Countries with biggest rpg market?

[Kae'Yoss]

It's actually quite sad, for rules stuff we use English almost exclusively in my group.

I flatly refuse to buy anything German if it's even remotely related to D&D. Several others also get only English stuff, and some don't have a choice, anyway, since they don't own any books and have to read what the others lend them. In the games I currently play in, two people use the German stuff.

 

[paranoid]

Let's have a look at some numbers:

Today's Amazon.xy sale ranks for PHB3.5, english / local language
UK: 1,143 / -
US: 1,159 / -
CA: 3,798 / -
DE: 12,494 / 9,717
FR: 18,393 / 31,626
JP: 176,592 / 9,582

of course, these figures mean nothing . Unless you make the assumption that a) each country orders the same percentage of books via amazon and b) the market is not "saturated" and the growth is linear, which is probably not the case. Why doesn't amazon provide total sale numbers?
The only conclusion you can draw is that with the exception of france (the book is not in stock there in the moment), the localized versions apparently sell better than the english ones.

what stumped me:

Amazon.de sale rank for DSA 4 Basisbox
GE: 31 (!)

and it's out since 2001...

-p.

P.S.: I'm from Germany and own the english books, of course

 

[NiTessine]

I know that in the 1991 edition of the Swedish RPG Drakar och Demoner (which to Swedes is about as synonymous with RPGs as Dungeons & Dragons is to Americans), they claimed that they had sold enough copies of earlier editions that there were, on average, one copy in every ten households. Now, Sweden's a pretty small country population-wise (about 9 million), so that doesn't really translate into a huge absolute number.

The sales figures I've seen bandied about for it have been in the six-digit range, and repeated often enough in different sources that I'm starting to believe them. The game is now in its sixth or seventh edition, I understand, and it's never been translated.

Now, I'm no expert on the roleplaying industry, but as far as I know, very few RPGs in English ever sell 100,000 copies. Such a phenomenal success might be explained partly with Norway and Denmark, where they languages are close enough to Swedish to make learning easy, but those are hardly populous nations, either. Finland, despite the fact Swedish is mandatory through high school, doesn't enter into that equation, by the way. I've never seen or heard of anyone playing Drakar och Demoner in Finland, and it's not sold in the local gaming stores. I own a 6E copy that I picked up in Stockholm, incidentally.

The Finnish situation, on the other hand... The most sold Finnish RPG book ever is Myrskyn aika, by Mike Pohjola. He wrote a series of columns on RPG.net about its production. To my understanding, it's sold about 2,000 copies. The next most successful is Praedor, at around 500. English RPGs are probably more popular. Finland's population is 5,100,000. In any case, there's enough gamers here to support a chain of gaming stores that opened its seventh retail outlet in January. Most of their profits come from Games Workshop stuff, though.

RPG translations are a rare thing in Finland, nowadays. From 80's to early 90's, we got translations of OD&D, Twilight: 2000, Paranoia, Rolemaster, Call of Cthulhu... and then they kinda stopped. I don't know the reason, but likely it either wasn't profitable in the first place or ceased to be profitable. And at least that OD&D translation was ridiculously bad. I mean... mörköpeikko?

 

[Thunhus]

We also had Finnish translations of MERP, 2300AD, Runequest, Cyperpunk 2020, Shadowrun and Elric. But no new translations in last 5-10 years.

Thunhus

 

[yennico]

That's the difference. The "unless" part isn't.

That is not correct. German book sellers can´t give you a discount, they are by laws not allowed to do this. Under special circumsatnces they can do it. If a book store either finds a defect in a book (scratches on the cover, etc.) or decide they want to sell a book under the price the manufactor demanded, becasue they want to clear their stock they can mark the book with a special flag (mostly a stamp imprint at the side of the sides). Book sellers can sell books under the manufactor demanded price but these books must be marked and this mark has to be not removable.