Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zardnaar" data-source="post: 7338279" data-attributes="member: 6716779">Its more or less what I am talking about lol. WTF is Klooge, Myspace and Friendstar are basically gone. Amazon was barely making a profit back then, IIRC 2004 was the 1st year they actually made money.  NZers do not use Ebay that much due to postage costs especially for books, it used to be cheap circa 2004 or so when you could buy books for a $1 or $2 and post them for $8. Now its more like $20.  I do buy some stuff off Amazon (1st time in 2004) especially when they do a free postage deal (which they have not done for years AFAIK), but there are other sites to get RPG books from. If I lived in America I wold buy a lot more of Amazon (paperbacks $8 here they are $25 (17 USD approx).  Amazon now is a lot bigger though. Imagine if it existed in 1981-83 and the golden age books could be purchased for half price (in an era with 90 million less Americans).  The main point is still that Americans and posters on sites in particular forget that they are in the minority. Most people do not post in online forums, most people do not use VTT and in 2004 that % would have been even smaller. Let alone 2000. I mean what part of the following statement is untrue. 5E D&D is the 1st edition of D&D where a popular edition, social media, online gaming/shopping have converged for the 1st time. 4E is the only other edition you could really make that comparison to IMHO but the problems there were how unpopular the edition was. 3.5 was not that popular either, 3.0 was but that was 18 years ago when a lot of things were in their infancy or did not exist.  NZ has been behind in some ways ahead in others as companies often use us as a test market (not for D&D). For example we had electronic debit type cards late 80's and were very common by the mid 90's.  Hardcore gamers on PC were online gaming 1995 for the ultra hard core I suppose but for the masses it was more 2006 onwards with things like consoles connecting to TVs (PS3/Xbox 360) before it came a family thing from 2002 it was a hardcore thing with the Xbox. I was streaming things back in 2004 or so most people were not and it did not really become a thing for the majority until Netflix rolled around.  Hell it was around 10 years ago VTTs even started to be talked about on forums in any serious way and most of the D&D playerbase is not active on forums (I doubt 1% are). 5E doing well on Amazon? I'm fairly convinced that in America most D&D books are probably sold on Amazon. Hell I have bought them myself and paid the $20 postage and its still cheaper than getting them here in some cases. I also would not get to excited though as the Amazon rankings are actually indicating that D&D sales are falling with the exception of the PHB. Its not doom and gloom of course just once you get outside the launch window of a product sales go down.</blockquote>

Verification