Dragonlance and Manual of the planes sales, from Ben Riggs

[Jer]

Looking at the numbers for OA, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and the Manual of the Planes, one thing that strikes me is how sales for RPG books back in the day absolutely cratered after the first year. The World of Greyhawk release appears to have had better legs than the others, but it still dropped by over 100,000 units. You can almost feel people looking at all these numbers and arriving at the strategy of massive blasts of product that would characterize 2e-4e.

I would bet that if we had Wizards numbers from 2000 to the 5e rollout you'd see similar shapes to the graphs if not exactly the same numbers. The core books having a long tail of sales, individual supplements having a huge burst of sales on initial release and then tapering off quickly. I suspect this because of some of the things that the D&D team were saying during the 5e rollout about backing off on the monthly release schedule that they'd been using since they bought TSR. There was some indication that it followed the same kind of curves - big numbers right at release, and then a relatively quick drop-off. I don't know if they knew that they'd get a long tail of sales out of supplements when they decided to do it or if it was just that they couldn't do anything else and it worked out in their favor, but either way it was the standard up until 5e.

 

[Parmandur]

I would bet that if we had Wizards numbers from 2000 to the 5e rollout you'd see similar shapes to the graphs if not exactly the same numbers. The core books having a long tail of sales, individual supplements having a huge burst of sales on initial release and then tapering off quickly. I suspect this because of some of the things that the D&D team were saying during the 5e rollout about backing off on the monthly release schedule that they'd been using since they bought TSR. There was some indication that it followed the same kind of curves - big numbers right at release, and then a relatively quick drop-off. I don't know if they knew that they'd get a long tail of sales out of supplements when they decided to do it or if it was just that they couldn't do anything else and it worked out in their favor, but either way it was the standard up until 5e.

Indeed, this is historically pretty normal. That's whybRPG companies keep putting out new product. I think the 5E team has expressed surprise at how long lived a lot of the 5E products are, compared to even their fingers crossed hopes.

 

[Jer]

I think the 5E team has expressed surprise at how long lived a lot of the 5E products are, compared to even their fingers crossed hopes.

It makes sense in retrospect that even a monthly release schedule would lead to a lot of bad outcomes - for completists its hard to keep up, for regular players/GMs you don't have time to integrate the material from one month before another book is dropping, and once you've fallen off the monthly release train it becomes easier to just skip them. On the creation side the pressure to create products on a schedule like that has to be brutal and expensive, and then when it only really sells for a few months at most before trickling down to nothing it has to be discouraging too.

That doesn't mean that it's obvious that moving to fewer products per year would lead to a longer and fatter tail for those products, but I can see how it would work.

 

[Stormonu]

Wow. I didn't expect the 2E DL box to be that much weaker than the 1E book.

If I remember correctly, the DragonLance Adventures book came out shortly after they finished the main story line of the DL series - it was basically a reorganized DL5 and basically the campaign book for DL. By the time of the DL box, Ansalon had been put to one side where Taladas was the new hotness. I, for one, took the DL box as a reprint/expansion of the Adventures book, and already having it, wasn't in a hurry to pick it up. I imagine many others just skipped it altogether.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Absolutely. New is always exciting and shiny. Until a point, after which it starts to just get exhausting. And "Yay, another book!" turns into "Ugh, another book!" I think the slower release schedule has helped build a more sustainable product lifespan.

I would bet that if we had Wizards numbers from 2000 to the 5e rollout you'd see similar shapes to the graphs if not exactly the same numbers. The core books having a long tail of sales, individual supplements having a huge burst of sales on initial release and then tapering off quickly. I suspect this because of some of the things that the D&D team were saying during the 5e rollout about backing off on the monthly release schedule that they'd been using since they bought TSR. There was some indication that it followed the same kind of curves - big numbers right at release, and then a relatively quick drop-off. I don't know if they knew that they'd get a long tail of sales out of supplements when they decided to do it or if it was just that they couldn't do anything else and it worked out in their favor, but either way it was the standard up until 5e.

 

[Shardstone]

I'm not sure I'd describe it as "lit af" unless you call getting together with a bunch of friends, eating pizza (not me, because I was a weird kid and hated melted cheese until I was a teenager), drinking soda, playing AD&D for giant 6-8 hours stretches, then winding down with some Nintendo or a movie on VHS, lit. Though now that I typed that out, as an adult living during the ongoing pandemic, yeah, that sounds hella awesome.

But it was pretty cool how the worlds were so open. Heck, even Forgotten Realms, back when it was still just the grey box and a handful of supplements, had plenty of open space. There were sessions where I'd just unfold one of those giant maps and ask the PCs "where do you want to go?"



Looking at the numbers for OA, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and the Manual of the Planes, one thing that strikes me is how sales for RPG books back in the day absolutely cratered after the first year. The World of Greyhawk release appears to have had better legs than the others, but it still dropped by over 100,000 units. You can almost feel people looking at all these numbers and arriving at the strategy of massive blasts of product that would characterize 2e-4e.

Ya man, that all sounds lit lmao.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Please note that these do not include the Dragonlance adventures.

Today in actual D&D sales numbers! Dragonlance and Manual of the Planes!

The three major setting releases for Dragonlance are charted below, with Fifth Age, a reboot of the setting in a new era and system, selling the worst.

Next, there is a chart comparing sales of Greyhawk setting material to Dragonlance, with the advantage going to the former. I want to note that none of these charts reflect Dragonlance adventure sales, and that regrettably, I have no Dragonlance adventure sales numbers.

Lastly, there is a chart for Jeff Grubb’s opus, Manual of the Planes.

As always, snips of hard numbers are in the comments.

Have you preordered my book on D&D history yet? If you preorder now, you get a free Jeff Easley bookplate! This offer ends in a mere seven days, so take advantage of it now! Link in the comments below!

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Be interested to know the very exact books he's counting as "setting sales" for DL and GH here, because I bet they're not exactly what we'd expect.

I'm surprised they're so low in both cases.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Absolutely. New is always exciting and shiny. Until a point, after which it starts to just get exhausting. And "Yay, another book!" turns into "Ugh, another book!" I think the slower release schedule has helped build a more sustainable product lifespan.

I mean, I think WotC miscalculated with 5E, but in the safer direction, which is to say they put out too little material rather than too much, for the first several years (indeed until quite recently). That was a very conscious decision on their part, of course - one I seem to recall came from on-high of WotC, rather than from the D&D team themselves.

 

[Mannahnin]

Be interested to know the very exact books he's counting as "setting sales" for DL and GH here, because I bet they're not exactly what we'd expect.

In each chart listing sales for a setting, he's labeled the columns with the names of the exact books and boxed sets being counted. The last comparison, Greyhawk vs. Dragonlance, is just summarizing the prior charts, right?

Here's the Greyhawk chart from the other thread.

As a note, the blue line is 1975's Supplement I, which, TBF, isn't REALLY a campaign setting book. But the 1980 original Greyhawk folio campaign book is completely missing from the numbers (Jon Peterson confirmed this in the comments on Ben's FB post), and that from all accounts did quite well and is well regarded to this day. So I'd suspect that if we were to have those numbers and drop Supplement I from the chart, Greyhawk would have a better showing in total.

 

[Jer]

In each chart listing sales for a setting, he's labeled the columns with the names of the exact books and boxed sets being counted. The last comparison, Greyhawk vs. Dragonlance, is just summarizing the prior charts, right?

Yes that's right. The summary bar charts are the totals of the data that is shown in the other charts.

But I caution anyone against using these numbers as indications of anything other than "here is how D&D products were selling" over the course of time. Especially using them to show settings competing with each other in popularity. The trends on these graphs show that the most important factor in how well a setting sold was when in TSR's timeline it was released - prior to '86 sales were really, really good. Post 1992 sales were really, really bad. There's far too much correlation with the general sales trends of the core books and across the lines to really use these graphs as evidence of anything other than maybe either TSR's mismanagement or to point to where the D&D fad ended and the business of D&D became getting the same small group of dedicated gamers to buy multiple products instead of trying to get more people to play the game.