D&D 5E (2024) Is WOTC done publishing campaigns?

[Zardnaar]

you do not have hard number of players for 1e or 5e, you may have hard number of PHB sales for 1e, but that is about it

I am not sure why WotC is cagey outside of a ‘it is always better to have some wiggle room’ approach, I however doubt that 1e sales have anything to do with it

1E is the highest one we have hard numbers for. 5E has trounerd it even with low estimates.

 

[ECMO3]

The US population in 1980 was 226m
The US population in 2026 is 341m

That's about a 50% increase in population. So a 50% increase in sales would be matching sales.

D&D is much more of an international game than it was then, so I don't know that the U.S population is that relevant. 1E D&D had some traction in the UK and Canada, but it was not marketed and sold worldwide like 5E is.

I think 5E written books are printed in 6 languages? I have heard there were a few Spanish 1E PHBs from the first printing in the late 70s, but if they existed they were very rare and I don't think there are any other languages 1E was printed in.

 

[Cergorach]

D&D is much more of an international game than it was then, so I don't know that the U.S population is that relevant. 1E D&D had some traction in the UK and Canada, but it was not marketed and sold worldwide like 5E is.

I think 5E written books are printed in 6 languages? I have heard there were a few Spanish 1E PHBs from the first printing in the late 70s, but if they existed they were very rare and I don't think there are any other languages 1E was printed in.

I wonder... Are you an American or from somewhere else?

D&D was popular in the 80s across all of Europe that wasn't the Soviet Union, maybe not in the same way as it was in the US, but there were translations all over the place. But it had competition from other pnp RPGs games as well... Translations of the Basic D&D Red Box were done in many languages, I know of the German one and the Dutch one. Especially the Dutch one (which I still own) was a minor miracle, at the time there were not even 15 million Dutch citizens (but there were less then 6 million Flemish Belgians as well that would speak Dutch as their main language). And I seem to remember seeing some French D&D stuff as a child (when going there on vacation). And that's besides folks just preferring the English versions of the D&D books (like myself), over the native language products.

Some interesting German D&D history: The history of german D&D/AD&D as I know it • Collecting General • The Acaeum

Back in the 80s there were international distributors that bought products in the US and sold them all over the place. And of course vice versa.