WotC Chris Perkins announces Retirement from Dungeons and Dragons

Over on Twitter and Bluesky, Chris Perkins has announced his retirement from Dungeons and Dragons.

Chris Perkins started officially working for Wizards of the Coast in 1997 as an Editor for Dungeon Magazine. Since then, he has functioned as the Editor in Chief of D&D Periodicals, A Senior Producer, and eventually landing as the Senior Story Editor over D&D 5e and Game Architect on D&D 5e 2024.

He also is known for acting as one of the Dungeons Masters for Acquisitions, Incorporated.

Personally, I'll miss the guy's work.

https://bsky.app/profile/chrisperkinsdnd.bsky.social%2Fpost%2F3llyvdjkphk2p

 

[MothMayI]

That was reported, but was absolute BS. It wasn't even POSSIBLE for it to be true. It was a very, extremely obvious mistake.

I don't think it sold as poorly as Bookscan reported...but I am curious as to how/why the sales figures were reported as being so low. Has Bookscan been considered a reliable indicator of D&D/other TTRPG sales? What could have caused a massive under-reporting of PHB sales?

It's something that feels too extreme to be true, but also to not have something behind it. Even if it is just a different way WotC handled the release that made sales figures difficult to accurately track.

 

[Desdichado]

Thank you for that!

I would add, that we do not have the digital numbers for sales via DDBeyond. Many people no longer buy physical books. I wonder that the ratio is, 50/50? or more digital sales than physical ones?

I hear that a lot, and while I don't entirely disagree with it, at some level it feels like a handwavey "don't believe your lying eyes" excuse too. Those data points certainly aren't the whole story, but they're not cherry-picked lies and impossibilities, they're well documented facts that contribute to the story. For that matter, his list is missing two significant new points too: the firing of all of the Project Sigil people and release of the tool in an incomplete format, and now the retiring of Chris Perkins while he's still a little young to retire just a few months after he got promoted.

Yeah, yeah... all of these facts are circumstantial, and there's other explanations for them that could certainly be true. But they tell a more compelling story than "the Bookscan data was actually wrong; Bookscan doesn't know what they're doing and released BS data out into the wild" That's a much more unbelievable story than any "ignore all of those other things; they don't mean anything."

I say all that as someone who has no dog in this fight whatsoever. I only bought a used 5e PHB (original, not 5.5) a few months ago reluctantly because after relocating, I got invited to join an already started 5e campaign. I have no real interest in either 5e or 5.5, and I don't care in the least (except for academic curiosity) what WotC or anyone else does with the D&D brand. And many of the so-called DungeonTubers who are bearish on the 5.5 sales are explicitly not anti-WotC people. Some of them have even been accused of being shills.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

@Alzrius My condemnation of your above post might be coming off as stronger than I intend - or more specifically, more censuring of you than I intend. I'm pretty adamantly against most of the points you make, particularly the first one, but I don't mean it to come across at all personally - not even a little.

But, let me tell you about BookScan, just to be clear as to why I'm so sure that the first point is total BS. I've had decades of experience with reading analysis of bookscan reports. They have always been unreliable, even if they're still useful to look at. They've ALWAYS had "reporting fragments" - places where books are miscategorized, or otherwise misreported, and to get a true idea of how it's sold (even just how it's sold through locations that report to bookscan, keeping in mind that it has little to do with the entire market, much of which does NOT report to bookscan) you have to ADD UP multiple lines of Bookscan reportings for a single product.

The guy who "reported" bookscan's "thousands of copies" was only showing ONE LINE, and the LOWEST SELLING LINE of reporting for the PHB. Presumably (I've seen it hundreds of times) one could have looked through more data to find where there were more lines featuring the same book, and added them up. This happens all the time for comics.

ALSO - for example, I doubt that there are many (if ANY AT ALL) FLGSes that report to bookscan, so... even if it WAS all the sales of stores that do (and it couldn't possibly include AMAZON, for example, which probably categorized it differently) it wouldn't come close to revealing how the PHB sold IN TOTAL. It's just a useless bit of reporting. Totally not worth every thinking about ever again.

This is all not to add, that it's so obviously a ridiculous number that it would mean that MY OWN TINY LITTLE FLGS would have been responsible for like 2% of the ENTIRE SALES and my distributor would have had (I saw the pallets) something like 1/3 of all the books - for one small part of Canada ALONE. It's silly!

 

[darjr]

WotC changed distribution, to Hasbro, and stopped reporting to Bookscan.

Amazon stopped too, for these books, as far as we know.

 

[mamba]

I don't think it sold as poorly as Bookscan reported...but I am curious as to how/why the sales figures were reported as being so low.

Didn't those bookscan figures get published before most businesses would even have reported their sales at the end of the month? That is an easy how, as to why...

 

[Alzrius]

@Alzrius My condemnation of your above post might be coming off as stronger than I intend - or more specifically, more censuring of you than I intend.

It's cool. I didn't take it as anything personal.

ALSO - for example, I doubt that there are many (if ANY AT ALL) FLGSes that report to bookscan

That was my understanding too; as I heard it, Bookscan only covers major retailers and Amazon. So FLGSs and direct sales are excluded from their numbers.

 

[The Soloist]

The fact is that, we do not have the whole picture. I'm on the side of caution.

We do not know Chris Perkins' financial set-up. Many people retire at 50 or 55. It's none of our business.

Sigil fail to deliver a good performance for the investment, got scrapped, and will make a great deductible in the next Hasbro financial report. That has no relation to D&D 5.5 sales.

People like creating narratives, connecting the dots. It's how conspiracy theories are born.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I don't think it sold as poorly as Bookscan reported...but I am curious as to how/why the sales figures were reported as being so low. Has Bookscan been considered a reliable indicator of D&D/other TTRPG sales? What could have caused a massive under-reporting of PHB sales?

I guarantee you, it is a fragment of BookScan sales, which is a fragment of the total sales, and based entirely on mistaken categorization. Very common with BookScan. It's meaningless.

It's something that feels too extreme to be true, but also to not have something behind it.

It has NOTHING behind it. If you look at BookScan, you can find Graphic Novels that it can claim had 1 UNIT sell in a year. But if you look further, you'll find that THAT unit just needs to be added to the bigger pile that was under the correct category. It just means that the single book store that reported that single sale had it in their individual system under an incorrect category. It just gets thrown into the much larger database without correciton.

Even if it is just a different way WotC handled the release that made sales figures difficult to accurately track.

Amazon's changing D&D from a book to a game made tracking sales of the new books slightly more difficult than it used to be, yeah, but we've NEVER had an accurate idea of how anything sells, just bits and pieces of available information that you can try to add up, but you're rarely comparing apples to apples. It's guesswork at best.

 

[This Effin’ GM]

It's how conspiracy theories are born

When a mommy suspicion and a daddy bias love each other very much....

 

[FitzTheRuke]

"the Bookscan data was actually wrong; Bookscan doesn't know what they're doing and released BS data out into the wild" That's a much more unbelievable story than any "ignore all of those other things; they don't mean anything."

I said nothing of the sort.

BookScan releases data that people who understand how to interpret the data can find useful. And we know that the piece that people have been quoting to make sales look bad IS NOT REAL DATA. It's a data fragment. It's an obvious fragment. So holding it up and saying that it means something is the BS, not the data itself. Not BookScan as a whole.