I believe that 5e is nearing the point (perhaps a year and a half away) when it will reach peak popularity.
Furthermore, I think that we will see a fairly dramatic drop in sales after that point. Thereafter, the edition will (I believe) sell at a steadily (but slowly) declining rate until the release of a new edition.
Currently, 5e is doing very well. I suspect that any future losses of profit will be caused by dropping numbers of new players.
My guesses could be completely inaccurate, but I am glad to be able to share them.
Peak and decline is inevitable; the question is, can WotC stimulate later peaks? I would echo what @
Prakriti said and say that the movie will impact this trajectory - and possibly stimulate a later peak. WotC has to be thinking about other ways to do the same, because at some point sales
will start going down. On the other hand, maybe they find a way to turn D&D into the RPG version of Monopoly or, as someone said, Catan. No peak and valley, just an undulating plateau.
1982 was the peak of 1e. It was doing very well, but not as well as they had forecasted. And 1983 was the beginning of the decline.
I don’t know about 5e. The current books seem to be doing well on Amazon and sales seem sustained. But growth cannot last forever, so it has to plateau eventually. But even then, when new player acquisition slows down, we’ll have a few years of declining but still good sales. 5e probably has quite a few good years left.
But, I think we’re closer to the middle. I do think we’ve almost hit saturation where we have “enough”
I question this idea of saturation and "enough" and have a theory about that. Maybe I should post it in the other thread, but I'll reply here.
If you look at the 18 books that have been released, you have the three core rulebooks, one book that is specific to the Forgotten Realms, one rules supplement, two monster/lore books, one setting book, and eight story arcs in ten books (including Tales as a "story arc" and the two Waterdeep books as one). It is really not that much for five years of releases, especially when you consider that ten of the eighteen books are adventures - so really only five non-adventure books in four years, and none are truly "core."
In fact, WotC has done a good job getting away from that silly 4E era idea that "everything is core," which was an attempt to optimize sales that led to bloat and over-saturation. In 5E, only the PHB, DMG, and MM are core. Everything else is optional.
But from reading the other thread, I think the feeling of saturation that some are experiencing comes from "falling behind" on the story arcs. By having such a small number of releases, WotC has perpetuated the idea that even if everything isn't core, every release is special and exciting. "What is the new story that WotC is telling? I want to be part of that." 5E is about story, after all.
It feels saturated when you can't keep up with the latest story and are one or two or more behind. I think WotC's release schedule is based on the idea that if you play one story arc after the other, you'll finish one in six months of playing once per week, and be ready for the next. Not every group can keep up with that pace.
Now of course no one is saying that you have to play every story arc, and certainly not everyone wants to play every story arc. They are optional. If you're starting now, you have seven different story arcs to choose from, plus a compilation of adventures (Tales). I don't see that as much as saturation as it is a nice wealth of options. And how can providing more adventure options be "saturation?" How can we ever have
enough stories?
In previous editions, saturation came from rules bloat - so many rules options and supplements to choose from and keep up with. It was generally understood that adventures and setting stuff were all optional. No one felt overwhelmed by all of the Dark Sun or Planescape stuff. If you were a fan of the setting, you loved all of the material you could buy. If you weren't, you just ignored it and looked at other stuff. But what was overwhelming were all the Complete books, all the endless little books that came out; or in the 3.5 and 4E eras, all of the hardcover rule books.
So again, I think the feeling of saturation and having "enough" is almost because there are so few actual non-adventure books being published, and that WotC has made story--and the story arcs--as central to the game line, so that when a new story comes out, the feeling is that "everyone is playing it." When that doesn't happen, we either feel that we're being left behind, or that the new story arc isn't popular because people aren't talking about it, so therefore it must not be good, and people have had enough. But again, there is no "enough" with story, and we haven't had so many non-story books that we could possibly have reached a saturation point.
Maybe this
is a kind of saturation, or 5E's version of it. But I don't see it as a bad thing - just that we've reached the point that we now have a nice back-log of adventures to choose from. I mean, it is a good thing that if you don't like the next story arc, you can always go back and pick up one that you didn't get to previously.
If anything, I think we need
more stories, but more short ones - modules, compilations, etc. Of course we get those from DM's Guild, but if we were to think in terms of WotC only, I'd like to see them branch out from the "novel as default" approach to story-telling. We need more short-stories, more novellas, more vignettes even.
