D&D General Is DnD being mothballed?

[Maxperson]

There are so many things that lead to 5E's success that I don't think anyone has a good breakdown. It's everything from an approachable game that doesn't focus on "crunch" to streaming to people wanting real person-to-person interaction to VTT to COVID to a general acceptance of geek culture that simply wasn't there before.

But without a solid foundation that works to get people in the door and keep them it wouldn't matter. I'm just happy I can find players.

Absolutely. 5e is a good, quality game. But then so are 3e, 2e and 1e. The foundation is there for all of those editions and my position is that it's pretty unknowable if those editions would have done better, worse or the same as 5e. We can all have opinions on what those answers are and why, but we have no hard facts to prove a given position.

 

[darjr]

That does not necessarily follow. Critical Role can be an advertisement for D&D in general, without being a sales juggernaut itself. Folks can see CR, buy D&D, play published adventures in the FR or their own worlds, and not feel a desire to specifically play in the CR campaign world.

Not really. It could/would be very intimidating to try and run Mercer's setting after having watched him run it, and for people who may also have watched him run it. I know that I wouldn't want to do that and I'm a very experienced DM whose players have lots of fun. It makes perfect sense for his setting not to do as well as the ones WotC puts out.

Ya both have good points but if the point is that CR is a main driver in selling D&D books I’d think their D&D book would have sold much better. We have three of them now?

Two WotC, one an adventure? Two settings one by Darrington?

 

[Parmandur]

I know, that is probably what they internally are doing. Not sure why they would think that given the sales data we have showing that rulebooks sell better than adventures however…

In any case, this is only an either / or if WotC makes it one, they could also increase the staff / hire temps and do both books.

That to me was where Matt was going, why do you still only have 10 people working on this when it turned into this runaway success

They've been hiring people like gangbusters for a couple years now, and increasing the number of books...?

 

[cranberry]

The rumors of D&D's mothballing are greatly exaggerated..

OT: It will be interesting to see what direction WoTC goes if the VTT doesn't provide the level of monetization that they are hoping for.

 

[mamba]

Leaving money on the table.is a flawed concept, however, just because one person will buy something doesn't mean it is profitable in the long or even short term.

I’d argue it at a minimum would be successful in the short term, now all the 3pps are meeting that demand instead.

Not sure about the long term, but I don’t think anyone is suggesting a pace of a book a month either. One book more for each of the past four years would probably have been just fine

 

[FitzTheRuke]

It's possible that 5e is the best ever(different from best selling). It's also possible that the release rate has a lot to do with it. And it's also possible that neither of those things are true and it's due to other factors.

In my experience of selling D&D for... 6 core revisions of 4 editions (with a 7th on the way!) I can say that this is the only edition where I still have a significant number of customers who buy every book that they publish. This has NEVER been the case before, as they've always ALWAYS burnt-out even the most hard-core buyer with the pace (and quality) of books. Now, not all 5e books have been the best, and I suspect that they're close to a breaking point with the new increase in price-point and the higher-end slipcases for the same (or less) content. I think the breaking point is close. BUT, it's never lasted 10 years before. I don't think that it's lasted more than three years before.

There's gotta be something to the release schedule - it's not just the advent of Critical Role and Stranger Things. Those things are responsible for the stellar "Long Tail" of people who pick up a book here, a book there, but the sustained sales across the board? That's on the release schedule.

 

[Umbran]

I wish I could find it now, but there was a chart showing 5E sales and the upward trend wasn't significantly increased by Stranger Things or CR.

Or else a game that would have plateaued kept rising because of them.

Yeah, the problem is that we don't know what would have happened otherwise, because CR and Stranger Things were unprecedented.

 

[mamba]

Yes, but it shows that if this became a habit (1 release a month let's say) that it would frustrate a portion of the target audience.

definitely, I am in no way implying that a book a month is a sustainable rate

 

[Staffan]

Actually, it did work. For Battletech, for Storyteller, and for 2e, 3.5, and for 4e -and for PF1. It's just that 2e and 4e had the minor problem of it not being nearly enough, because 2e couldn't, in spite of so many dedicated fans buying every book it spat out, generate enough income to offset losses on novels, and the failed collectible card & dice games (and general mismanagement), and because 4e was given a yearly revenue goal like, 5 or 10 times the revenue of the entire industry or something.

It certainly didn't work for 2e. You talk about "so many dedicated fans buying every book it spat out", but the problem is that they didn't. That's why Ryan Dancey wrote about touring TSR's warehouse and seeing stacks and stacks of unsold books.

It's hard to say what killed TSR exactly. Random House no longer wanting to be paid for unsold novels in store credit was certainly the actual death blow, but TSR was certainly in bad shape before that. If a dragon starts a fight with 100 hp, is the magic missile that takes it from 5 hp to 0 to credit for the kill? In the post I linked above, Ryan Dancey talks about the early days of WOTC buying TSR, and he puts the ultimate blame on TSR's lack of market research. That's what lead to having five or so different "vanilla" fantasy settings for D&D (Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Birthright, Mystara) in addition to the weirder ones (Al-Qadim, Dark Sun, Spelljammer, Planescape, Ravenloft). That's what made them try for not one, but two different CCGs (Spellfire and Blood War) based on D&D. That's what lead to products being priced lower than their actual production cost.

 

[Parmandur]

Ya both have good points but if the point is that CR is a main driver in selling D&D books I’d think their D&D book would have sold much better. We have three of them now?

Two WotC, one an adventure? Two settings one by Darrington?

I suspect that might be a problem with the data set: we don't know the relative percentages on any of these products outside of Bookscan. Take Ravnica as an example: Nate Stewart went on record in 2029 thar Ravnica was the fastest selling D&D book ever released, buy thst isn't reflected in the Bookscan numbers. Simple explanation for that in my mind is that Ravnica fans are enfranchised Magic players...who buy stuff from their FLGS every Friday. So, including that non-Bookscan venue, I can believe that Ravnica had a huge initial surge of sales outside thst data set, and it would not surprise me if the same were true for CR.