WotC Estimating D&D’s Revenue, Teos Abadia crunches the numbers.

[Parmandur]

Thanks. To make sure I follow, do you mean the following:
$60 retail price, which is what your FLGS charges you.
$36 is what the retail store paid to the distributor.
$23 is what the distributor paid to the gaming company.
$23 is what the gaming company gets for all of its work. This must cover salaries, printing, art, editing, marketing, etc.

@FitzTheRuke is the FLGS, he runs a comic and game store in...British Columbia, IIRC?

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Thanks. To make sure I follow, do you mean the following:
$60 retail price, which is what your FLGS charges you.
$36 is what the retail store paid to the distributor.
$23 is what the distributor paid to the gaming company.
$23 is what the gaming company gets for all of its work. This must cover salaries, printing, art, editing, marketing, etc.

Yeah, that's what I mean. All numbers approximate, of course! (And not including how shipping eats into ALL our margins, increasingly!)

 

[FitzTheRuke]

@FitzTheRuke is the FLGS, he runs a comic and game store in...British Columbia, IIRC?

Yup. Just outside Vancouver. I've been at it 30 years exactly come Nov 1.

 

[Velderan]

I think you are probably right. I checked my own average purchase price and it's $24. Reducing the estimate to match this, I get:

Year 1: $6m
Year 2: $23m
Year 3: $45m
Year 4: $59m
Year 5: $86m
Year 6: $71m

Speaking for myself, I always bought books when they had a 20% off sale so my average purchase was the same. I had 1 purchase over that (Dragonlance board game bundle) and 1 below (PHB for 50% off from the Essentials Set coupon). $25-30 is probably a good estimate to work with though.

Now what I’d be curious to know is how the shift to digital has impacted the number of individual buyers. For my table of 7, all of us owned a physical PHB and Xanathar’s. Once I started buying DDB books and sharing them, I became the only one buying books. Pre-DDB, that would have likely been 4 or 5 copies of Tasha’s sold that ended up only being one (at a higher margin, plus the subscription income). To the best of my knowledge, none of the other players bought any physical books at all once we shifted to digital. A master tier subscription is what? $50-60 so 2 purchases using the above estimates?

This is obviously all anecdotal, but I wonder how common the scenario above is for other tables.

 

[Parmandur]

Speaking for myself, I always bought books when they had a 20% off sale so my average purchase was the same. I had 1 purchase over that (Dragonlance board game bundle) and 1 below (PHB for 50% off from the Essentials Set coupon). $25-30 is probably a good estimate to work with though.

Now what I’d be curious to know is how the shift to digital has impacted the number of individual buyers. For my table of 7, all of us owned a physical PHB and Xanathar’s. Once I started buying DDB books and sharing them, I became the only one buying books. Pre-DDB, that would have likely been 4 or 5 copies of Tasha’s sold that ended up only being one (at a higher margin, plus the subscription income). To the best of my knowledge, none of the other players bought any physical books at all once we shifted to digital. A master tier subscription is what? $50-60 so 2 purchases using the above estimates?

This is obviously all anecdotal, but I wonder how common the scenario above is for other tables.

Never really embraced Beyond or digital myself, but I'm sure that's not a unique experience across all the people plsying, particularly since the Pandemic. I noted in one of @Alphastream blog posts that the downshift seen in the Bookscan numbers (minot as it us) coincides with when Beyond really was taking off.

 

[mamba]

A master tier subscription is what? $50-60 so 2 purchases using the above estimates?

per year… given how rarely they have a book like Tasha’s, that probably means they get at least the same $ amount this way

 

[dave2008]

Now what I’d be curious to know is how the shift to digital has impacted the number of individual buyers. For my table of 7, all of us owned a physical PHB and Xanathar’s. Once I started buying DDB books and sharing them, I became the only one buying books. Pre-DDB, that would have likely been 4 or 5 copies of Tasha’s sold that ended up only being one (at a higher margin, plus the subscription income). To the best of my knowledge, none of the other players bought any physical books at all once we shifted to digital. A master tier subscription is what? $50-60 so 2 purchases using the above estimates?

This is obviously all anecdotal, but I wonder how common the scenario above is for other tables.

I don't know that going digital makes much difference. I'm the only person that has bought books in my group for the past 30 years. The only difference is I've bought a lot more books now because I can get them digitally than I normally would with physical books. Obviously this is purely anecdotal as well.

 

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

With a name like Teos Abadia, he should be handing out quests rather than crunching numbers