Daggerheart Sold Out in Two Weeks, Has Three-Year Plan in Place

A recent interview with Business Insider revealed just how well Daggerheart did for Critical Role's Darrington Press when it first launched earlier this year. Ed Lopez, Critical Role's chief operating officer, revealed that Daggerheart sold out in two weeks. According to Lopez, Critical Role anticipated that their stock would last a year, but the game was forced to go into reprints in a hurry. "The amount of units that we ordered we thought was going to last us a year, and it lasted us literally two weeks," Lopez said. "It's a great problem, it's a Champagne problem, but it's now changing our view in terms of what this product can be."

Lopez also revealed that Darrington Press has a three-year plan in place for Daggerheart, which includes the already announced Hope & Fear expansion, which adds a new domain and several new classes and backgrounds to the game.

Lopez also spoke about the hires of Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins, stating that the two would be working on both Daggerheart and D&D material for Darrington Press. "We really want their creative juices brought to the world of 'Daggerheart.' That being said, we're also doing a bunch of 'D&D' stuff, and who better to bring in than the guys who used to do it?" Lopez said.

 

[mamba]

Start threads about them and hype them up!

or at a minimum, mention them by name in unrelated topics like your post in this one

 

[Tigris]

Nothing was kept? It did not happen, there was nothing to keep. 4e books sales where terrible compared to 5e from the start. The source that they were so great, WotC, no one else.

As for profitability? Almost certainly 5e, as it was done with a far smaller staff.

4e Did not only sell on amazon though. Looking at 1 limited fataset leads exactly to this falls claims like "pathfinder outsold D&D".


4e did sell out as well and also needed several printings:
D&D 4th edition was even sold at target and most likely similar shops. Also it was sold digitally (pdf and subscription).

 

[djotaku]

Getting back to the topic at hand - early on people wondered why CR didn't do DH as Season 4. They've already stated in multiple places that there were a number of reasons for this:

• Brennan lee Mulligan is a D&D person and it seemed unfair to invite him to GM and then change the system
• The process of planning for Season 4 and getting BLM onboard started while Daggerheart was still in production.
• With bullet #2 there, by the time they released Daggerheart and it was a giant success (unlike the lack of success for Candela Obscura) it was too late to do S4 as Daggerheart.

So I think if they go DH for the main series it'll start with Season 5. There's also the possibility of having 2 main series now that the main cast has been planning on adding other folks. Maybe some of the cast (plus new people) are in D&D game and others in cast (plus new people) are in DH game. Not sure of their bandwidth (in a time sense, not internet sense) would allow for that. They also still continue to do some voice acting, I think.

 

[Morrus]

4e Did not only sell on amazon though. Looking at 1 limited fataset leads exactly to this falls claims like "pathfinder outsold D&D". 4e did sell out as well and also needed several printings: D&D 4th edition was even sold at target and most likely similar shops. Also it was sold digitally (pdf and subscription).

Why are you linking to a Reddit post which is a link to a thread right here on EN World?

 

[Zehnseiter]

Oh god. Can this thread not go a single page without that stupid and useless D&D sales number flame war that interests nobody that clicks on a thread about a completely different game.

This is a thread about the sales number of Daggerheart.

I repeat DAGGERHEART.

I consider it frankly impolite behaviour to your fellow posters to permanently interrupt an ongoing discussion with this nonsense.

 

[Tigris]

Why are you linking to a Reddit post which is a link to a thread right here on EN World?

Because the reddit post was easier to find with google, and I am linking to some additional discussion which happened in the post.


@Zehnseiter Well the thing is: We have no sales numbers. At least not from the linked article.


All we know is "it sold out". A thing which funny happens often when it comes to RPG public releases. It happened according to some statements several times with D&D 4e and also happened during D&D 5e and in both cases no actual numbers were said at that time as well. (And for initial 5E sales we do know the actual numbers and they were not as good as claimed)


Thats why the comparison comes. The exact same potential marketing trick was used before to make an rpg release look more successfull than it really is.



I mean one thing we know is that they think they make more money producing advertisement for D&D 5e (making critical role with it), than they think they would make money doing advertisement foe their own game (doing critical role with daggerheart, which was initialy assumed (and most likely the plan on why it was created in the first place)).


If the sales would be really really good, as a company you would expect it to change to its own game.


However, on the other side, the PDF did sell over 5000 copies on drivethru RPG, so it definitly can potentially be quite successfull.


On the other hand, from the number of reviews, the sales number eill not be that much higher on drivethru RPG than 5000 sales.


In average you get 1 review per 80 to 150 buyers. So more than 6000 buyers is unlikely.


(Other adamantite sellers like cyberpunk red, ironsword, stars without numbers or even fabula ultima have way more reviews, but of course also had some more years ro get them.)

 

[Parmandur]

Oh god. Can this thread not go a single page without that stupid and useless D&D sales number flame war that interests nobody that clicks on a thread about a completely different game.

This is a thread about the sales number of Daggerheart.

I repeat DAGGERHEART.

I consider it frankly impolite behaviour to your fellow posters to permanently interrupt an ongoing discussion with this nonsense.

Yeah, I apologize for any part in that, but to refocus on Daggerheart...I don't think there is any direct parallel in TTRPG history to the success they are having.

 

[Zehnseiter]

All we know is "it sold out". A thing which funny happens often when it comes to RPG public releases. It happened according to some statements several times with D&D 4e and also happened during D&D 5e and in both cases no actual numbers were said at that time as well. (And for initial 5E sales we do know the actual numbers and they were not as good as claimed)

Thats why the comparison comes. The exact same potential marketing trick was used before to make an rpg release look more successfull than it really is.

Don't know where you live but here in Europe (in my case Germany) that game was really difficult to find (I struggled to acquire a copy) almost immediately on release. And that situation lasted for quite some time. We are talking months here. That thing was sold out hard.

If that would have been a marketing trick Darrington Press would have hurt themselves.

And just to mention it: It gets a German language translation from Pegasus Spiele

 

[FoolishFrost]

To be fair, Europe has had issues getting copies of MANY things in the rpg space. Especially initially. It’s not a good thing, but it’s been darn consistent.

Let’s be honest. They printed what they thought was a reasonable amount of product. They based that number on previous sales.on older rpg products they sold, and they got hit with a wall of customers. Printing takes time. They couldn’t adjust on the fly.

CR has always tried to lean toward restraint in their expectations. That’s not a compliment or curse, it’s just my behavioral analysis. They are risk adverse.

Now, they have tons of the book out, and feel comfortable shifting more resources toward expanding the foothold. I wish them luck. The issue is, rpgs are notoriously “flavor of the week” aside from the few who have carved a loyal following. The CR crew may be able to leverage their media influence to shift the needle, but this is kind of unique for a rpg company. The closest was TSR back in the 80s, and that didn’t end well…

 

[Zehnseiter]

To be fair, Europe has had issues getting copies of MANY things in the rpg space. Especially initially. It’s not a good thing, but it’s been darn consistent.

To a degree but at least here in Germany there a some really good shops like Sphaerenmeisters-spiele that get even a lot of the more exotic crowdfunding stuff. So usually I don't struggle to get things.