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It is, but in theory would be applied consistent to other sales. We know BookScan is partial. But it should be big enough that the sales ratios should hold. So, maybe VR having an alt cover helps it catch up to a book that lacks an alt cover. But otherwise this is not going to change much. The...

For sure. It's hard to keep in mind the many many considerations this topic carries. The sales of VR are awesome compared to most historical sourcebook/setting sales, especially for that type of product. I wish Ray could share what he knows about the holes in the data. We all know there are...

Thanks. To make sure I follow, do you mean the following: $60 retail price, which is what your FLGS charges you. $36 is what the retail store paid to the distributor. $23 is what the distributor paid to the gaming company. $23 is what the gaming company gets for all of its work. This must cover...

Oh, wait. 60/35/25 is over 100. What did you mean to propose as the split? Retail 40%?

This is really interesting, Echohawk! Is "Year 1" 2017, or something else? There is also the potential for numbers to change. From my various consulting projects I have seen cases where inventory/sales numbers like that can sometimes be reset or used for some other purchase (every third...

This is really useful to hear. My understanding is that it can vary by product type and segment. So, like this might be different for board games, and different again for a WotC D&D themed board game, and different again for miniatures... but on average might be that split you mention?

In the article, I am primarily speaking of physical book sales. The part where I don't is in this paragraph: "Is this plausible? Forbes in 2022 estimated that D&D was responsible for between $100M and $150M in annual revenue, out of the $1.3B total WotC revenue. Is it plausible that books make...

It's a bit of everything. '80-'82 was the height of TSR sales. And of the popularity during the TSR era. It was also amazing post '82 in terms of the explosion of settings. This was made possible by the ruinous economic approach of TSR's executives. For example, Ben Riggs says that on the...

D&D Beyond sales are not included. As it says on the blog posts: "BookScan data is normally available only to invited book publishers. BookScan tracks the sales of all books sold in the US to big box stores. It excludes direct sales, digital sales, gaming stores, and comic book stores. It...

I totally hear you. I also want to stress that at 5E's scale, even if all of your friends and their friends were exactly the same, this would still be anecdotal data. 5E is so huge that you really need thousands of data points to draw conclusions.

Thanks! Please do consider the mailing list so you don’t miss any. I appreciate the kind words. This series was a lot of work, made possible by the kind folks supporting my efforts.

The negative numbers are explained in Ben’s book. TSR had a very strange arrangement where they essentially received a loan on books they sent to be distributed and sold. Every new release was therefore a source of cash (but a loan!) and encouraged management to make more products. But, these...

Thanks for pulling these together! It took me forever to find these two weeks ago, so I'm really glad you shared them so others can find them more easily!

It feels like you want a particular answer on the Pathfinder/switching question. Let me turn it around and ask you, what do you think happened, and why is it an important question?

The normal expectation would be for each successive release to do worse than the prior ones and for sure to do worse than core books and similar products. A starter set (typically sold at a loss) should sell better than an accessory, for example. There are always some surprises (if we look at 2E...

The scale of D&D is entirely different than for other RPGs. Whether they stick or not is important to the other RPGs, not to D&D. Some for sure did, some for sure didn't, but nothing in the data shows an impact - as expected. D&D doesn't compete with other RPGs. D&D competes with other forms of...

Decline here is for new products. For much of 5E's life, each new product did better than the previous one. That is essentially unheard of in our hobby. Crawford and other staff have cited this, as they should, because it is tremendous. What the data shows is that this is changing. Releases...

To be clear, this isn't my assertion. It's what the data showed very clearly in the original video on the Roll for Combat show, disclosing the BookScan data. They looked at overall sales during the first months of 2023 and could see no drop at all from the OGL. Instead, two very clear spikes...

I don't have good data for this, but what I hear and see suggests that D&D isn't achieving its awesome growth on the backs of hardcore invested gamers. Just as 50% of all 5E players are new to the hobby with 5E, I think a lot of purchases are point-of-sale type impulse/interest buys for new and...

I don't think we have good data on how many subscriptions are paying subscriptions vs free subscriptions. Hasbro has shared data points such as 13 million DDB users, up from 10-11 at time of purchase, but it is unclear what that really means for income. They also said at that time (2022 December...