Dragon & Dungeon Magazines - the numbers tell the story

[JeffB]

Not surprising. Paper mags are getting to be a little too expensive I think for a majority of people to buy them regularly. (not just gamers, but in general)

I know that in my area bookstore chains, Dungeon & Dragon basically disappeared in the last few years. I'd see them on occasion, but either the stores werent carrying them period, or were ordering so few copies that they sold out quickly and I never saw them. I went looking for the last issues for keepsakes, and never found either one.

I stopped subscribing..oh...IDK 4 years ago, simply because I got out of gaming for awhile, and also cos I found so little useful in either one. I wanted to pick and choose issues, even though I wasn't actively using them, just to have an entertaining read.

I suspect the sales trend of D&D products from WOTC is similar. It's steadily been dropping. Again my local chains D&D section has been getting moved to progressively smaller spaces. The Video Game and Computer game "cheat books" take up more space these days.

I don't think it's a circumstance of poor quality from Paizo, but rather the downslope of 3.X sales. 2E was lucky in that towards the end they had a surge of cash and enthusiasm with the WOTC buyout. As well as the 25th anniversary and launch of 3E. The market is very different right now (for ALOT of businesse):The D20 glut and dropout, and we've been color hardcovered to death by WOTC, and while that may have been a grand idea 5 years ago when there was so much enthusiasm, I think its come around to bite them in the @$$ now. I don't think the people with enough expendable income can make up for the vast majority of gamers that make up WOTC's market (i.e. those who DON'T have that expendable income)

I've rambled enough...

I'm sad to have seen Dungeon & Dragon mags go...a fine institution it was for so many years

 

[GVDammerung]

Outstanding work, Merric!

If I recall correctly from the "publisher's statements" that appeared in Dragon over the years, the high water mark for Dragon was something like 108,000 copies in the mid to late 80s or early 90s.

How the mighty had fallen by the end. Sad.

Does this put the move to online with the D&D Insider in a different perspective?

Paizo said it was profitable but from the raw numbers there is a wiff of desperation perhaps(?) on Wotc's part that if they didn't do something, something would do itself with a slow downward trend. Again, this would run contra to Paizo's assertions of profitability as I recall them, however. Maybe both were true?

 

[Plane Sailing]

Not quite getting that.

The numbers I've quoted are the average # of issues per month in a year. They're not the total figure sold over the entire year.

Ah, I misunderstood. I read it as total # of issues per year. Your Australian text is all upsidedown to me

I'll edit my text to make it clear I'm a doofus.

Out of interest, do you know whether the figures are averaged over the calendar year up to that date (so the figure is averaged over a range from 9 months to 12 months) or over the rolling 12 months prior to that date?

Regards,

 

[Plane Sailing]

If I recall correctly from the "publisher's statements" that appeared in Dragon over the years, the high water mark for Dragon was something like 108,000 copies in the mid to late 80s or early 90s.

How the mighty had fallen by the end. Sad.

Where those monthly or annual figures?

Don't forget (like I originally did) that the figures are average per month.

this would give you annual totals something like

Oct	2000	 458,568 
Oct	2001	 595,524 
Oct	2002	 621,972 
Oct	2003	 823,020 
Oct	2004	 752,700 
???	2005	 655,644 
???	2006	 555,000

Cheers

 

[Mark]

(. . .) your numbers suggest that the magazines slowly crept up from the release of 3E, and then began to fall again after a few years (. . .)

Seems to be the case though I wonder if splitting the market with 3.5 (by WotC) had anything to do with it. Any chance to see the same ranger of numbers for June, July, and August of those years?





(Cheers! )

 

[James Jacobs]

We had monthly circulation meetings for the magazines while we were doing them, and these numbers were among those we obsessed over during those meetings. It's a lot more complicated than just "How many magazines did we distribute" though... in fact, the crazy way the magazine world works, if you distribute less but the same amount sells, you're more successful than if you distribute more and don't increase your sale. And of course there's a bazillion other factors tinkering away in there as well... with things WotC was doing (such as releasing 3.5) being only one of the factors. And you don't really get hard data to work with for about a year, so in some ways, when you see information about how magazines are doing, it's a year old by the time you can try something to do about it. The whole thing was really pretty complicated, and interpreting those figures is certainly one of the few parts about doing magazines that I don't miss!

 

[Uzzy]

I'm curious, where did you get your figures from, Merric? I'm also wondering if you've numbers for 2007, and corresponding numbers of the sales of all Wizards DnD products. I wonder if there is a similar rise and fall.

 

[Deset Gled]

What made 2003 such a good year? 3.5e? Shackled City? Something else?

I'm surprized no one has pointed out the obvious yet; D+D v3.5 was released in 2003.

 

[Glyfair]

That was the time when Paizo was trying to bloat dungeon's readership with polyhedron content. Rather than place the RPGA polyhedron content in Dragon, where player driven content and minigames traditionally belonged, Paizo transfered paid polyhedron subscriptions to Dungeon subscriptions.

The word from Paizo at the time (either Erik or Johnny Winters) was that neither Dungeon or Polyhedron was very profitable. Rather than canceling both magazines they decided to bundle them together and see if that would work.

If they had bundled Polyhedron with Dragon we probably would have seen the last of Dungeon.

If the numbers are available, I'd love to see how the success curve matches up with the other editions..

I tried gathering numbers from the CD-ROM. The problem is that they didn't seem to publish the numbers some years. Plus, quite a few were unreadable with the scans.

I'll try to include the numbers in my "Dragon review" series when I find them, and they are readable.

I'm curious, where did you get your figures from, Merric?

Magazines are required to post numbers in their magazine (I believe it's tied to postal regulations, but I'm not sure). Every year these numbers appear in the magazines.

 

[T. Foster]

I'm curious, where did you get your figures from, Merric? I'm also wondering if you've numbers for 2007, and corresponding numbers of the sales of all Wizards DnD products. I wonder if there is a similar rise and fall.

Dragon and Dungeon used to once a year (most years) post their circulation figures for the previous year in the magazine. A year or so back someone posted the circulation figures for Dragon going all the way back to the 70s. IIRC the magazine hit its peak in circulation c. 1982-85, dropped inexorably through the late 80s and 90s, and shot back up from 2000 on to about the same level as the early 90s.