D&D 5E (2024) One Store's Sales (D&D 2014 & 2024)

[Reynard]

Oh, yeah, it isn't "real information" in that sense.

Nevertheless, books released after Behond starts direct physical sales are selling less, which would match with statements about the success of direct sales for WotC.

I have a friend who runs a game club in his school, and he says that it is very common for the players to use Beyond while the GM still runs from books. I wonder how typical that is.

 

[Parmandur]

I have a friend who runs a game club in his school, and he says that it is very common for the players to use Beyond while the GM still runs from books. I wonder how typical that is.

Beyond has marketed hard to school clubs, so probably pretty common.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Eyeballing the data it seems like for recent releases (so 5.5e and tail end of 5e) you tend to sell way more of the Exclusive / Alternate covers, while for the earlier 5e releases it doesn't seem to follow this trend as much

I'm wondering if that indicates DnD Beyond direct orders starting to dominate the market of players who just want the product at the cheapest price available, while collectors who are more willing to spend extra money preferring to support a local game store over WotC.

There are many factors in play when it comes to that. In no particular order:

1) Both our orders (the number I "guess" we will need), and our allocations (the number they choose to actually provide us) doesn't ever really line up consistently. On top of THAT, we can't assume that I ever "guess" correctly for how many we should have.
2) Sometimes the Exclusive covers are AWESOME compared to the "regular" one, and sometimes they are not - and this is a matter of opinion (though one that builds to something like a consensus.
3) Some of the exclusive covers, not only did we get 100% of what we ordered, but they were available for reorders, sometimes for many months.
4) Amazon's deep discounts on early 2014 books was "worse" than Beyond for stealing sales. Amazon often priced core books at cheaper than MY COST - making it cheaper for US to get them on Amazon, rather than from WotC through our distributor.
5) This is probably most important - the Exclusives are, as I've shown, only usually available for a brief spell, and often not even in full quantities to what I "expect" (read: guess) we will sell. So, once we're out of them, we only have Regular Covers to sell. It's not a choice for customers who wait. So, initially, the vast majority of our sales (this goes all the way back to the earliest releases that had them) are for Exclusives, and then the ongoing (later) sales are all Regulars. There's always a couple of people who like the Regular better, or people who just don't care and literally grab the first one they lay their hands on.

You're absolutely right that there's also a ton of people, even some who frequent my shop, that will buy theirs from Amazon (early on) and Beyond (now). But we always have to remember, that they move a copy here and a copy there. So we should never underestimate the effect that TIME has on the sales of the Regular cover when compared to the Exclusive. Generally, all the Exclusive covers sell in the first couple of weeks to the hard-core customer, and the "tail" is made entirely of Regulars.

So, in the cases where the book has been out for a long time, the Regular cover will naturally (eventually) beat out the Exclusive, but keep in mind all of the above.

For our Extreme Example, I'll give you: The 2024 Monster Manual vs Ghost of Saltmarsh. MM24 was so heavily allocated (something that I didn't think would happen - I had hoped that they would have learned from how the PHB24 did by Feb25, but I think that maybe they were too busy starting the reprint of the PHB24 to give full attention to MM24) that we didn't receive enough copies of the MM24 to COVER PREORDERS. They allocated our Exclusive covers down to about 2/3 of what I'd ordered. That would have been less disastrous had they told us that it would happen (we got 100% of our order for DMG24, for example) and we'd have upped our order for the MM Regular. But they didn't. AND then they didn't have MM24 Regular covers available for about a month, either. So we sold out within days of release. In fact, because we get them two weeks early, we didn't have any at all by release date.

On the flipside, Ghosts of Saltmarsh (a decent book) had a, let's say "somewhat ugly" Exclusive cover (in particular if we compare it to the earlier Hydro covers) which was available, not only at 100% of our order, but available at our distributor (in the warehouse) for, I think, at least a year. I would say that "it didn't sell well" but our chart up there doesn't agree. That's because it sold very slowly over time, with no one being particularly excited by it, but the numbers add up.

I would say that a LOT of the Exclusive covers would have done much better had they been available. But enforced scarcity is part of their "charm", right? Ultimately, our orders, and WotC's print run (and presumably our individual distributor ordering correctly as well) makes as much or more difference when it comes to Exclusives as our customers' buying desires does. There is a "sweet spot" where they all line up - and there's the two examples above (others were similar) where they do not.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I already celebrate the collective misremembering of the "Mines of Phandelver" as being plural, since to me it stands for how the module grew in 5e folk memory far beyond its humble origins as the budget-conscious taster adventure. So I really love that in your store they are also "Last" instead of "Lost".

I typed that in when I posted the chart - the store has it listed as STARTER SET and I wanted to be more clear here. But I'd call that a typo or more likely a brain worm. I'm aware that it's called Lost Mines. Must be, like you say, from seeing it typed that way too often.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Ah, of course. I saw "23-Aug" and assumed it meant August the 23rd, and so on. Silly me.

I don't know why excel was spitting out the dates in that order. I agree with you that it's a strange way to write August 2023.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

The big takeaway from that is that adventures sold a lot better than settings. If that's reflected in WotC's data, it would suggest that the current setting/adventure ratio is too high.

I don't think that you can really conclude this. What is an Adventure and what is a Setting is pretty muddled in 5e. I don't think that a "regular" person can tell the difference. OTOH, the products that WE would list as "Settings" are usually the experimental, often Magic The Gathering or Critical Role - related books, and the Adventures are mainstream Forgotten Realms. I would suggest that that nature is our meaningful difference, not Adventure vs Setting.

Additionally, the Anthologies have done quite well, which might be setting agnostic, for the most part, (in spite of being shoehorned into the Realms) but the important bit with them is that they are easier to crib bits out of.

And now we have "Setting" material that is also both Crunch (in the form of Heroes of Faerun), and Encounter-based (Adventures of Faerun). It's a whole different animal, IMO. We'll have to see how it does long-term.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Actually, I'd say that the big takeaway is that most books started selling a lot more slowly at @FitzTheRuke FLGS starting about late 2022...when Beyond introduced direct sales of physical books with Dragonlance and moving forwards.

You may be right, but there were also other reasons. Knowing my customers is a big part of how I do business (I generally know what they will buy better than they do - it's exhausting, but it's how I do as well as I do) - and there were multiple general consensuses around that time:

• The "whales" finally got overwhelmed with 5e product. They had kept up buying everything up until around then, and they started to realize the raw amount that they hadn't yet used. Adventures that weren't played (because they were coming out faster than they could be played), that sort of thing.
• A few products that they maybe had bought were less-than-well received.
• They were faced with upcoming products that looked like more of the same.

These added up to, for the first time with 5e, more and more of the "full line" feeling "skippable". And once a "whale" starts skipping products, the "spell is broken" and they can skip more and more.

Truly. People who had bought 100% of 5e material (usually not including side-stuff like official dice) now dropped to one or two books a year. While WotC produced up to, what, six?

I personally felt that that made more of a difference, but it looks like it's probably true that DDB's bundles made a difference too. And it makes sense. It's the only way to get digital AND physical without paying TWICE.

 

[Parmandur]

You may be right, but there were also other reasons. Knowing my customers is a big part of how I do business (I generally know what they will buy better than they do - it's exhausting, but it's how I do as well as I do) - and there were multiple general consensuses around that time:

• The "whales" finally got overwhelmed with 5e product. They had kept up buying everything up until around then, and they started to realize the raw amount that they hadn't yet used. Adventures that weren't played (because they were coming out faster than they could be played), that sort of thing.
• A few products that they maybe had bought were less-than-well received.
• They were faced with upcoming products that looked like more of the same.

These added up to, for the first time with 5e, more and more of the "full line" feeling "skippable". And once a "whale" starts skipping products, the "spell is broken" and they can skip more and more.

Truly. People who had bought 100% of 5e material (usually not including side-stuff like official dice) now dropped to one or two books a year. While WotC produced up to, what, six?

I personally felt that that made more of a difference, but it looks like it's probably true that DDB's bundles made a difference too. And it makes sense. It's the only way to get digital AND physical without paying TWICE.

And as you say, Amazon pricing was probably juat as much as detriment: I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the folks who transitioned to buying direct had been prior Amazon customers for D&D products.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

And as you say, Amazon pricing was probably juat as much as detriment: I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the folks who transitioned to buying direct had been prior Amazon customers for D&D products.

Yeah, I think that's actually a big takeaway here. It explains why WotC "fixed" the "Amazon problem" of deep-discounting the books. It wasn't to protect us FLGSes who were losing sales (and frustratingly being undercut at our freaking COST) to Amazon, but so that they themselves would be more competitive when selling their bundles.

But yes, we've probably lost some sales to the bundles. I know that we have customers who only buy digital on Beyond, ones that buy Exclusives from us and digital from DDB, and, of course, ones that only buy Physical from us. Of course there's (VancouverITES, by the way) who buy the bundles. I don't think that there's many who used to buy from us who switched to DDB bundles, but it looks like it's obviously some.

 

[Reynard]

(VancouverITES, by the way)

Vancwhoovians is infinitely more suprabundilious.