Acquisitions Inc. switching to Daggerheart

[Kichwas]

Poor sales beget poor sales.

Yeah.

If a book isn't selling, people might avoid being the one to jump in and buy it if they're worried about the ability to find a table to play at.

It doesn't take much for a game to just vanish from playability.
You need active discussion, you need good resources for people to find GMs and players, you need good online tools. And you need a perception that these things are all ready to go to get people to buy books. And if books stop being bought; the perception dries up.

If you're a GM with 'captive players' you might go pick up the bottom ranked item on DriveThruRPG. But if you're only a player you're probably wondering if you can ever get to play a game before you go buy it.

Two of the smarter moves Darrington made were
1) getting a very active presence on Startplaying and
2) getting a lot of other Actual Plays to run sessions of it.

Three of their worst moves were
1) not having official Foundry support (there is a third party kit now, but due to the license those guys are not allowed to put in the Void content which is now almost half of the character creation content),
2) Not using Daggerheart for their own CR main campaign. Doing instead a 'West Marches game' which is a format Daggerheart does poorly at, thereby needing to use D&D - that helps CR, but hurts Daggerheart.
3) Then running their own one-shot with a massive cast showing just how badly Daggerheart does with large groups. Note that this is not an uncommon problem. Pathfinder 2E breaks down even harder than Daggerheart does - and they've dodged that by very strongly recommending people stick to 4 players. D&D breaks down too - but gets a pass due to being the 'legacy contender'. But Daggerheart is new - so showing where it fails early on was unwise.

 

[MacDhomnuill]

Poor sales beget poor sales.

Sales don’t appear to be poor though, all available data says its selling very well. And there is still demand outstripping production several months after its release and a large kickstarter. Demand is high enough that instead of waiting for the boxes and card cases for the core set to be produced/shipped Darrington is selling the core set without them in order to keep up with demand. I this if they published sales numbers it would encourage more 3rd party publishers to support Dagger heart, at least darrington isn’t having Amazon hide its sales ranks like WOTC is with D&D 2024.

 

[MacDhomnuill]

Any market information is potentially beneficial proprietary information: know what products sell can be an edge over competitors in developing selling more new products.

Game companies are trying to make money, not advance the general knowledge of humankind.

I think in this situation, concealing sales of their core product are just slowing down third-party publishers from supporting it. It feels like Daggerheart is popular. It feels like it is selling a lot. The numbers from the places we can get them like Amazon and drive-through look really good but if they don’t ever come out and say we’ve sold 20,000 or what ever books third-party publishers are still gonna be hesitant to jump in and start publishing things for it.

 

[Reynard]

Sales don’t appear to be poor though, all available data says its selling very well. And there is still demand outstripping production several months after its release and a large kickstarter. Demand is high enough that instead of waiting for the boxes and card cases for the core set to be produced/shipped Darrington is selling the core set without them in order to keep up with demand. I this if they published sales numbers it would encourage more 3rd party publishers to support Dagger heart, at least darrington isn’t having Amazon hide its sales ranks like WOTC is with D&D 2024.

I was just answering your actual question, not saying anything about DH. It is possible that publishing good sales data would promote 3rd party support for DH, but given what we have seen as far as partnerships go, Darrington seems to want to have relationships with its 3rd party support network. The DH license is really aimed at fan and semi-pro support.

 

[Agamon]

I think in this situation, concealing sales of their core product are just slowing down third-party publishers from supporting it. It feels like Daggerheart is popular. It feels like it is selling a lot. The numbers from the places we can get them like Amazon and drive-through look really good but if they don’t ever come out and say we’ve sold 20,000 or what ever books third-party publishers are still gonna be hesitant to jump in and start publishing things for it.

Concealing?? This sounds like they are willfully hiding it. How many copies of PF2 have sold? Tales of the Valiant? Warhammer 4e? Cyberpunk Red?

These figures are not shared publicly. They've said it's selling well, that's all we're going to get.

 

[MacDhomnuill]

Concealing?? This sounds like they are willfully hiding it. How many copies of PF2 have sold? Tales of the Valiant? Warhammer 4e? Cyberpunk Red?

These figures are not shared publicly. They've said it's selling well, that's all we're going to get.

WOTC removing their products from amazon sales data is hiding it, Darrington is just not saying anything which hurts the newcomer to the market

 

[Ashilyn]

WOTC removing their products from amazon sales data is hiding it, Darrington is just not saying anything which hurts the newcomer to the market

I don't know that I'd say they're "hiding" it so much as going back to industry norms. That also doesn't preclude the fact that 2024 may be selling well. Particularly in today's reactionary environment, if it's selling less than 2014 did - which is a given given the perception that it's still 5E and 5E is a 10 year old game - I don't know that I'd share sales data either, since most people aren't going to notice it's missing and putting it out there will lead to a parade of overblown discourse that isn't actually all that true. That doesn't mean it's selling poorly though. Just not to the incredible metric it will inevitably be held against.

Make no mistake, I'm not a fan of WotC or 5E, but it's really not that surprising that they took this move, and it's not really "hiding" or anything as malicious as implied.

 

[Agamon]

WOTC removing their products from amazon sales data is hiding it, Darrington is just not saying anything which hurts the newcomer to the market

If it hurts them, it hurts every single other RPG that runs things the same way, I guess. But I don't run an ttrpg business, so I'm not going to assume I know better.

 

[Parmandur]

I think in this situation, concealing sales of their core product are just slowing down third-party publishers from supporting it. It feels like Daggerheart is popular. It feels like it is selling a lot. The numbers from the places we can get them like Amazon and drive-through look really good but if they don’t ever come out and say we’ve sold 20,000 or what ever books third-party publishers are still gonna be hesitant to jump in and start publishing things for it.

Their license is potentially slowing down third party adoption: any questions of the rukeset or popularity aside, I would be reluctant as a business to invest in developing for a license that can and has been changed like the Daggerheart one.

But keeping proprietary information proprietary is not unusual or hurting then: that's why companies keep thwt information close to their chest, it is valuable if you don't share it. SJG is an unusual outlier.

 

[Parmandur]

I don't know that I'd say they're "hiding" it so much as going back to industry norms. That also doesn't preclude the fact that 2024 may be selling well. Particularly in today's reactionary environment, if it's selling less than 2014 did - which is a given given the perception that it's still 5E and 5E is a 10 year old game - I don't know that I'd share sales data either, since most people aren't going to notice it's missing and putting it out there will lead to a parade of overblown discourse that isn't actually all that true. That doesn't mean it's selling poorly though. Just not to the incredible metric it will inevitably be held against.

Make no mistake, I'm not a fan of WotC or 5E, but it's really not that surprising that they took this move, and it's not really "hiding" or anything as malicious as implied.

The Amazon thing seems less like an effort to hide anything, and more of an effect of the measures Hasbro took to prevent Amazon underselling MSRP.