I suspect the number is closer to 50,000.
My best information suggests that the 2e Player's Handbook (pre-black border edition) sold less than 2 million copies over its entire lifetime. The Red Box did much more than this over its lifetime, but that was very near the end in 1989.
That certainly sounds like a more believable figure. Thanks for issuing a correction. That cite on Acaeum gets trotted out way too much and it's nice to have it debunked.
If the red box was so successful in 1989, one has to wonder why they canceled it in 1990 and went a different direction in 1991. A direction which ultimately would end in the cancellation of the D&D line by 1994.
Rank stupidity is a possible explanation.
Possibly. But hindsight is 20-20.
The real question would be what the sales on the Expert, Companion, and Master sets looked like in 1989. If the sales on those products were flagging to a point where reprinting them was beginning to look like a questionable proposition, then TSR's decision to switch to a rebooted Basic + Cyclopedia model makes sense.
I think the root of their mistake remains the pay-for-preview nature of the post-1991 Basic Sets: Pay us $20 or $30 for a product which is designed to sell you a different product. And once you buy that product, the Basic Set will never be used again.
This has three effects:
(1) When a new player joins an existing group, that group is not going to be using the
Basic Set and the new player is probably going to be told to skip buying it. This means that you're creating a segment of your potential audience which is skipping the product.
(2) Savvy customers are going to skip the pay-to-preview product and just buy the full rules. At best they will feel like the company was trying to pull a fast one on them. At worst, this will sour them on the idea of trying the game and/or confuse them so that they end up not making the purchase.
(3) Customers who end up buying the pay-to-preview product had a high probability of feeling like they got ripped off when they figure out that they bought the "wrong" book.
Anyway, long tangent short: D&D experienced its largest success when it had an accessible, all-in-one box that
wasn't a pay-to-preview product. It would be nice if WotC seriously considered marketing the game that way again.
(The Essentials line arguably makes it all worse. You now have three different entry points to the game all labeled with an identical trademark: The Basic Set, the Essentials Compendium + Heroes trilogy, and the core rulebook trilogy. For a product line which is ostensibly about making it clearer to the consumer what books they're supposed to be buying, this looks like a complete failure to my eye.)
