I would be interested in what
@FitzTheRuke thinks about sales in the game store. Everyone wants to spin and parse the carefully chosen words at the shareholders meeting, but someone who sells the books would have more impact on me to the health of the game.
D&D 5e 2024 is absolutely selling great. I fully believe that anyone who claims otherwise is... let's say, using "wishful thinking".
That said, I have to admit, that I'm starting to agree with
@Mark Craddock. I'll explain:
When I first heard Mark make the claim (a long time ago now) that D&D Beyond was eating into his FLGS sales, I thought he was exaggerating. I'm used to Comics, where Digital has never made much of a dent on physical sales (if anything, it's helped to advertise). I hadn't noticed anything of the sort.
But I've started to notice it. It was particularly galling to me with the new Heroes of the Borderlands Starter - where my distributor had it for weeks, but wouldn't let me have mine until Release Day (which wasn't early for us FLGSes like things normally are) but then it seemed like
everyone here were receiving theirs from D&D Beyond during the week leading up to release date.
Don't get me wrong here - my plan wasn't to break street date! It was to
prepare for running it at launch!
So, DDB breaking street date themselves, while holding me to it to the letter was annoying, but the worse part was... the sales started off really slow. We've gone through a bunch of them BY NOW, but it really did seem for a bit there like "Everyone who wants it has it already" by the time I even got my own.
That was irksome.
But I admit, that the above complaint is more about how the whole thing made me
feel, than something where I can fully track what the cause of the slow start was. I will say that the Starter is selling "Fine" but it is selling less than what I would have expected, and I believe (with no way of proving it) that it is probably due to DDB.
But the core books sold great at launch. In fact, they sold OUT at launch. It would have been nice for them to have been more readily available. There was a few week window at the beginning of the year where we didn't have one or the other of the core books, and we
never received our full order on the Exclusive Covers (and if we'd know that would happen, we'd have compensated with more Regular Covers, so some warning would have been nice, too!)
The core books are, IMO, at my store, turning over at a nice regular pace - still higher than any other edition, including 2014 5e (except maybe at its peak near Christmas time, or something like that, but we'll see how 2024 books do near then...)
