D&D 5E (2014) Amazon US book sales rank.

darjr · Jul 29, 2022

Well if it is, no wonder they thought a movie was a good idea to spend money on!

Parmandur · Jul 29, 2022

Hussar said:
Wow. Considering that the phb has consistently hovered in the 50 range, that would put lifetime phb Amazon sales at 1.8 million copies. And that’s only Amazon US.

Holy crap.

Yup.

vecna00 · Jul 29, 2022

If those numbers are even close to accurate, just holy crap!

Parmandur · Jul 29, 2022

vecna00 said:
If those numbers are even close to accurate, just holy crap!

It's relatively less crazy when you consider that D&D Beyond has 10 million active users right now.

abirdcall · Jul 29, 2022

FitzTheRuke said:
The main difference between 5e and all the others, AFAICT, is that all the rest of them, no matter how high they started, plummeted around year four (give or take) and then trickled until their ultimate end. 5e was still RAISING by 2018. This is why it's totals, no matter how much the market may have been smaller at the start (I don't know about that, but I believe it was smaller than the initial market for 1e, at least) it just keeps on going and going.

I know that as a retailer, in 2e, 3.5, and 4e, by this time, I was lucky to turn over a single copy of any of the core books in a month. New splat books would sometimes only turn over one or two copies in their lifetime. 5e still sells dozens (or more) of every book released, and we still sell core books multiple times a week! AND that's with all the other ways of getting the books competing with us (which never used to be quite the case!)

Every year since release the rate of sales has increased, sometimes in leaps and bounds.

That can't last forever of course but even if it evens out or even declines it will still be doing very well like you said.

abirdcall · Jul 29, 2022

Parmandur said:
No, thst sounds about right.

Yep. The last numbers we have gotten is that the game has over 50 million active players and we know that the rate of sales has continued to increase since then.

That is just on Amazon too.