I hate to say it, because I think people often overvalue it as an explanation for D&D's recent success and this suggests that I'm wrong about that, but March of 2016 would be the 1 year anniversary of Critical Role's first show.
The numbers are not preserved so to get history it needs to get captured. Plus it’s rare for any books to reach these levels ever. Also Radiant Citadel has been doing OK in its ranking the entire time it has been in preorder. The Spelljammer book has been doing really well and has spiked recently, in preorder.
That seems strange. I feel like that data definitely still exists, even if it isn't necessarily publicly available.
I think it's just an indicator that they're selling well, though theoretically we could make some historical comparisons to sales ranks of other books at release, or six months after (or what have you), if folks are checking the numbers at each release. Which I think darjr is doing.
What use are Amazon's internal numbers to us (or a future Ben Riggs or Jon Peterson) looking back years later, if we can't see them? Whereas posts like this will at least theoretically continue to be publicly available ten or twenty years from now, as are posts on ENworld from twenty years ago.
It is already a hit product. There are authors who would swoon at those sales and RPG creatures that just might contemplate killing for them. Though it may not have the same Amazon ranking as other adventures, true.
I'm not sure what you mean. I was pushing back against the idea that the data was gone, not suggesting we shouldn't be sharing it or archiving it now.
