That is the year of release, not the year sales are being measured.Actually surprised the PHB hasn't been number 1 every year.
There are no "player options" books: literally every book with player options has multiple tines more DM information...which makes sense, since WotC has said that DMs do most of the buying, either individually or corporately for the table.Player's option books are king, followed by monster books. Not really a surprise there
Again, live sales, but also consider: Magic is a very game store centric community (even though most people who play have never been to a game store), so the hardcore Maguc fans would buy where they get their cards...not Amazon, for the dedicated fans.The MTG settings are actually the worst sellers in each year (excepting 2021, where Strixhaven beat out Ravenloft). I would have thought crossover sales would have done more for them.
But the thing is, they didn't hit their numbers: 3E, 3.5, 4E and Essentials all crashed and burned within a few years. The 5E product strategy was explicitly designed around trying to do the opposite of what had failed... and here we are 8 years later, with Rise of Tiamat still in print.The 3e sales strategy was pretty much built around that, as was 4e - cranking out a new player option or monster book every month was the way you hit the target numbers and kept everything going (and since there were more players than DMs, more player option books than DM tools was also the way you hit those numbers).
Heck, not just 5 years old, but reprinting material from the 70's.TftYP is
#1,484 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#15 in Dungeons & Dragons Game
#21 in Puzzles & Games
Which in the olden days, would have been considered amazing for an adventure released 5 years ago.
Wait?! Really? Wow!Heck, not just 5 years old, but reprinting material from the 70's.
The 70's.
Hoard of the Dragin Queen will have been in print longer than 3E and 3.5 combined in a couple months.
The 3E PHB was published August 10, 2000, while the 4E PHB was published December 5, 2008. That's 8 years and 4 months.Wait?! Really? Wow!
The 3E PHB was published August 10, 2000, while the 4E PHB was published December 5, 2008. That's 8 years and 4 months.
Well, not out of malice or anything: that's the gobsmacking thing: absolutely no 3E book had as good a run as Hoard of the Dragon Queen, one of the lesst of the 5E books by most measures. Indeed, Tales of the Yawning Portal and every book from 5E that is older than that has outdone every 3x book, including Core!And this is conveniently ignoring 3.5...