That's because most of Pathfinder's material is sold online through their subscription plan so it's only fitting that D&D sold more in stores.
Sure, and if the WotC community DDI group numbers were to be believed, 4e was pulling in millions in DDI subscriptions. But neither company has shared their numbers.
So both are just sources of uncertainty.
It may be "common wisdom" but there are still exceptions. Pathfinder most notably, began with perhaps 10 percent market share and then grew that substantially until their market share was larger than WotC's.
Of course, Pathfinder was a product line of adventures before a D&D 3.5 clone was added to it. What year is that 10% from?
They are on record as stating that their selling of Core Rulebooks increased over time, not decreased. It may have plateaued already, but they most certainly grew in popularity and it was not the 1st edition of their rulebook that sold the best I don't think.
They're on record as saying a lot of things when preaching to their choir of devoted fans, but it's not like they opened their ledgers to the public. But, it's certainly plausible that, as 3.5 holdouts got bored with it, they migrated to Pathfinder.
Like I said, with very little hard information, it's very easy to devise a plausible scenario to your liking.
Core-books aside, I would not be surprised if there were more ADnD players at the end of the 1st edition then at the beginning.
I would be shocked. In the early 80s, D&D was a fad, there were tons of people at least trying it. In '89, at the end of AD&D 1e's run, that had dropped off precipitously, down to the hard-core that still sustains the game today.
(If you want anecdotes, when I started in 1980, my entire circle of junior-high friends were playing and we were not alone, by junior year in high school there were two of us still interested. In 1978 there were 3 gaming stores with in-store D&D being played in the area - The Dragon's Den, The Game Reserve, and The Game Table. By '88, they had all closed their doors. And I was the last GM running AD&D when the Game Table closed - the other games being run there were Champions, Battletech, Traveler and GURPS.)
Likewise, with 2nd and 3rd edition.
2nd edition went into the teeth of the CCG, LARP, indie and Storytelling trends in gaming. Young players virtually disappeared from D&D tables, taking up M:tG instead, existing ones abandoned the game, WWGS and SJG were rapidly becoming the headspace leaders in the industry, which became increasingly fragmented into myriad 'not D&D' (D&D being the poster boy for despised 'ROLL playing') niches. I'm fairly confident that 2e saw a further decline in numbers of players, but I can't cite numbers to prove it - AFAIK, there aren't any. But the visible trends of the decade all point that way.
All that turned around with 3.0 & d20. Players came back to D&D, and erstwhile direct competitors jumped on the d20 bandwagon.
Contrarily, it seems to me that there were less observable 4e players at the end of the run of that edition than at the beginning. Thus they ended weaker than they began.
It seems that way to you because of your personal confirmation bias. It seemed to me like there were remarkably /more/, and that very few of them were longtime players. Different points of view in different contexts. Hard numbers would be needed to resolve that difference. Hard numbers I'm afraid probably don't exist.
Presumably, though, 4e followed the usual trend in sales, starting strong with the core books and tapering off - just like every other edition has.
Which is a mostly irrelevant point to the discussion. The success of DnD as an RPG is gauged by its success within the market that exists.
That's one gauge. It's not the one that matters to WotC, it's success within the context of being a unit of Hasbro that matters. IcV2 reported the in-store sales of TTRPGs as 15 mill, out of almost half a million in the slightly broader 'hobby games' segment it was tracking, with CCGs accounting for most of it. WotC has one TTRPG it's producing ATM, and owns several more, they're obviously bringing in less than 15 mill. WotC also own several CCGs, including two of the most popular of all time. One of them brings in over 100 million. In that context, D&D is a low-performing product line. Hasbro is a 7 billion dollar company. In that context, WotC is a good performing unit, thanks, for now, only to it's CCGs. Winning the TTRPG market with D&D - even sowing it up entirely - wouldn't change that. Growing the market by a factor of 5 or 10 and winning it would - that's what they tried, and failed, to do with 4e (mainly via DDI and on-line products that never materialized). They're obviously not trying to do it now.
It might be "easy" to do, but that does not prove everyone does it.
There's simply not enough data for proof, so it's all anyone /can/ pull together. So, yes, constructing plausible-with-enough-confirmation-bias scenarios is what everyone is doing in discussions like this.
