Basic D&D Was Selling 600,000+/Year At One Point

Recently Ben Riggs shared some sales figures of AD&D 1st Edition. Now he has shared figures for Basic D&D from 1979-1995, and during the early 80s is was selling 500-700K copies per year.

Ben Riggs' book, Slaying the Dragon, which is a history of TSR-era D&D, comes out soon, and you can pre-order your copy now.

Slaying the Dragon - Macmillan

The secret and untold story of how TSR, the company that created Dungeons & Dragons, was driven into ruin by disastrous management decisions, then ...

read.macmillan.com

You can compare these figures to those of AD&D 1E in the same period. Basic D&D sold higher than AD&D's PHB and DMG combined for 4 years running, again in the early 80s.

If you take a look at the overall sales from 1979-1995, here are the two beside each other (again, this is just PHB and DMG, so it doesn't include the Monster Manual, Unearthed Arcana, etc.)

More actual D&D sales numbers!

Below you will find the sales numbers of Basic D&D, and then two charts comparing those to the sales of AD&D 1st edition. For those who don’t know, early in its life, the tree of D&D was split in half. On the one side there was D&D, an RPG designed to bring beginners into the game. It was simpler, and didn’t try to have rules for everything.
On the other side there was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax’s attempt to throw a net around the world and then shove it into rulebooks. The game was so detailed that it provided rules on how Armor Class changed depending on what hand your PC held their shield in. (It may also have been an attempt to cut D&D co-creator Dave Arneson out of royalties…)

I am frankly shocked at how well Basic D&D sold. Having discovered AD&D 2nd edition in the 90s, I thought of “Dungeons & Dragons” as a sort of baby game of mashed peas and steamed potatoes. It was for people not ready for the full meal that was AD&D. (I have since learned how wrong I was to dismiss the beauty of what Holmes, Moldvay, Mentzer, Cook, et al created for us in those wondrous BECMI boxed sets…)

I figured that Basic D&D was just a series of intro products, but over its lifetime, it actually outsold AD&D 1st edition. (Partly because 1st edition was replaced by 2nd edition in 1989. I’ll start rolling out the 2nd ed numbers tomorrow FYI.) These numbers would explain why in a 1980 Dragon article Gygax spoke of AD&D not being “abandoned.”
Still, between 1980 and 1984, Basic outsold AD&D. The strong numbers for Basic D&D prompt a few questions. Where was the strength of the brand? Were these two lines of products in competition with each other? Was one “real” D&D? And why did TSR stop supporting Basic D&D in the 90s?

The only one of those questions I will hazard is the last one. A source told me that because TSR CEO Lorraine Williams did not want to generate royalties for Gary Gygax or Dave Arneson, Basic D&D was left to wither on the vine.

I will also say this: TSR will die in 1997 of a thousand cuts, but the one underlying all of them was a failure of the company to grow its customer base. TSR wanted its D&D players to migrate over to AD&D, but what if they didn’t? What if they wanted to keep playing D&D, and TSR simply stopped making the product they wanted to buy? What if TSR walked away from what may have been hundreds of thousands of customers because of a sort of personal vendetta?

Tomorrow, I’ll post numbers for 2nd edition AD&D, and comparisons for it with Basic and 1st edition.

And if you don’t know, I have a book of D&D history coming out in a couple weeks. If you find me interesting, you can preorder in the first comment below!

Also, I'll post raw sales numbers below for the interested.

 

[Zardnaar]

It seems to me the Satanic Panic was a double edged sword for TSR. 1981 and on it seems to have helped sales, but after BADD got going and products were dropped out of major retail stores, it wasn’t good.

Pretty much. It may have impacted sales 84 it definitely accelerated them.

I suspect it was also saturation and bubble burst.

 

[Stormonu]

I'm pretty sure two factors really killed D&D sales in the '90s - MtG & the Storyteller system. Lost a lot of players during those dark times, and I even abandoned the game at that time for a while.

I would be extremely curious to see how many UA books were sold (by year). And how much the DL modules were gobbled up.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

That seems to be very strong evidence thst the Satanic Panic, contrsry to the usual dismissive depiction by many fans as a "great marketing" bit for D&D, was actually a body shot that TSR never recovered from. (@Snarf Zagyg and @Zardnaar have trotted that out lately, for example). This explains a lot about TSR's strategy shifts after 1984, and BADD getting D&D out of mainstream outlets.

Compare this to now, when WalMart, Target and Amazon carry the products with no problem. If JC Penny, Toys R Us, or Sears were still going concerns today, I'm sure they would, too

This might be worth a deep dive, but the short answer is ... no. This is not strong evidence, IMO. It has to do with the correlation, not causation part. I know that you also post the Dancey facebook bit, but again ... these weren't the issues.

You can go back to Game Wizards with the relevant chapters and you'll see the issues re: revenue. But I'll expand on this is an actual thread, given that it's more about the moral panic and less about this specific issue.

 

[Jer]

I'm pretty sure two factors really killed D&D sales in the '90s - MtG & the Storyteller system. Lost a lot of players during those dark times, and I even abandoned the game at that time for a while.

Chalking it up to MtG and Storyteller eating into TSR's lunch missed a key dynamic, I think, which is that roleplayers in the 90s saw AD&D as a dated, bloated system that felt unsatisfying to many groups of people. The people who wanted more "realism" in their games balked at how "gamey" the system was and went looking for systems that had systems that fed their desire for more verisimilitude (Chaosium's BRP, Rolemaster, even GURPS). Meanwhile folks who didn't really want more gritty realism were getting frustrated with various things and were looking for alternative types of games. Of course what they were looking for varied from person to person or table to table - skill systems that didn't shackle them with arbitrary class restriction, or mechanics for social interaction that made a game something other than a combat game, or world-building that was more relevant to folks in the 90s than folks from the 70s. Sometimes that last one just meant "give me a game that is set on Earth here and now, not some dumb fantasy world that never existed". The early-to-mid 90s especially was before the Harry Potter explosion of fantasy and a time of trench coats and katana blades. Where even the superheroes had to be rethought to have grim expressions all the time and a multitude of pouches to get people to buy their comics. It's no wonder that Vampire took off - it's right in that grim and serious, trench coat and katana world. (It's also no wonder, IMO, that Vampire has never been able to reclaim those heights of popularity for exactly the same reasons).

Meanwhile AD&D and D&D both stayed firmly in early RPG design of the 70s and 80s and the products that TSR produced basically catered to people who liked that. And they stayed that way right up until they went bankrupt, got bought by WotC, and the system was redesigned to be a 1990s game instead of an early 80s game. At which point you both had people who'd been away from it for a while and folks who were too young to be interested in trench coats and katanas anyway and were now abuzz with this Harold Potter person and his fantasy world (and the general burst of interest in YA fantasy that came off of it over the following years) taking a fresh look at it.

 

[RealAlHazred]

Nope.

They like claiming that but you have to be careful how they word it. Usually it's things like presales or year 1.

3.5 didn't do that well relative to 3.0. 4E probably voutsolf it initially maybe even lifetime vsakes no one knows though.

Most if 4Ecsakescwerecearky with people buying blind it would seem. You can guess the reaction.

Are... are you okay?

I think it's worth thinking about the fact that, for instance, Old School Essentials is B/X D&D reorganized (but no new rules or content), and its Kickstarter had almost 3,000 backers. That's good numbers for a forty-year old system. And the OSE Advanced Fantasy Kickstarter (which adapts AD&D 1E content to B/X power levels and mechanics) had 3,700 backers. How many of them were there for the AD&D vs. how many just pick up everything OSE is hard to say. But it makes me think WotC missed a step by not reviving Red Box back when they acquired TSR.

 

[Reynard]

Chalking it up to MtG and Storyteller eating into TSR's lunch missed a key dynamic, I think, which is that roleplayers in the 90s saw AD&D as a dated, bloated system that felt unsatisfying to many groups of people. The people who wanted more "realism" in their games balked at how "gamey" the system was and went looking for systems that had systems that fed their desire for more verisimilitude (Chaosium's BRP, Rolemaster, even GURPS). Meanwhile folks who didn't really want more gritty realism were getting frustrated with various things and were looking for alternative types of games. Of course what they were looking for varied from person to person or table to table - skill systems that didn't shackle them with arbitrary class restriction, or mechanics for social interaction that made a game something other than a combat game, or world-building that was more relevant to folks in the 90s than folks from the 70s. Sometimes that last one just meant "give me a game that is set on Earth here and now, not some dumb fantasy world that never existed". The early-to-mid 90s especially was before the Harry Potter explosion of fantasy and a time of trench coats and katana blades. Where even the superheroes had to be rethought to have grim expressions all the time and a multitude of pouches to get people to buy their comics. It's no wonder that Vampire took off - it's right in that grim and serious, trench coat and katana world. (It's also no wonder, IMO, that Vampire has never been able to reclaim those heights of popularity for exactly the same reasons).

Meanwhile AD&D and D&D both stayed firmly in early RPG design of the 70s and 80s and the products that TSR produced basically catered to people who liked that. And they stayed that way right up until they went bankrupt, got bought by WotC, and the system was redesigned to be a 1990s game instead of an early 80s game. At which point you both had people who'd been away from it for a while and folks who were too young to be interested in trench coats and katanas anyway and were now abuzz with this Harold Potter person and his fantasy world (and the general burst of interest in YA fantasy that came off of it over the following years) taking a fresh look at it.

Folks would do well to remember this. The cohort that discovered D&D through 5E is going to go through the same growing pains. You can already see it happening with the "veterans" -- many are frustrated with the limitations of the game and how it really isn't that great for "story" and non-combat oriented play. It might not be PbtA and FitD that "eats 5E's lunch" (or it might be) but something certainly will.

A new White Wolf/Vampire is waiting out there in the future, just out of sight.

 

[Jer]

Folks would do well to remember this. The cohort that discovered D&D through 5E is going to go through the same growing apins. You can already see it happening with the "veterans" -- many are frustrated with the limitations of the game and how it really isn't that great for "story" and non-combat oriented play. It might not be PbtA and FitD that "eats 5E's lunch" (or it might be) but something certainly will.

A new White Wolf/Vampire is waiting out there in the future, just out of sight.

I will say that while this might be true, the market is in a very different place now than it was back in the early 1990s. Everything is just ... bigger. White Wolf was able to swoop in because while D&D was the biggest fish in the RPG pool at the time, the RPG pool was really small. A company that is going to be able to move into that space is likely to be another big gaming company or some startup that can convince investors that their games are going to give them an ROI in D&D numbers rather than a small hobbyist company like White Wolf. I suspect we're more likely to see a lot of little games that nibble into D&D - picking up numbers from disgruntled D&D players who are looking for something different - but D&D stays at the top. At least for the near term. (Wizards could easily screw this up with whatever they do in 2024 though.)

Also I think a lot of folks go down design paths with new games that aren't as fruitful for building a "popular" game. D&D is an easy game to play and to learn regardless of whether you are interested in storytelling or not. It turns out, Vampire actually is too - for all it's talk of being a "Storytelling" game, the mechanics of Vampire make it a game that can be played by someone who doesn't actually care about their place in the narrative or story structure or drama or anything like that and just wants to play out a vampire power fantasy. If there is a game coming that will knock D&D off its perch it will be another game like that.

 

[Reynard]

I will say that while this might be true, the market is in a very different place now than it was back in the early 1990s. Everything is just ... bigger. White Wolf was able to swoop in because while D&D was the biggest fish in the RPG pool at the time, the RPG pool was really small. A company that is going to be able to move into that space is likely to be another big gaming company or some startup that can convince investors that their games are going to give them an ROI in D&D numbers rather than a small hobbyist company like White Wolf. I suspect we're more likely to see a lot of little games that nibble into D&D - picking up numbers from disgruntled D&D players who are looking for something different - but D&D stays at the top. At least for the near term. (Wizards could easily screw this up with whatever they do in 2024 though.)

Also I think a lot of folks go down design paths with new games that aren't as fruitful for building a "popular" game. D&D is an easy game to play and to learn regardless of whether you are interested in storytelling or not. It turns out, Vampire actually is too - for all it's talk of being a "Storytelling" game, the mechanics of Vampire make it a game that can be played by someone who doesn't actually care about their place in the narrative or story structure or drama or anything like that and just wants to play out a vampire power fantasy. If there is a game coming that will knock D&D off its perch it will be another game like that.

Given how powerful influencers are, particularly with GenZ and younger millenials, I think if a game appears to knock D&D off being the only game in town (I don't think anything will supplant it; White Wolf didn't even do that for more than a quarter or two, as i recall from Shannon Applecline's histories) I think it will be because some person or group with a lot of pull decides to make the not-D&D a thing. Imagine of Critical Role came out with their own RPG rather than using D&D. I think that would have a major impact on D&D's dominance.

 

[Parmandur]

Just to confirm, these figures are just for the various Basic sets, or for the whole B/X and BECMI lines? That is, are they including the Expert boxed sets, Companion, etc.? Or just the Holmes Basic ('77), Moldvay Basic ('81), Mentzer Basic ('83), Denning Basic ('91), and Stewart Basic ('94)?

It's for all the Basics combined: they guy who posted these said he would do a breakdown in the future, because he has the data.

 

[Parmandur]

This might be worth a deep dive, but the short answer is ... no. This is not strong evidence, IMO. It has to do with the correlation, not causation part. I know that you also post the Dancey facebook bit, but again ... these weren't the issues.

You can go back to Game Wizards with the relevant chapters and you'll see the issues re: revenue. But I'll expand on this is an actual thread, given that it's more about the moral panic and less about this specific issue.

I mean, if the BADD movement got the game out-of stores and then sales fell over 70%, I'm pretty comfortable with the causal element.