One Year Later: D&D 5E PHB & MM Still On NYT Bestseller Lists

It's been year since D&D 5th Edition hit our store shelves (if we're counting the Starter Set); or since August 2014 since the Player's Handbook released. The D&D 5th Edition Monster Manual is hanging in at #7 on the "Games & Activities" bestsellers list at the New York Times, while the Player's Handbook is #3. Although it seems Minecraft has books, which are kicking both their asses. Who knew? (Lots of people, apparently!)

You can see the current list here. A snapshot is below.

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[Greg Benage]

This is a useful list for tracking actual sales on all Amazon sites per month: http://www.novelrank.com/asin/0786965606

Novelrank is likely worse than useless unless the book's sales are very low.

http://louharper.blogspot.com/2013/08/novelrank-is-useless.html
http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?265134-Novel-Rank-s-Numbers-vs-Actual-Sales

The numbers on a high-selling line like 5e are almost certainly wildly inaccurate.

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

The storyline adventure books seem to be doing well too. At least for the time being, their strategy seems to be working. When sales of the PHB noticeably decline, that's when I suspect we'll see a print Unearthed Arcana or the like.

 

[DEFCON 1]

The lesson here is that Pathfinder is still selling well, and 5E is still selling well. If you like a particular style of Dungeons & Dragons, your game is still available for purchase and you'll probably find other people wanting to play it. You can get a D&D/PF game together and have a lot of fun doing it.

Really... what more is there to compare or worry about?

 

[spinozajack]

You know there were a LOT of people that said, "Sure it had a good launch but talk to me again after a year and well see if it's still selling well then".

OK...here we are. Let's talk.

I personally don't think of this as a year (for me it's a year after the last core book comes out that's most relevant). But this is "A" point to talk about.

It's a solid product with solid community and fan involvement that went into its development, and so reflects what the plurality of D&D gamers want out of, or like in, a D&D ruleset.

Those who hate it are a small minority.

It all comes down to the express design bias to make a game that feels and plays like D&D. Even while innovating and chopping out baggage and cruft and bloat and rules glut.

I feel like you can do more (like move attack move) in 5th using less rules, and those rules are more versatile, more realistic, more coherent, less jargony.

They deserve to run away with their success. And never forget the main lesson, the big reveal that even took them by surprise! People wanted a simple fighter they could play that just attacks. If you went by what the superfans said on the forums, you would have the battlemaster be in Basic D&D instead of the champion, and the champion probably wouldn't even exist. And possible Basic D&D as a concept wouldn't even exist. Simplicity is beautiful. Life is complex, many people don't want a complex mess of rules and powers just to play a fighter who bashes skulls in and takes monster's stuff.

To build on what you just said, I'm fairly sure those who denied 5th edition's early success was due to its rules and overall design being acceptable and even greatly enjoyed, have been proven wrong. And beware of goal posts being moved, "we should look at sales after 4-5 years to really tell anything". No, we know. Everyone I talk to, nearly every review I've seen has been loaded with superlatives for the new edition. It is a massive hit.

 

[spinozajack]

That Zelda book is solid gold; amazing coffee table book, well worth every penny.

It looks great, I'm getting that now.

I'm also looking forward to the new Wii U title coming out next year. Go left handed swordsmen! (and women! apparently you can play a female Link now, good. He was always somewhat elf-drogenous anyway, so why not)

 

[Windjammer]

Novelrank is likely worse than useless unless the book's sales are very low.

http://louharper.blogspot.com/2013/08/novelrank-is-useless.html
http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?265134-Novel-Rank-s-Numbers-vs-Actual-Sales

The numbers on a high-selling line like 5e are almost certainly wildly inaccurate.

Thanks for those links. I have no idea as to the degree of accuracy of Novel Rank, but I agree with your first author that, of necessity, NovelRank cannot track total sales volumes. For one, it does not index every possible sales site. Just as, obviously, Paizo sells more than 250 copies of its core book per month, owing to a multitude of sales channels not tracked by Novel Rank.
That said, the reasoning given by your first author to be skeptical of the site seems strange. He/She says, "The two [sc. actual and NovelRank sales figures] are unevenly off. The issue seems to be that NovelRank can capture only one sale an hour, regardless if there were one or a hundred." If this were true, then the site could not possibly more than 744 sales per month (for a month with 31 days, and obviously 24 hours each). But that is false, since the site consistently reports higher sales volume for the 5e PHB.

 

[Parmandur]

It looks great, I'm getting that now.

I'm also looking forward to the new Wii U title coming out next year. Go left handed swordsmen! (and women! apparently you can play a female Link now, good. He was always somewhat elf-drogenous anyway, so why not)

That game looks amazing; can't wait!

 

[Greg Benage]

That said, the reasoning given by your first author to be skeptical of the site seems strange. He/She says, "The two [sc. actual and NovelRank sales figures] are unevenly off. The issue seems to be that NovelRank can capture only one sale an hour, regardless if there were one or a hundred." If this were true, then the site could not possibly more than 744 sales per month (for a month with 31 days, and obviously 24 hours each). But that is false, since the site consistently reports higher sales volume for the 5e PHB.

Yeah, the blogger should probably have said something like "one sales estimate per hour." The way it seems to work is that, when the Amazon rankings are updated each hour, NovelRank looks at the ranking, direction and degree of movement and then makes a guess about the number of books sold. The consensus is that this works pretty well when the number of sales (and sales/hour) are very low, but it becomes increasingly inaccurate as sales increase. It's a pretty safe bet that bestselling books like the PHB and Pathfinder have Amazon sales that are multiples of their NovelRank figures, but there's no way to say what those multiples are.

 

[Windjammer]

Thanks, Greg, that makes a lot of sense. I now understand much better what the blog author intended, and also how NR actually works.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

You know there were a LOT of people that said, "Sure it had a good launch but talk to me again after a year and well see if it's still selling well then".

OK...here we are. Let's talk.

I personally don't think of this as a year (for me it's a year after the last core book comes out that's most relevant). But this is "A" point to talk about.

It's definitely great news for WotC and D&D in general. I know it's not been a big hit with existing roleplayers who I know, but it has got new (or very-long-lapsed) people into the game. That's been due to three things that I've seen (imho):

1) Perception that it's "new" and thus they can learn it/play themselves and without needing to learn a lot. This is of course a perception thing - all editions have been the same way, but it matters.

2) Really good marketing appealing to a younger generation of gamers, many of whom have heard of and are interested in pen & paper RPGs conceptually, but have never played them (but have played CRPGs etc. - particularly Skyrim and Dark Souls). Most 5E groups I know of are in their 20s and have no P&P experience.

3) Good rulebook design which gets people excited about stuff whilst minimizing the "I have to learn what?!" factor.

They could have done better on many things, but it's really solid for people who don't expect specific things.

Of course, there are more potential sales down the road - I mean, for example, the reasons I've not bought it, for example, remain the same, and could still be fixed by WotC:

A) No digital tools (and not even PDFs) together with a system complex enough to benefit them (unlike, say, Dungeon World). That's a dealbreaker for me.

B) Lack of content.