Wow, and printed in Belgium, too. That's wild. I'll have to check to see what printing costs are like there, but I think the are on the expensive end.
D&D General Ray Winninger on 5e’s success, product cadence, the OGL, and more.
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It's funny, because it feels like I worked there 30 years ago. I spend more time these days working on games than ever, and it's fun to just talk games and RPGs without the shadow of Hasbro looming over everything.
So happy to have you active and chatting about things again!
That doesn't make any sense to me. If you had a huge order, you'd just split it out across multiple vendors.
The more I think about it, the more I'd worry about the business side of things. Hasbro is in massive debt and needs profitability over everything else. Between tariffs and printing in the US and western Europe, they're not making much money on the printed books.
I wonder if this goes back to the strategy outlined up thread - if WotC wants to push everything to direct sales, then the profitability of the books doesn't matter if they lock people into D&D Beyond. They'll make their money long term by cutting retailers and distributors out of the equation.
Tell that to my deadlines!
But it's nice to be back here and on X/Twitter/Bluesky/the alley behind the local 7-11.
dave2008
Legend
How do you quantify this? I know the 5e KS market is huge, but I don't know much about OSR KS market. Regardless how do you measure the value of one versus the other? Is someone keeping track? Is there way to access the KS data and disaggregate by system?
They only comparison I know of 4 of the top 10 TTRPG KS of all time (Million Dollar TTRPG Kickstarter Club) are 5e , and none of them are OSR.
darjr
I crit!
Some printers also screwed up print runs as well.
First we had notifications, here in NZ, that there was a delay on the delivery. And now I've been told they didn't make enough - so my PHB pre-order cancelled. I have cancelled all of them as I want a set. Now I will just wait for the later print runs with all the errata in them. 
darjr
I crit!
Just to have it here, this is the thread about the biggest print run D&D book
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...
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...
Except we weren't talking money, we were talking size.
Do you want to make the claim that the OSR community is one of the biggest TTRPG communities out there? I mean if you really want to, go right ahead... but I'm gonna still go with my original belief that the OSR community is only a very small slice of all the various TTRPG communities, regardless of how much money they may be willing to spend on themselves.
But that's even beside the point. The original point was that the OSR community doesn't eat themselves alive the same way everyone who plays D&D does, because they all know they are in it together to keep their community alive. It isn't large enough or disparate enough to splinter themselves into the same sort of cantankerous factions that D&D has. Which is a good thing!
Of course if you'd like to make the claim that members of the OSR community are in fact just as much a bunch of a-wipes that D&D fans can be... far be it from me to stop you there as well!
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