D&D 5E Amazon US book sales rank.

[Zardnaar]

I know people complain about current management at WotC (sometimes with justification, sometimes not) but I think it was pretty obvious that 4E was shoved out the door far too quickly. It had some good ideas, but it was obvious that the people working on it simply weren't given the time they needed. Still not sure it would have been the right direction for me, but you can't please everyone. At the same time I will always wonder what could have been if it had been given more time for review and development.

Ah well, water under the bridge and all that. I'm sure most people who have done development on new products will always have that project that they weren't given enough time to get it right at one point or another.

4E whiff for me buy I liked Star Wars Saga. Wonder if a more 3.75 leaning towards that version more would have gone.

 

[darjr]

View attachment 380677

It’s only officially been out for a week, but according to Wizards of the Coast, the new Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook has already surpassed Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything to become the fastest selling D&D book ever—in the entire 50-year history of the game. It has sold three times as many copies as the 2014 version of the books did at launch.

Not only that, the 2024 Player’s Handbook was the biggest print run in D&D’s history.

In a press release today, WotC claims more than 85 million D&D fans worldwide, and says that D&D Beyond, the game’s official online platform, has over 13 million users.

View attachment 380678

 

[bedir than]

Free adventure released today to the general public after launching weeks ago as a convention and FLGS exclusive.

https://www.dndbeyond.com/claim/source/uni-and-the-hunt-for-the-lost-horn

 

[darjr]

Free adventure released today to the general public after launching weeks ago as a convention and FLGS exclusive.

https://www.dndbeyond.com/claim/source/uni-and-the-hunt-for-the-lost-horn

Finally!

Yea!

 

[mearls]

Looking at what I put together, then reading the WotC press release that Darjr quoted, a few things:

• You can be confident that the press release is accurate. They can write stuff to cast things in a good light, but they can't blatantly lie about things.
• A few folks asked about D&D Beyond, and I think this is part of it. Clearly they're doing well there.
• I also think this points to strength in core hobby and game stores. That's an area where it is hard to get good data, and they must be doing well there to move so many books.

The really good news is that we're seeing a successful launch without relying on Amazon or other big chain discounts. That's great news for the overall hobby. It means that people are willing to pay full, or near full, price for books.

 

[bedir than]

Some new monster design in there

 

[Zardnaar]

Looking at what I put together, then reading the WotC press release that Darjr quoted, a few things:

• You can be confident that the press release is accurate. They can write stuff to cast things in a good light, but they can't blatantly lie about things.
• A few folks asked about D&D Beyond, and I think this is part of it. Clearly they're doing well there.
• I also think this points to strength in core hobby and game stores. That's an area where it is hard to get good data, and they must be doing well there to move so many books.

The really good news is that we're seeing a successful launch without relying on Amazon or other big chain discounts. That's great news for the overall hobby. It means that people are willing to pay full, or near full, price for books.

It's spin but I don't think they're lying either. Eg they don't say active users and the markets a lot bigger now than 2014.

It's basically what one would expect anyway.

 

[mamba]

A look at 13th Age offers a pretty good idea of what more time might have produced, even with much less money, a smaller staff, and no D&D brand recognition behind it. Since one of the criticisms of 4e was that it wasn't really D&D, that last element might even have been for the best.

I assume they would have landed on something close to 4e Essentials, I don’t think it would have fared much better than 4e did however

 

[SlyFlourish]

It's in there!

Each level 3 "You get a subclass" feature ends with:

That's quite an elegant solve, IMO. I can use any 2014 subclass by just back collecting any features I may have missed. At a quick glance, it looks like the math works out.

The only issue I see is that when making content, it's easier to build for 2014 and let this rule solve for 2024. I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to handle in my work, but in my eyes this is the kind of thing that supports backward compatibility.

Wow that’s subtle but it sure is!

 

[see]

Well, the PHB debuted on the USA Today Bestseller List at #57.

That's lower, IIRC, than some previous 5th edition releases.

On the other hand, it had a lot of non-bookstore sales before its general release date, it had the D&D Beyond bundle sales, there's the question as to what exactly is going on with the Amazon numbers, and this is a post-Random House release while I believe the higher ones did have Random House releases (which I expect had more slaes show up on USA Today data sources).

EDIT: And there's the fact that D&D books released after the USA Today booklist hiatus tended to rank lower, which may have meant a methodology change that affected how many D&D sales were seen relative to other methods. (Fizban's debuted at #6 and Spelljammer at #13 before the hiatus, while Planescape was the first to make it after and was at #129, for example).