the right size (not campaign length, but not just mini adventure bites either) arriving in my mailbox for a few dollars. ....

Ever consider Adventure-a-week or ENsid5r? That's pretty much what those two seem to put out (I've never subscribed to either, yet).

 

[Charles Rampant]

One of the points of these threads is that so far the core books have far, far outsold the adventures.

CoS was sort of an exception, but it still faded eventually. In general, that old pattern holds.

I think its just that WotC wants to keep barriers to entry low, and a campaign in a book is an easy way to do that.

But why are the adventures selling so well now, when they apparently were not a profitable line before? In other words, what made Wizards turn to them as the primary post-core releases, over other things? I know that they are easier to avoid system bloat with, can be stealth-setting books, all that; but presumably Wizards were able to convince themselves that profit was there to be made from adventures in general.

 

[darjr]

Because they are adventure paths and a bit of setting and a bit of a collection of encounters to use elsewhere.

The individual mods don't quite work as well in my opinion because of analysis paralasys. As a DM you'll either have to go to the work of making a lot of unrelated things mesh or collect so many so as to have many choices that it begins to be too​ many. At least for a lot of folks. Those that thrive with lots of adventures are also happy pulling apart existing ones for their own use, and then I'd argue that the APs can be a great value for that purpose.