D&D (2024) 2024 Player’s Handbook is ‘Fastest Selling D&D Book Ever’

It’s only officially been out for a week, but according to Wizards of the Coast, the new Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook has already surpassed Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything to become the fastest selling D&D book ever—in the entire 50-year history of the game. It has sold three times as many copies as the 2014 version of the books did at launch.

Not only that, the 2024 Player’s Handbook was the biggest print run in D&D’s history.

In a press release today, WotC claims more than 85 million D&D fans worldwide, and says that D&D Beyond, the game’s official online platform, has over 18 million users.

 

[Velderan]

BookScan has never pretended to show all sales of a given book: usually they are said to represent about 75% of real sales. However, @Alphastream made a solid case comparing historical BookScan data with WotC actual sales numbers and estimated it is closer to 20% for D&D books. But this seems lower than that.

Which makes a lot of sense when you factor in 3 things:

• FLGS had the book available 2 weeks early so a lot of people probably jumped on that.
• WotC has been pushing the bundle pretty hard.
• digital is incredibly popular so plenty of people probably just bought it on DDB or their VTT of choice and skipped the physical book entirely.

If there’s a delay in Amazon reporting their numbers as Morrus points out above, that 3700 might be accurate for what Bookscan can report. It just isn’t cause for concern given everything else we do know.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

If I recall, your distributor had almost all of those already spoken for as well (and you had to convince them that you had them reserved before they would give them to you or you would be out of luck to get them). This indicates that even in your local area, the PHB is doing well.

Not quite. You're conflating two different anecdotes of mine. The above is my estimation of how many they (my distributor) had initially - I saw the flats in late August, before they were allowed to release them (for the Game Store release date of September 3rd).

The time that I had to convince them was three weeks later, when I had started to run out, and had asked for MORE copies to be put aside. They initially told me that they couldn't fill that order, but I managed to (truthfully) convince them that our order had been placed while they'd still had stock, and they'd just 'forgotten' to set them aside.

At that point, they had a few boxes of books (of 10 copies) - maybe around 100 copies or less. And those, were either spoken for, or they had wanted to hang onto them for whatever reason, because they initially told me that the simply didn't have ANY, but after I proved that there should have been some aside for me, they opened a fresh box and gave me seven of the ten. (I'd have liked more, but it was clear that it wasn't going to happen).

Here's another issue with the idea that "WotC only sold 3700 copies of the PHB" - that would mean that my own tiny little game store in a Canadian suburb would be "worth" nearly 2% of their entire sales (not that we report to bookscan). While perhaps chest-puffing, it's patently absurd.

 

[mamba]

Whatever the reason is for Bookscan underreporting, shouldn’t those reasons have been true for Tasha’s as well though?

If FLGS are not included that is true in either case, same for digital etc. The only thing that does make a difference is reporting sales late, those late reports are missing from the PHB number but are included in the TCoE one.

So what changed between the two releases? The FLGS got it two weeks early so might have absorbed more of the overall sales than they otherwise would have. WotC has the book on sale directly, with a good discount for the physical + digital bundle. General trend towards digital over print.

Not sure that accounts for the missing 130k books (or more, depending on how much the PHB is outselling Tasha), but maybe that (and reporting late) is enough

 

[bedir than]

Whatever the reason is for Bookscan underreporting, shouldn’t those reasons have been true for Tasha’s as well though?

Not necessarily, as Amazon doesn't regularly report to Bookscan, distribution channels have changed (no more Random House), direct purchasing from WotC for physical books now, and the massive expansion of digital purchasing since Tasha's is something that Bookscan will never touch.

 

[Alphastream]

This is what Bookscan includes in its numbers if you are curious. It does include Amazon, Barnes & Noble, BJs, Books-A-Million, Costco, Gamestop, Sam's Club, Target, Walmart, and 800 independent bookstores (among others).

Circana BookScan Data Providers | Publishers Marketplace

Hi, a friend of mine who follows book sales says the UK BookScan numbers are higher than what you are sharing for the US. That seems to further undermine the US figures, given the size of the book market.

Can you check the US "lifetime" BookScan sales for the new PH? Maybe Amazon and B&N and similar outfits put all their preorders/first week sales through Bookscan before the official first week of publication you are looking at?

 

[FitzTheRuke]

So what changed between the two releases?

I think we can find the answer to that here:

However, the listing is not looking correct. It says the author is Diamond Comic Distributors Inc and the Publisher is PSI. PSI is probably the wholesaler supplying it to Diamond/Alliance.

This sounds to me like the only account that Bookscan is currently reporting (for whatever reason) is Diamond. Diamond is a comic book distributor - their games arm is Alliance, and while it's possible that the number includes Alliance, it's actually more probable that it only includes Diamond itself.

If I were a betting man, I'd say that the 3700 copy figure is ONLY the copies sold directly to Diamond, and that means only the copies that Diamond sold directly to Comic Book Stores (you can order WotC products as a comic store through Diamond's Preorder Catalogue, without even having an Alliance account!)

In addition, a Comic and Game store (such as mine) wouldn't normally use that option - we have other game distributors, including Diamond's own Alliance!

Just so that I don't lose everyone - I am saying that the 3700 copies likely only went to the Comic Store Arm of a single distributor. Even Diamond probably got more copies than that, but through Alliance.

Bookscan is only showing reporting for 1 account - Diamond. It's missing EVERYONE ELSE. Does that make sense?

 

[Alphastream]

Which makes a lot of sense when you factor in 3 things:

• FLGS had the book available 2 weeks early so a lot of people probably jumped on that.
• WotC has been pushing the bundle pretty hard.
• digital is incredibly popular so plenty of people probably just bought it on DDB or their VTT of choice and skipped the physical book entirely.

If there’s a delay in Amazon reporting their numbers as Morrus points out above, that 3700 might be accurate for what Bookscan can report. It just isn’t cause for concern given everything else we do know.

I absolutely like your logical train of thought, but it isn't likely given what we've seen historically. We on ENWorld and gaming internet in general live in a real bubble where we see very clear repeated patterns of how folks buy things, such as on D&D Beyond. But for D&D, the audience is vastly bigger than our bubble. There are folks constantly walking past store aisles, coming in to gaming stores, shopping online. D&D is a game with global shipping and distribution schedules. The scale of it is enormously beyond what we see. Most sales, historically, come from outside the patterns of buying we see.

For sure, digital sales are a new thing. But in the vast D&D market, the number of folks who have even been to the D&D Beyond website is likely very small. When I would visit gaming stores around the country in the first few years of 5E, maybe one in six D&D players had been to the D&D web site. Fewer than that were engaged in anything forums/social online.

While everything you mentioned is true (digital sales, FLGS sales, bundles) and a factor in sales, it is inconceivable for those factors to so profoundly impact the BookScan side of things (we haven't seen such a change for previous 5E books, even during the D&D Beyond digital era). That's why folks who understand BookScan tend to think that the numbers being reported are inaccurate for some reason.

 

[mamba]

Not necessarily, as Amazon doesn't regularly report to Bookscan, distribution channels have changed (no more Random House), direct purchasing from WotC for physical books now, and the massive expansion of digital purchasing since Tasha's is something that Bookscan will never touch.

so basically the reasons I listed

 

[darjr]

ignore my grumpiness

 

[mamba]

For sure, digital sales are a new thing. But in the vast D&D market, the number of folks who have even been to the D&D Beyond website is likely very small.

DDB has 18M accounts, somewhere I heard that is about 50% of D&D players. Even if it is not, it is a significant percentage and not what I would call ‘very small’