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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MerricB" data-source="post: 8307348" data-attributes="member: 3586">I'm going to be quite brutal here: When you have a game that sells 1,000,000 units, and the next edition of that game sells 100,000 units, then the opinions of those who loved the later edition don't matter so much. (These are not the actual numbers, but read on...)As we get further away from 4E, it's becoming very clear that the sales numbers were catastrophically bad. At the end of 2010, two years after its release, icv2 was reporting 4E was tied with PF for first spot in sales in hobby stores. By Q2, 2011, PF was in first spot.D&D, under usual circumstances, has 10:1 or 100:1 sales over any other RPG.And that's why, when 5E rolled around, it wasn't a "fixed" 4E. For all the brilliant design decisions in 4E - and I DMed two campaigns to 30th level in it - it was rejected by the wider gaming population.We do not know exactly how bad 4E sales were, but I think, after the bounce of the initial release (when everyone was curious about the new edition), ongoing sales dropped to 50% of 3E or perhaps even lower.This is why I'm interested in seeing with RPGs took advantage of 4E's failure to rise up in prominence. Because it is the era when you can test if "4E's lack of dominance is good for other RPGs".The game I'm now paying attention to is Fate Core, which got into the Top 5 of the icv2 lists for several quarters, while ALSO publishing quarterly sales numbers. (It's selling about 1,500-2,000 copies a quarter during the time when it was hitting Top 5).How does this compare to D&D? We don't know. However, by some posts I've seen, the PHB was selling 100,000+ copies a year during the 1E era. (Those are evergreen sales). Expressed quarterly, that's 25,000+ copies - or over 10 times the sales of FATE Core when it was doing strongly. Is that comparable to today? I suspect so, but I don't know.(Wizards' goal with D&D is to sell a wildly popular RPG.)Cheers!</blockquote>

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