D&D 5E According to the Hasbro Q1 earning call D&D sales are up substantially.

MGibster said:

In the 1990s I could walk into my FLGS and see AD&D side by side with GURPS, Cyberpunk 2020, Dark Conspiracy, Traveller, and a myriad of others games, but for many years in the 2000s it was mostly just D&D, d20 products, and Pathfinder.

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But if you're talking about today, how many non-D&D games are going digital only and not even bothering to offer print books, or at best print-on-demand?

darjr said:

In fact the retailers I hear that seem upset are upset because they didn’t order enough exclusive cover phbs.

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As far as I can tell, it didn't matter if you ordered more - we didn't get all of what we ordered. It was allocated. So, it's more a matter of wishing that they'd printed closer to what we ordered when it comes to the exclusives.

This is possibly on the heads of our distributors and not WotC - they may have under-asked WotC for them if they were worried that they'd get stuck warehousing it.

The exclusives were far more available on the recent books (before the new core) than they'd ever been before. I suspect that WotC still printed substantially more than they had for those books, but not by the factor that was needed.

doctorbadwolf said:

I think if they can get second printings of the alt covers out in a box set, or even just individually, they will sell like hot cakes all over again, and the FR and Eberron books will also sell like crazy, so it’ll be a while I think before any sort of downturn in sales, assuming they don’t eat their own face again in terms of PR.

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Yes, as a retailer, I'd love for them to do a boxed set for Q4. Exclusive covers would be nice on that. They don't need to do totally new covers, but it would be nice if there was something to distinguish them from the first batch.

FitzTheRuke said:

Yes, as a retailer, I'd love for them to do a boxed set for Q4. Exclusive covers would be nice on that. They don't need to do totally new covers, but it would be nice if there was something to distinguish them from the first batch.

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For sure. Selfishly, I just want a new printing of the existing alt covers, because I didn’t get any of them.

But new special covers would also be rad, and makes more sense as part of a box set.

occam said:

as @Umbran pointed out in another thread, what it probably means is that each category's bar is the portion of the overall bar accounted for by the category. IOW, Tabletop was responsible for ~37/46 of the overall increase. Using dollar figures: WotC revenue was up ~$146M from last year. So:

• Tabletop was up ~$117M (37/46 of $146M)
• Digital was up ~$3M (1/46 of $146M)
• Licensing was up ~$25M (8/46 of $146M)
• FX (whatever that is) was down ~$3M

We're off a bit due to rounding, but it's close.

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yep, that works, 462.1 - 316.3 for WotC + Digital makes for a 46% increase. If we take that 143.8 increase as 46, then the Tabletop's 115.6 increase comes out to 37, i.e. its contribution to the overall 46% increase. Nice, so that resolves the % values.

occam said:

I believe from what we've learned before now, these categories are not especially confusing:

• Tabletop is Magic and D&D: cards, books, etc.
• Digital is MtG Arena, DDB, and other first-party digital offerings.

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works for me, makes calculating the D&D portion harder, but that is no reason not to accept it. The surprising thing to me is that Wizards Digital barely grew (or is very small in comparison to print and thus only contributed 1 to the 46 while print contributed 37 of the 46). Given that WotC said that D&D sales are 60% DDB these days, that would have to mean that MtG sells a metric ton of cards but does not get much revenue from Arena.

In any case, that means that most of the Digital + License growth was in licensing, which also matches the WotC chart where it contributed 8 to the 46, so that too appears to work out.

occam said:

Oh wait, I just realized we do have a hint of something interesting, I think.

• Magic overall is up 46%. (cf. slide 27 of the earnings presentation)
• WotC Tabletop is up 51%. (ibid)
• Tabletop represents over 74% of WotC revenues (ibid), so it's definitely the big dog.

If Tabletop is almost entirely Magic and D&D, and if Magic's Tabletop increase is roughly in line with its overall increase (an assumption possibly justified by Tabletop's large share of overall revenue), then Tabletop's larger 51% increase could imply that D&D's growth was especially high in order to bring up that number, even if the absolute dollars for D&D are lower than for Magic. In any case, it's difficult to imagine a scenario where D&D didn't do well.

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makes sense. So these are the numbers we have available


That also confirms the 'MtG is split across Tabletop and Digital' part - and makes calculating D&D growth more complicated. To me the surprise is that print grew a lot but digital remained flat (most of WotC's non-print growth came from licensing if you look at the WotC breakdown)

Given that digital is essentially flat, let's focus on print and try some ratios between MtG and D&D to see what we get


Which would be pretty impressive print growth, the surprise is that digital does not seem to show anywhere near similar growth. Harder to figure out because Arena and Licensing 'dilute' the numbers we have

doctorbadwolf said:

For sure. Selfishly, I just want a new printing of the existing alt covers, because I didn’t get any of them.

But new special covers would also be rad, and makes more sense as part of a box set.

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I just checked ebay prices on the alt covers and woah! I had no idea!

Damn, I am tempted to sell my set and just buy the regular covers, and some comics with the profits

Well, well, well, D&D is not dying after all. Told you so!

The anti-WoTC-D&D YouTube echo chamber will go berserk trying to find a negative angle. They'll probably say the numbers are not high enough to sustain the 2024 edition in the long term. They'll say it's just a bump, and D&D will fail by December 2025, with closing words on how great Shadowdark is...

The Soloist said:

They'll probably say the numbers are not high enough to sustain the 2024 edition in the long term. They'll say it's just a bump, and D&D will fail by December 2025

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it’s definitely a bump as you have people ‘upgrading’ in addition to the new players coming in that D&D always had. What the numbers will look like after the upgrade phase, no one knows, they could stay higher than the 2014 ‘baseline’ due to continued growth or not. We won’t know for at least two years imo

What it certainly isn’t is D&D dying right now

Maybe WotC's strategy of 3PPs in D&DBeyond is right, because thoses are creating crunch that help to promote the brand, and they enjoy the best showcase to promote their own titles.

I wonder if WotC will acquire some IP in the future when some 3PP had to close the business.

Some I interesting speculation up thread.

As for the results. If releasing 3 big deluxe corebooks for the most popular edition in the game’s history did not lead to a spike in revenue it would be a disaster. So they have avoided disaster.