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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tigris" data-source="post: 9830114" data-attributes="member: 7043270">And that was exsctly the kind of marketing I mesn "Mike mearls is saying" without actual numbers. In the mesntime we did get rough actual numbers of the sales of D&D over the years (which are linked in the post I linked). 2014 and 2015 had roughly the same revenue (29 vs 25) as 3.5 had st the end of its lifecycle. Which is weaker than initial years for 3E, 3.5 and 4E (gor ehich er sll know thst they had big drop in sales after first year).This is exactly my point, people use statements made in interviews, which are made for marketing, at face value, even if actual data (later released) shows different.Mike Mearls especially often was beagging about 5e to make him look good. Like in an interview saying that in 2013 the sales numbers of D&D were really down and than 2014 they went up a lot thanks to 5e.Yes in 2013, the year which had no new D&D material was released (partially because of him). Doubling the sales compared to previous yesr sounds good. Doubling the sales in a year when a new edition (and a new D&D toyline) comes out and you celebrate 40 years D&D and have the first new releases since 2 years compared to a year which had 0 new D&D releases does not sound that great anymore. Dont forget that in 2014 D&D was close to being killed (as said by Mearls and others, including stating that they could only afford a single person officially working on D&D for a while. And the other people working on D&D where officially working for MtG), because 4E did not reach the 100 million yearly sales Hasbro wanted from "core franchises". And then was considered a niche franchise. So WotC needed to build the narrative that 5E was a big success, else Hasbro would have killed D&D/ outsourced it from WotC.  So this behaviour at the time is completly reasonable and understandable. That is also why Wotc did for almost 2 years release no new D&D content before 5E. (2 years! With the whole 2013 with no D&D release. That never happened since D&D exists). And why 5e had originally small print runs (mitigate risk) which makes it easy to say "it sold out it went below our expectations".Also 5e did not release in digital form, just book form, unlike 4E which is part of the "whole picture". All 5e sales where from physical sales, while all digitsl sales (which even in 2019 made a huge part of income) come from earlier editions released digitally.So we should maybe not use vague posts from 2014 (from the guy profiting most drom the "its a huge success" narrative) as sources, when we have actual numbers from 2025. And we should always be critical when a marketing person claims something which makes them look positively, whitout showing the actual numbers.</blockquote>

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