D&D General Ray Winninger on 5e’s success, product cadence, the OGL, and more.

[Micah Sweet]

I think that is your opinion or assumption, but not necessarily true. Oldies like us who are familiar with 3e-3.5e know what you mean, but people who started with 5e (and that is a lot of people now) could be very confused by it. That is why I prefer 5e14 and 5e24 (or just 5e). I don't know how I can be more clear in fewer key strokes.

Fair enough, but I've yet to see anyone express confusion on the term if they weren't trying to make point to me about it.

 

[mearls]

Thanks for the detailed responses, Mike. They are sincerely appreciated!

I'm curious about the reference to a slowdown with 5.5 though. From this article: "Lanzillo said that the English-language, analog version (ie., physical books) of the 2024 Players Handbook reached the same sales numbers that the 2014 PHB did in three years across all languages." That doesn't sound like a drop, so I'm wondering if you have some additional insights that might mean the marketing blurb is somehow hiding a slowdown.

This quote had been running circles in my head for the past couple hours, and I think have tracked down why.

I have a source that has the actual quote on this topic:

"the English language version of the 2024 Players Handbook 'reached more players hands in four months' than the 2014 edition did, across all languages, in three years."

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That "reached more hands" is doing a ton of work. We have to assume that it at the very least includes all new D&D Beyond accounts created from the launch of the 5.5 PHB to today. How many is that? From August '24 to the end of the 2024, that's about 1,000,000 million more users.

You could plausibly say that that is 1mm players that the PHB has reached, in the form of the free rules, which are a subset of the PHB content.

You can also account for campaign sharing in DDB, which might multiply the copies sold by anywhere from 2 to 5 times to reach that hands reached number.

This is the basic problem I face - any hard data I find shows a drop or a slump. Every quote I have from WotC relies on a lot of specific wording to do its lifting, and in many cases the press is (in good faith!) reporting phrases like "in players hands" as sales.

 

[Echohawk]

"the English language version of the 2024 Players Handbook 'reached more players hands in four months' than the 2014 edition did, across all languages, in three years."

Interesting. I note that @brimmels article specifically says "Lanzillo said that the English-language, analog version (ie., physical books) of the 2024 Players Handbook" which is an odd thing to emphasize if that claim wasn't specifically made in the presentation.

@brimmels are you able to clarify exactly what it was that Jess Lanzillo said during that presentation?

 

[WinningerR]

In the year or two before the release of the new PHB, WotC made quite substantial changes to the way the D&D business operates, making it very difficult to apply what we know about earlier eras to figure out what's happening now.

WotC now sells books direct-to-consumer and incentivizes purchase by deeply discounting physical/digital bundles. How successful is that program? How many sales has it pulled away from Amazon, FLGSes and other outlets? We have no idea.

WotC ended its relationship with Penguin-Random House and now sells to Amazon directly. (A hefty percentage of D&D is sold through Amazon.) An important consequence of this change is that Amazon now treats D&D products more like games, while they were previously treated like books. This changed a number of things, including the way Amazon discounts the products. During the PRH era, Amazon customers almost never paid cover price even for the very latest D&D products. These days, it seems, new products are barely discounted at all which is certainly impacting sales. WotC is pleased about this. Their aim is to take as much of the business direct-to-consumer as possible; they want to engineer a world in which WotC itself is the only source of discounted D&D (at least on the frontlist). In effect, WotC is deliberately selling fewer books in an effort to earn more revenue on each of those sales. Is that working? We have no idea.

WotC launched a VTT and are using it to drive DDB subscribers? How is this impacting Roll20? Is it incentivizing more digital sales? We have no idea.

The OGL fiasco blew up the release schedule for 2023-24, the 50th Anniversary was poorly exploited, and the roll out of the 2024 core books was suboptimal. All of those factors had at least a short term impact on the business. How significant? We have no idea.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that more customers purchased the 2014 PHB on Roll20 over a ten year span than purchased the new PHB in four and a half months. Similarly, the DDB data posted upthread looks pretty dubious.

Is D&D experiencing a "slow down?" I've yet to see a compelling argument and I can see several counter-arguments. Still, we don't know. It's not at all unlikely that growth is slowing down--you can't continue to grow at 20+% annually forever. There's no question the brand remains at or near its high watermark.

 

[Reynard]

In the year or two before the release of the new PHB, WotC made quite substantial changes to the way the D&D business operates, making it very difficult to apply what we know about earlier eras to figure out what's happening now.

WotC now sells books direct-to-consumer and incentivizes purchase by deeply discounting physical/digital bundles. How successful is that program? How many sales has it pulled away from Amazon, FLGSes and other outlets? We have no idea.

WotC ended its relationship with Penguin-Random House and now sells to Amazon directly. (A hefty percentage of D&D is sold through Amazon.) An important consequence of this change is that Amazon now treats D&D products more like games, while they were previously treated like books. This changed a number of things, including the way Amazon discounts the products. During the PRH era, Amazon customers almost never paid cover price even for the very latest D&D products. These days, it seems, new products are barely discounted at all which is certainly impacting sales. WotC is pleased about this. Their aim is to take as much of the business direct-to-consumer as possible; they want to engineer a world in which WotC itself is the only source of discounted D&D (at least on the frontlist). In effect, WotC is deliberately selling fewer books in an effort to earn more revenue on each of those sales. Is that working? We have no idea.

WotC launched a VTT and are using it to drive DDB subscribers? How is this impacting Roll20? Is it incentivizing more digital sales? We have no idea.

The OGL fiasco blew up the release schedule for 2023-24, the 50th Anniversary was poorly exploited, and the roll out of the 2024 core books was suboptimal. All of those factors had at least a short term impact on the business. How significant? We have no idea.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that more customers purchased the 2014 PHB on Roll20 over a ten year span than purchased the new PHB in four and a half months. Similarly, the DDB data posted upthread looks pretty dubious.

Is D&D experiencing a "slow down?" I've yet to see a compelling argument and I can see several counter-arguments. Still, we don't know. It's not at all unlikely that growth is slowing down--you can't continue to grow at 20+% annually forever. There's no question the brand remains at or near its high watermark.

My sense is that WotC would prefer to sell Print/Beyond bundles above all, because it pulls people into that ecosystem.

 

[mamba]

To be fair, most people doing 5E 3PP support are using their own "logic" rather than adhering tightly to WotC's design paradigm. I mean, that's why 3PP content exists at all.

at a minimum the level at which your subclasses begin would be different between 2014 and 2024, even if you otherwise design your classes and subclasses according to your own logic.

For monsters it is about your stat block format and phrasing, there are plenty of options that closely follow 2014, even if your monsters are your own.

So you either follow 2014 or 2024, or you are sitting between two chairs. Does that mean you are compatible with only one of the two, no, obviously not, but you will have to make a decision about which one you are more compatible with and which one less.

And, as someone stated upthread, it won't matter at all for adventures or settings.

which is why I did not mention them, and that only holds true if you have neither new (sub)classes nor new monsters, which many of the big 3pp books do have, even if they are primarily an adventure path or setting. At that point you basically have a generic fantasy setting that also works with 5e however, rather than product specifically for 5e.

 

[mamba]

Sure, but either choice is compatible with either 5e14 or 5e24. So once I make choice, what ever I produced is compatible with whatever 5e game your playing.

compatible yes, the question is how the 'half' of the market that you leaned away from feels about it however. Just because you are largely compatible does not mean you get proportionally the same amount of sales from both (all, if you include ToV and A5e) camps.

 

[mamba]

Do I think the designers of D&D want to make a game that all fans of D&D and RPGs would like? Sure. But do I also think they are well aware that they CAN'T make a game that all fans of D&D and RPGs would like? Absolutely. They are not stupid just like we are not stupid. They know full well that a percentage of the playerbase will not follow them no matter what they do or what they make. And they have to accept that. And accept it I think they do.

agreed

So their question then becomes... what will ultimately serve their game the best? Focus primarily on existing veteran players to make adjustments to their game in the hope against hope that they will stick around for a bunch of time longer before potentially moving on elsewhere... or focus on the newer players

First off, I do not think it is a 'hope against hope' scenario, or that WotC sees it as such. Second, where do you see 2024 here, is this focusing on new players over the existing ones? I do not see that, but I am curious about your opinion

I don't know what the proper ratio is. None of us really do. Even WotC doesn't really know what is best, all they have is their history to lean on. But it appears to me that they always seem to fall on the side of the "new or lapsed player" pool.

I'd like to see that case made for 2024 What in the rules did they change to better support new players against the desire of the existing players?

 

[payn]

How have we been having discussions about 5E2024 without coming up with a better name we all agree on?

I respectfully submit Fifther Edition and 5 Fast 5 Furious.

D&D the fifthening

 

[Mistwell]

That still sounds impressive, but why aren't they comparing it to the average year? It's clear it is not the best year.

Mike, it's been 4.5 months. Not a year. If your premise is it's not selling well, then the data to support that premise shouldn't be that it didn't beat the best year in 1/3rd that time, right? I mean, I don't think they even printed enough copies to be able to do that.

WotC has even admitted that in their initial press release. In fact, they have admitted it at least twice:

• The press release near the game's initial launch crowed that this was the largest first print run. The obvious omission is that D&D has had bigger second or later print runs. That means that the book is not beating 5e at its peak

Again, beating it at it's peak would be comparing 4.5 months to an entire year. The second run, and the third run, each covered at or nearly an entire year, right?

• , nor did they plan to (they would have printed more). Otherwise, they would have printed more.

I believe, as last time, they expect later runs to incorporate the early discovered errata changes that they've been inserting at DNDBeyond. Errata is part of the print run calculus for the first print, isn't it?