D&D 5E 3 Years Later: D&D's total Domination on Amazon (and Earth in General)

[TerraDave]

On Starfinder: Paizo has a direct sales/subscription model, of which I have been reminded many times in these threads. So potential customers, seeing the initial success of the game, could be utilizing that instead.

But yes, many complaints about binding, which is sad. Its a big beautiful book, and that should be a selling point.

 

[Jester David]

Actually it might be that Starfinder has dropped in rank due to supply constraints as they try and fix the binding issues.

On Starfinder: Paizo has a direct sales/subscription model, of which I have been reminded many times in these threads. So potential customers, seeing the initial success of the game, could be utilizing that instead.

But yes, many complaints about binding, which is sad. Its a big beautiful book, and that should be a selling point.

It's very likely all the people initially curious about Starfinder bought and ore-ordered the book and sustained sales are just lower. With over a year of warning, people had lots of time to decide if they wanted or not, and were ready to buy.
The current sales are the fewer people on the fence who held off until reviews or delayed for financial reasons.

While Paizo sells directly, unless you're subscribing (which is likely few people for the rulebooks) the books are pricier than Amazon, shipping is far more *and* slower. If they had bundled PDFs I'd expect Paizo.com sales to be a larger percentage. But Amazon is competitive...

 

[jimtillman]

54 is huge.
Especially when Starfinder only hit around 90. We'll see if it hangs around that number for a few days or if it spikes and drops.

only hit around 90 heh <--sarcasm by the way

 

[jimtillman]

Holy crap Starfinder nose dived. It's 11478 overall, and #38 in gaming books. Yikes. It's only been a month since release.

To put it in perspective, Hoard of the Dragon Queen is selling better than Pathfinder Core which is selling better than Starfinder. Yikes.

apparently starfinder sold out due to it unexpected success
only a few online dealers have copies to sell which means, copies are not selling untill more product comes out

 

[Jester David]

only hit around 90 heh <--sarcasm by the way

apparently starfinder sold out due to it unexpected success
only a few online dealers have copies to sell which means, copies are not selling untill more product comes out

It's Amazon ranking was dropping pretty hard even before. It's super low now (in the 10k range) but was deep into the 100s before.

Not to besmirch the success of Starfinder. It's doing very well. But it's just selling like most RPGs do, with a huge initial spike of sales and then a trickle afterwards. It was noted that 3e sold something like half of its initial sales on the first month. If not more. And the remaining half or third over the next three years.
The trick/ catch with RPG as product lines has always been sustaining sales over multiple years. Getting a high selling book years into the product line.

Not to minimize the success of Starfinder. Because what it did was solid. Top 100 on Amazon is great!
Which is why it getting solidly beaten by Tomb of Anihilation, an adventure three years into 5e, is remarkable and worth commenting on. ToA is a surprising success...

 

[jimtillman]

no argument there toa looks great, i may actually buy it for a future d&d campaign

 

[darjr]

It looks like amazon is saying Starfinder is or was recently out of stock. That could explain the quick drop. Probably the same kind of thing with the first initial drops of the 5e PHB.

 

[Hussar]

Hope so. That would suck if starfinder didn't do great.

 

[darjr]

Hope so. That would suck if starfinder didn't do great.

Yup it looks like it. On Amazon now it's only available from third party vendors. Does that happen often when it goes out of stock? Doesn't Amazon usually take the order and then say it's out of stock instead of only showing thrid party sellers?

 

[Mistwell]

ToA is at 73 overall today.