D&D 5E Xanathar's Guide #1 non-fiction bestseller this week

[darjr]

Not only that but wizards is on record saying they now have more players than they’ve ever had.

 

[Lord_Blacksteel]

I must admit, I never understood the interest in book sales figures, or movie box office, etc. I mean, I understand why WotC employees care, but it holds no real interest for me. I like an occasional MacDonalds, but I don’t care how many Big Macs they sold this month!

I'm with you on this. If all people want is reassurance that the game is doing well then when WOTC says "Book X is selling really well for us" then that should be enough, right?

But it's not, so people dig for numbers and come up with something like this 45,000 copies for Xanathar is a few weeks. Great, or to quote someone else "So What?" What does that number tell you? Especially considering that you have no other data to compare it to. Without context, it's meaningless and you have no way of knowing if that is "good" or "bad" other than what WOTC says - because they are the only ones with the full set of data!

If you found out the latest FFG Star Wars player supplement sold 90,000 copies a few months ago would that change your opinion? What if you found out Pathfinder's Teen Investigators supplement sold 44,000? What if the last D&D hardcover sold 100,000 copies? Would that change your feelings about where the game is or how it's doing? What if it was #2 in nonfiction instead of #1?

It's the same thing when the IcV "rankings" come out. People get worked up over which game is #1 or #2 or #5 - it's meaningless when it's a limited subset of stores that are polled with no data on total sales or any hard numbers at all yet it's a big thing when a game moves up or down that list. I think the best you can come up with is that "these are some games that are doing well" yet even there we have no idea how the finances look inside the companies creating them.

Examples:
- During 4E WOTC was getting $10 a month from DDI subscriptions. How many were there? For how long? No one outside the company knows yet it's a pretty direct indication as to how the game is doing.
- Paizo gets a big chunk of sales form its direct product subscription model. How much? No idea, but it's never going to show up in any kind of publisher sales report.
- For the larger RPG publishers Amazon is a factor and the best anyone can do is their own ranking system which they have warned against using as an indicator of sales numbers.

Again, one number, from one channel, tells us precisely nothing about the state of the game. I have no reason to disbelieve WOTC that the game is doing well - it certainly looks like it's doing really well based on everything that we see - buy let's not get too wrapped up in a random number.

 

[Nikosandros]

40k copies in a few weeks is a significant number for an RPG book. I woudn't call it "a random number". As I wrote earlier, it is an indicator among several others about the very good health of D&D.