D&D 5E 3 Years Later: D&D's total Domination on Amazon (and Earth in General)

[Jester David]

That, and when WoTC bought TSR, D&D and Magic no longer were competitive against each other. WoTC could take an approach of trying to make them complimentary. With Magic being hugely popular (based on a core idea of "builds*"), I don't think it's coincidence at all that WotC's version of D&D placed a huge emphasis on "builds" as well. D&D became much like Magic: Take a theme, then select which powers/abilities (feats/cards) you wanted to have the most effective build. And it was a good business decision. Magic was super popular, and 3e had a resurgence and brought back players who liked that style of play. The fact that the whole goth phase of the 90s winding down (and thus bringing down WW sales) certainly helped as well.

*Taking parts from here or there to combine them in the most effective manner to accomplish a theme

In one of the recent Dragon Talk podcasts, Stan! discussed some of his experiences with late era TSR (Dragon Dice and Dragonlance Saga Edition) and it does sound pretty bad...

 

[LordEntrails]

Well, remember fantasy gaming has non-rpg products. There was a Zelda tie in book that hung around in there for a long time, and sexy truth or dare shows up around Valentines day. ...

Maybe you don't play that as an RPG, but maybe I do!

 

[Tony Vargas]

I think there are a lot of misconceptions about the rise and fall of particular editions.

True, and they have a lot more to do with business, marketing, and human nature than what was between the covers of the books.

The original game was dropped into the niche wargaming hobby, but also took off with some college kids, it made enough money, as a garage business, to fund printing one serious hard-back book in only three years (MM '77), and another each year after (PH 78, DMG 79). In the 80s, the game was accused of Satanism, as were a lot of things, (there was a whole minor later-day Salem thing going down in the 80s), and, like Heavy Metal, D&D benefited from that accusation with a flood of interest in the game from rebellious teenagers and shot to full-on fad status. It was also, as with so many meteoric phenoms, deftly 'stolen' from it's creator (or stolen from the usurper who stole it from Arneson, if you prefer that narrative).

That led to a new edition, that wasn't very new at all in a rules sense, and a new strategy of fiction-series tie-ins and floods of setting supplements that cashed in reasonable well on RPG trends in the 90s, except...

...CCGs happened, and the RPG hobby was all but killed off. TSR tried to make it up on novels and jump on the CCG hobby bandwagon, failed, and died.

So far, all of that had zero to do with the merits of the system (which was, even by the standards of it's contemporaries, to put it politely, 'lagging the industry').

CCGs fly higher, burn brighter and don't crash as hard as D&D did, but they still level off and, with much irony, the company that touched off the CCG craze white-knights the company that touched off the D&D craze, and with enthusiasm and accidental brilliance that only a fan could muster, makes D&D open source.

Even if that had flopped, it made D&D - at least, the d20 iteration of it - immortal. Again, that says nothing about the merits of d20 as a TTRPG system, the mere association with D&D, with the success/money of WotC, and being open-source make it a phenomenon that revives the tiny industry. ('Being open source' though is arguably 'something to do with the system,' so I'll conceded that nit.)

It was also a pretty mixed business move. Especially when WotC was acquired by Hasbro who had very, very different ideas about intellectual property, what constituted a 'core brand,' and how to flog revenue out of a niche product. So, Hasbro rolled 3.5 because, demonstrably, core-3 books sold better, so sell some more. But, at least it rolled a revised SRD to go with it, so the 3pps went along.

Not satisfied with sharing D&D's paltry revenue, however theoretically, with 3PPs, and with revenues never even flirting with what Hasbro considered 'core brand' worthy, WotC launched a desperate gamble, a new edition that'd sell on-line subscriptions to rival MMO income streams. They got a pile of money and a short time to make that happen. Oh, yeah, and kill the OGL and destroy our 3pp erstwhile partners while you're at it.

Shockingly, that plan didn't go well. The new RPG didn't sell at multiples of the entire industries revenue into the teeth of the worst recession since the great depression, and it's vaporware tools didn't bring in MMO-like revenue. To top it off, 3pps didn't swallow the GSL poison pill, and fans still had the immortal open-source d20 game to rally around. And, 'rally,' is putting it very politely.

D&D might have been doomed, but WotC comes up with another gamble, and this one's a lot safer. Consolidate the brand and stabilize it's image by hearkening to it's heyday. Cut production costs to virtually nothing and slow production schedules to a crawl (and even outsource said production after the core 3). Anything beyond recouping printing costs under that model is wild success.

The edition launches just as a boardgame renaissance is taking off, and succeeds, wildly. (Though RPGs still don't rival boardgames, which don't rival CCGs, which don't rival MMOs, which is a layer-cake of irony, considering how closely-related the wargames D&D came out of were to boardgames, and that CCGs and, especially, MMOs both owe a huge debt to the D&D they ripped off.)

None of the above has anything to do with dying from an overabundance of material.

The failure of TSR did, but it was an over-abundance (relative to what the market would bear) of novels, spellfire cards, and dragon dice - especially novels, because the publishing business was unforgiving of over-production.

The failure of subsequent editions also mapped to an overabundance of material, even if it wasn't necessarily the cause of those failures.

And, while the actual design of the game mattered virtually nothing to all of the above, 'bloat' also maps to a design issue that D&D has always suffered from. D&D, with it's lists of classes, spells, races, weapons, magic item, and eventually skills & feats, expands player options by building on those lists. You want to keep the game interesting, you want to desperately try to appeal to an even slightly broader audience than the same geeks who have been playing since the 80s, you need to put out more material, there's just no other way to build on the system, because of that basic nature of its design.
But, when you do that, you degrade the system, complexity grows geometrically, new material eclipses old instead of supplementing, unintended synergies open up broken combos that obviate great swaths of alternatives, and the game just gets demonstrably worse - and, again ironically - presents /less/ real choice and appeal than it did before it was expanded to add choices and broaden appeal.

That's all true, and it's a game-design reason to roll rev, but it's not the story behind the 'failure' of each past edition, especially the most dramatic ones. Those are stories of business & market factors.


But, we're hobbyists deeply familiar with the arc of those systems (and often deeply invested in one of them), so we prefer the 'bloat' narrative, anyway. We think of the complexity of peak 3.5 and figure 5e is 'simpler' so it succeeded, but bloat may still kill it. But D&D has never been simple (nor is 5e the simplest system of the lot, it's just not being built on much), and never been killed by the bloat, itself, because the system, itself, has never been a significant factor in its success or failure.

 

[Arilyn]

In response to Tony, yes, you are right about bringing out too much world stuff. It ties into TSR flailing around. Lorraine Williams even wanted to add needle work craft kits, leaving me with an image of geeks, hiding out in parents' basements, crouched over their Dragon themed embroidery!

And being owned by Hasbro can't be a good thing, in my mind. There's always the danger, Hasbro might decide to handle Magic themselves and place both Magic and DnD directly under Hasbro. I don't think it's inevitable, and I don't think there is any current danger, just a worrying possibity.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Lorraine Williams even wanted to add needle work craft kits, leaving me with an image of geeks, hiding out in parents' basements, crouched over their Dragon themed embroidery!

Counted cross-stitch*, most likely.
Well, D&D was to be found in 'hobby shops,' and those could also cater to arts & crafts. Also, there was D&D/SCA crossover, and the SCA wasn't all rattan-induced concussions, it also had a streak of costuming and crafts, including needlepoint.
So, if they'd been released, I could imagine the very occasional** girlfriend cross-stitching a dragon at the table, to combat the boredom of D&D.













* why, yes, I have been married a long time, how did you know?

** this would've been before the 'girl gamer' phenomenon.

 

[neq.the.glockenspiel]

Like book stores, games stores need to do some very fast catching up to stay afloat with the Grey Goo trying to digest them. They have options though, they're just hard to see when you're slogging away in the trenches trying to turn a buck. If fans would unite they could save a bunch of FLGS but... herding cats...?


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[neq.the.glockenspiel]

In response to Tony, yes, you are right about bringing out too much world stuff. It ties into TSR flailing around. Lorraine Williams even wanted to add needle work craft kits, leaving me with an image of geeks, hiding out in parents' basements, crouched over their Dragon themed embroidery!

And being owned by Hasbro can't be a good thing, in my mind. There's always the danger, Hasbro might decide to handle Magic themselves and place both Magic and DnD directly under Hasbro. I don't think it's inevitable, and I don't think there is any current danger, just a worrying possibity.

The latest development "Hascon" doesn't exactly fill you with confidence that Hasbro gets fan culture...!


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[Shasarak]

I have always heard that 3E>2E.

Is it because the Amazon sales numbers for 2e are so poor?

 

[Zardnaar]

I've always heard 3e outsold 2e...


Where did you get that number?
That's far larger than the reported revenue in the 1980s during the D&D boom.


We know that pretty much this time last years, the 5e PHB sales (after 2 years) were greater than the total lifetime sales of 3.0, 3.5, and 4e. And since then, the PHB has sold at *least* 120,000 copies on Amazon alone.

So, it's very likely 5e has outsold the PHB sales of 2nd Edition after just three years opposed to it's 11 years (uncertain if that's just the original printing on the combined original and black border revisions).

Again, 2-3 years of sales like this (just maintaining, and no surges or spikes of interest) and 5e passes 1e.

Except that number is a complete guess.

I'm not disputing that 5E is doing well, or even very well but if you look at Mearls language for exmaple we do not know what criteria he is using.

Saying for example 5E is going better than 3E dodesn't tell us much he might be talking about profit margins for example and I suspect 5E is doing very well there.

I suspect that D&D is also selling a disproportionate amount of books on Amazon due to price and lack of FLGS. I think there were several thousand in the 90's, a couple of thousand during 3E and perhaps 500-800 now in the USA so basic logic would dictate Amazon is probably the biggest source of D&D books. Our group for example bought all our books online (Amazon+Bookdepository).

Another thing is if Mearls claims 5E is outselling 3E it could also be in relation to 3.5 (which did not sell as well as 3.0) or even references the lifecycle. At this point in time in 2003 for example 3.0 was winding down or outright dead and we know that 3.0 was heavily front loaded in its lifetime sales so outselling 3.0 would not be to hard either.

I'm more or less convinced 5E has been a smash hit and it has high profit margins and is doing well and has sold hundreds of thousands of books. I'm not convinced it has outsold the life time sales of 3E and 2E and sooner or later its sales will plateau (everyone who wants a PHB has one). That is when they will probably do a splat book or setting per year, rerelease the PHB with errata+ new art or start on 6E.

Outselling 3.5, Pathfinder and 4E should not be very hard with any moderately successful D&D edition the only one that has not is OD&D. 5E is the 1st D&D since the golden age to outsell the previous edition although even Pathfinder pulled that off.

There are various sales estimates out there (Dancey, Mona, Gygax etc). Generally they agree on the following.

1E outsold 2E 2-1 (750k vs 1.5 million matches this)
3.0 sold heavily in the 1st month
No one knows exactly how many AD&D and BECMI sold (estimates of 1 million to 1.5 million), TSR records were very bad.
D&D peaked year was 1983, virtually bankrupt in 1985 (sales dipped 30% in 84, TSR guessed wrong and expanded instead)

I generally go with the low figures (3.0 500k, 3.5 250-350 Erik Mona vs 1 million Dancey).

No one knows exactly what 5E or 4E has sold, the 4E estimates are often around half the Pathfinder sales (250k 2014 Mona) and they pulled that edition fairly quickly more or less going out of print between 2010-2012. 3E estimates sometimes do not differ from 3.0/3.5.

 

[Zardnaar]

Is it because the Amazon sales numbers for 2e are so poor?

It was a narrative pushed at the time but since then some 2E sales numbers have come out and 2E did sell half of what 1E sold (apparently).

Half of 1E slaes figures still gets youinto 3rd place although 3.0+3.5 combined outsold it.

3.0 sold faster in tis 1st month than 2E 1st year though. 2E was in print for 11 years, 3.0 less than 3 years. WotC got greedy and spammed out another set of core books and 5 years after that another set (they also did 3 sets of Star Wars RPG in 7 years).

TSR novels were also making more than the RPG apparently and that feeds back into TSRs high revenue figures. The bubble had burst on the 2E profitability (1/3rd of 2E lifetime sales were in 1st year). You can make money via bloat (3E and Paizo) but TSR had deeper problems like selling product at a loss and ordering 1 million sets of Dragondice (selling 70k).

Spamming material out you make less per unit than fewer products (unless that spammed product sells like gangbusters, compared to core book sales it usually doesn't).

Some of the OSR editions have adventures that have sold more than lifetime sales of D&D editions and not just the lower selling ones. Thats how the adventures don't sell myth started as TSR was not really focusing on them as they died and 2E adventures outside a few of them and Dungeon magazine were not very good and/or limited to a setting.

Some figures that are somewhat reliable gleaned from old TSR court cases.

https://www.acaeum.com/library/printrun.html

Amazon was barely a thing during 2E and it came out towards the end of TSR and missed the peak 2E years.