AD&D Settings Sales Comparison 79-98

I know there have been a lot of these threads, and I'm holding off on any kind of overarching summary/compilation article until they're all in, but this one in particular jumped out at me. Again, this is from Ben Riggs, author of Slaying the Dragon, a history of TSR-era D&D, going out next month.

Slaying the Dragon - Macmillan

The secret and untold story of how TSR, the company that created Dungeons & Dragons, was driven into ruin by disastrous management decisions, then ...

read.macmillan.com

This graph shows a number of legacy settings and the total sales of their core setting product. Forgotten Realms is, of course, the top one. Interestingly, the other two settings that WotC has revisited in 5E -- Ravenloft and Spelljammer -- are near the bottom of the chart.

Ben says he will be providing the remaining settings tomorrow, and I'll update this post with those when he does.

1. Forgotten Realms
2. Greyhawk
3. Dragonlance
4. Ravenloft
5. Dark Sun
6. Spelljammer

 

[Jer]

The problem I have with this chart is some of those settings were in the market far longer than some of the others. I don't see how you can cmpare Forgotten Realms to Ravenloft or Dark Sun when it has almost a decade of extra sales.

Go back to the other posts and look at the sales over time charts for that info. It doesn't really make the comparisons any better though - most of the sales on these settings happen in their first year of sale and then they flatline, so even if you cut out the sales after a certain number of years the broad comparison will remain.

Arguably the one setting really getting dinged in the bar chart is Greyhawk, because nobody has the numbers for the original Greyhawk Folio and given when it was published it's possible that it did very well in sales because everything D&D was doing well in sales in those years.

 

[Parmandur]

If you aren't getting new players into the game and you're losing older players, your new settings aren't going to have an audience no matter how good they are.

The graphs on the core book sales strongly suggest that the number of new players coming into the game was diminishing pretty badly from the late 80s on. We don't have any real way from these numbers to see how quickly older players were leaving the game, but the numbers do at least support a hypothesis that the game was shedding actively purchasing players faster than it was gaining new ones.

Yes, the correspondence is there: but which caused which, the declining sales or the product release strategy?

WotC bet that it was the product management, and that seems to have been a good bet.

 

[harbison32]

Please remember you have to take into account the years all of these settings came out when comparing them to each other. Greyhawk was pretty much the original setting (1980), Dragonlance (1984, I believe), Forgotten Realms (1987), Spelljammer (1989), Ravenloft (1990, when it got the full treatment), Dark Sun (1991). The "big 3" on the chart all have had the longest run so of course they have sold the most, and they're kind of typical fantasy. The other 3 are kind of niche, but Ravenloft would be the more fantasy adjacent than Dark Sun and Spelljammer.

 

[Jer]

WotC bet that it was the product management, and that seems to have been a good bet.

The confounding factor in all of this is just plain overall bad corporate management on TSR's side. It's possible that any approach they took to shepherd the game would have failed because they just weren't as good at the business as Wizards was and were getting by on brand recognition and being the 800-lb gorilla in the room.

We haven't seen the same sales numbers from Wizards on their 3e rollout and products over time, but they seem to have struggled with the same problem that TSR did - high initial sales falling to a narrow tail over a shorter time than you'd want to see. I'd really want to see if that initial sales spike for 3e was higher and the tail fatter for the core books after Wizards did the 3e roll out - they were consciously doing things to try to build the player base and bring people back into buying D&D products who had wandered off through the 90s, but also 3.5 and 4e both came in a fairly rapid succession, which suggests that their approach was still having issues. And they at least seemed to actually recognize the problem and tried different strategies to combat it. TSR just seems to have done the same things over and over again with diminishing results each time.

 

[Dungeonosophy]

Aw, left Mystara out.

I realize that the chart is labeled “AD&D settings”, but the setting is main theme of this chart, not which iteration of xD&D the setting used.

The total of the B/X, BECMI, and Rules Cylopedia core box/book sales, plus the Hollow World boxed set, Champions of Mystara box, plus the AD&D 2e core boxes (Karameikos, Glantri, and Red Steel) ought to be included as a single “Mystara” bar on the graph.

 

[dinsdale]

The other factor that is worth considering is sales/release. I admittedly haven't looked back the information on the actual number of releases (though when has a lack of knowledge prevented someone from opining on the internet), but if, for example, Forgotten Realms had three core releases in that timeframe but Dragonlance only one, then this could alter the potential interpretations of the data.

 

[Haiku Elvis]

Which came first: the chicken, or the egg...?

Technically dinosaurs but who's counting?

On a more relevant note. Does anyone know if the novels are going to be included anywhere in one of these charts? I had more forgotten realms game materials than Dragonlance but I had a whole lot of Dragonlance novels.
A. Whole. Lot.

 

[Mannahnin]

Aw, left Mystara out.

I realize that the chart is labeled “AD&D settings”, but the setting is main theme of this chart, not which iteration of xD&D the setting used.

The total of the B/X, BECMI, and Rules Cylopedia core box/book sales, plus the Hollow World boxed set, Champions of Mystara box, plus the AD&D 2e core boxes (Karameikos, Glantri, and Red Steel) ought to be included as a single “Mystara” bar on the graph.

Including the core boxes/books would be too apples to oranges, I think. Those are primarily rules sets, even though Expert gave the basic intro to The Known World, which became Mystara.

I could certainly see putting Champions of Mystara, Karameikos, Glantri, and Red Steel on a Mystara graph. Hollow World I think is a bit of a stretch because it's really a distinct campaign setting on the same planet, isn't it? Maztica was broken out separately from Forgotten Realms.

 

[Stormonu]

The problem I have with this chart is some of those settings were in the market far longer than some of the others. I don't see how you can cmpare Forgotten Realms to Ravenloft or Dark Sun when it has almost a decade of extra sales.

Well, he's also put out the sales at time of release. Just compare, say FR's first year release sales to Ravenloft's first year.

 

[darjr]

Mystara numbers are coming. And the core books already have been.