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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imaro" data-source="post: 6527329" data-attributes="member: 48965">Yes but by only examining PHB 2 you're disregarding the performance of the splatbooks that came before it.  I also think much of PHB2's positive sales was due to the fact that it contained what many considered basic classes (Druid, Bard, etc.) and races (H-Orc)...I think a more interesting question would be how did the first round of "power" books sell?  These were the initial splat-books and were not propped up by the holding back of certain races/classes as PHB 2 was... I honestly don't know how they sold then but when looking at amazon now for a relative comparison... Martial Power (Nov 2008) is ranked #253,556 in Books, Arcane Power (April 2009) is ranked  #446,416 in Books Divine Power (July 2009) is ranked  #462,491 in Books Martial Power 2 (Feb 2010) is ranked #563,751 in Bookswhile PHB 2 (Mar.17 2009) is ranked #94,907 in Books...  This, admittedly limited, evidence seems to indicate PHB 2 is a bt of an anomaly when looking at the entire run of 4e books... in that it sold considerably better then all the splatbooks... so I think it's a little misleading to use PHB 2 as evidence to your claim that classic 4e was selling well...  On amazon, as of this post the essentials books are ranked as follows...HotFL    #454,694 in BooksHotFK    #300,834 in BooksRC         #185,027 in BooksDM Kit   #439,076 in BooksThis seems to indicate that the essentials line sold on par with the splat books for classic 4e... I think the biggest issue essentials had was in the confusion over whether they were splatbooks for classic 4e or new corebooks....  WotC was looking for the revenue of corebooks but confused their message by trying to placate 4e fans... IMO, they should have called it a revision, labeled it 4.5 and said it was fully compatible with 4.0.I think the question is... under-performed compared to what?  The core and PHB 2... sure... but then these weren't marketed as a new core... well actually they kind of suffered from confused marketing.  That said compared to the actual splat books, they did pretty well, in line with and even exceeding some of the previous splats for classic 4e... The problem was that WotC wanted corebook sales without having to label them as such... it just doesn't work like that.</blockquote>

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