Hussar
Legend
Right and that’s someone resigning. When is the last time WotC laid off staff?
D&D 5E Are D&D sales declining? Teos Abadia takes a look.
Right and that’s someone resigning. When is the last time WotC laid off staff?
Parmandur
Book-Friend
They haven't done layoffs in the 5E era, since a few people from the core books in 2014. A couple resignations or moving to a different industry.
Parmandur
Book-Friend
And I mean, Twos acknowledged that pretty explicitly his articles, but it makes sense to see that acknowledged.
darjr
I crit!
I have to say though that Teos was talking about it relative to the other books. Not that nobody was playing or it’s sales were poor.
Parmandur
Book-Friend
True, but I can see the sorts of potential blomdapots that Winninger alides to here: Beyond was a much more mature and accepted platform for buying books in 2021 than it was in 2018 or 2019, for instance.
And "relatively worse" might mean only wildly beating targets instead if astronomically trouncing them?
Oofta
Legend
The only people that actually know how well it sold across all distribution methods is WOTC. If they said it sold well I have no reason to disbelieve them.
Alphastream
Adventurer
For sure. It's hard to keep in mind the many many considerations this topic carries. The sales of VR are awesome compared to most historical sourcebook/setting sales, especially for that type of product.
I wish Ray could share what he knows about the holes in the data. We all know there are holes... but can those holes be characterized?
Some possibilities (assuming Ray is really saying that the BookScan data isn't indicative or relative Van Richten's sales, which may or may not be what he is saying):
1) D&D Beyond is huge. Maybe DDB has huge sales for something like VR, dwarfing paper sales... the latest Hasbro Q3 earnings has enough information to strongly suggest DDB sales are not showing huge growth (As we discuss in this Wednesday's episode of Mastering Dungeons) and maybe maybe that they also aren't enormous compared to other sales types. But it is really hard to tell.
2) Bookscan is Weird. Maybe Bookscan wildly diverges from other sales sources for some products. Like, maybe VR sold tremendously well at FLGSs. Maybe there isn't a good correlation between BookScan and other sources. But it would be pretty surprising for that to be the case.
3) Maybe the BookScan % is way off. Maybe BookScan is a far smaller piece of the pie, and the other pieces are big enough that what sells well on BookScan just isn't that huge a factor. VR might have done poorly via those distributions but that is dwarfed by how it did at stores and other places. This is perhaps the one I see most possible, but the little data we do have shows BookScan being fairly significant. If we could get more data, such as D&D announcing the number of a product sold in a particular time period from all sources, then we could get someone with BookScan to check and find that percentage.
There may be other possibilities, but I am not sure what they would be.
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Parmandur
Book-Friend
The two big factors between Van Richtens, for an example, and aome earlier books: Beyond was new and not widely adopted in 2018, and a lot earlier 5E books did not have a FLGS distinct cover (considering how we Doomed from 1 special cover a uear to like 4, shows they must sellsell indeed).
Epic Meepo
Adventurer
I'm surprised you're the first person to mention inflation. I know I can't afford as many books as I'd like these days.
