D&D 5E PHB is #3 right now on "Amazon's Hot New Releases"

[Mistwell]

Cut a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with the topic and just distracts

I guess we're going to do this the 'pulling teeth' way.

Question 1. Is there a different version of D&D that you prefer? Is there bitterness there over something WOTC did that is lasting with you?

 

[Lalato]

100% of my group is playing 5e every Tuesday. . 100% of my group in the early 2000s played 3e.

Yes, I know it's a meaningless stat. But that's the same amount of data that exists on how many people are playing 5e vs 3e.

 

[Parmandur]

0% of the people in my group were playing 3e before 2004, and 75% never played 3e in any form.

 

[Zardnaar]

I guess we're going to do this the 'pulling teeth' way.

Question 1. Is there a different version of D&D that you prefer? Is there bitterness there over something WOTC did that is lasting with you?

No real preference but if I had to pick one it would be 2E. Anything but 4E is my D&D of choice as such. WoTC did blow up the Realms and trash Dragon and Dungeon so there is that. THey may have also run over my cat.

 

[Sailor Moon]

I'm sorry but trying to compare online services and usage from 2000 to now is absolutely ludicrous and makes me want to tell them to please educate themselves. Amazon was not selling back then like they are now because the populace didn't fully trust online shopping. The online bubble wasn't about shopping on Amazon or Ebay. FLGS and big retail bookstores are where most of your RPG's were bought and saying otherwise is just flat out wrong.

Making Amazon your measuring stick for success is just grasping at straws for some kind of confirmation of victory. We will never know the answer to which one would have sold better online because you are dealing with a 14 year difference which is huge.

 

[Halivar]

I'm sorry but trying to compare online services and usage from 2000 to now is absolutely ludicrous and makes me want to tell them to please educate themselves. Amazon was not selling back then like they are now because the populace didn't fully trust online shopping. The online bubble wasn't about shopping on Amazon or Ebay. FLGS and big retail bookstores are where most of your RPG's were bought and saying otherwise is just flat out wrong.

Making Amazon your measuring stick for success is just grasping at straws for some kind of confirmation of victory. We will never know the answer to which one would have sold better online because you are dealing with a 14 year difference which is huge.

Total products? Sure. Books? Not as huge as you think, as Mistwell has cogently argued a few pages back.

 

[TerraDave]

"All" these rankings tell us is that the PHB has been a top selling book, relative to all other books, for around seven weeks now. At one point it was the top selling book. And not just on Amazon.

We also do know that no other role-playing book has come close to this in the last decade (including anything for 4E or Pathfinder). We have been told that the 3E PHB sold a lot in 2000. Mearls has said that 5E is doing better at this point...but sales where huge for 3E in its first year. We can neither confirm nor deny that 3E got into the top ten on any rankings (though it does seem like someone would have posted about it if it had).

Thats "it".

 

[TerraDave]

Seven weeks latter, D&D is still the top five in fantasy gaming (I think that Zelda book had snuck in there, but is back in its place).

Going through the top 5:

#1PHB 25 overall, 17 in most wished for
#2 MM 36 overall, 17 in new releases
#3 Starter Set 139 overall, higher then when I started this thread
#4 DMG 280 overall, 66 in new releases
#5 HotDQ 442 overall, this seems low, but does beat every other gaming book/product, (hence the ranking).

 

[Mistwell]

I'm sorry but trying to compare online services and usage from 2000 to now is absolutely ludicrous and makes me want to tell them to please educate themselves.

Well, that's insulting, and false.

Amazon was not selling back then like they are now because the populace didn't fully trust online shopping. The online bubble wasn't about shopping on Amazon or Ebay. FLGS and big retail bookstores are where most of your RPG's were bought and saying otherwise is just flat out wrong.

I cited the actual Amazon book sales numbers from 2000 versus now. It's not that different. It's up, but not by the exponential numbers people seem to think. When facts disagree with your instincts, facts still win. I've gone through the actual facts in this thread. You can review it, or just pretend you know better and not read it and tell people to educate themselves for disagreeing with your uneducated instincts.

 

[Mistwell]

Mearls had said contradictory statements though and he has been very careful how he has worded things. IIRC he claimed 4E for example sold well initially but only compared it to D&D he or WoTC had seen so it is unclear if he is comparing to 3.0, 3.5 or 3rd ed overall and he did not compare it to something like the original boxed set.

He clarified he meant it sold better than both 3.0e and 3.5e, initially. In fact he said 3.5e initial sales were better than 3.0e initial sales. I am sure someone around here can dig up that quote.

He also did not answer when asked a direct question about why make 5E if 4E sold so well.

He answered it quite well actually.

We were talking about the growth of D&D over the various editions. And Mearls explained to (without giving any solid numbers) that each edition of D&D had been successful. D&D had enjoyed a steady growth over all the various editions. More people were playing D&D every year and with each new edition. And that seemed like good news, so I asked the question that came naturally to me. “If that’s true, why are you scrapping 4E so soon and moving on to 5E?” I didn’t want to keep 4E, mind you. I’m not a fan of 4E. But if 4E had been successful and maintained the steady growth of D&D, it seemed like mothballing D&D for a two-year development cycle so quickly was weird decision. And here’s what he explained to me.

Mearls said that, even though the growth of D&D had been steady, something else had changed. In the prior five or ten years (remember, this was two years ago), there had been an explosion of people in geeky hobbies. More people than ever before were playing video games and MMOs, reading comics, watching comic and sci-fi and fantasy movies, watching anime, playing card games, playing board games, doing cosplay, attending conventions, and all that other crap that we gamers do aside from playing games. It was suddenly cool to be a geek. There were huge numbers of new geeks in the world. And every one of those new geeks was a potential D&D player.

But D&D wasn’t nabbing them. Somehow, D&D’s growth remained as steady as ever.

It’s like, imagine you have a fishing boat. And every day you go out and drag your net behind you and you catch some fish. And each day you catch a few more fish than the day before. Today you catch 100. Tomorrow, 105. The next day, 111. The day after, 118. And so on. That’s a steady 5% growth (approximately). But then, one day, imagine a tanker filled with thousands and thousands of fish crashes in your lake. And suddenly there are a thousands and thousands and thousands of extra fish swimming around. You’d expect your net to be a lot more full the next day, wouldn’t you? But the next day, you pull up 123 fish.

And that, Mearls explained to me, was what they wanted to do with 5E. They wanted to grab all those new players. They wanted D&D to be a simple gateway drug into role-playing games. To catch all those thousands and thousands of extra fish in the pond. They wanted to cast a wide net.

That is a good, direct answer. It explains a lot.