Man in the Funny Hat
Hero
Hard to compare from these charts settings sales from their introduction through the periods when NEW settings are introduced (and sometimes introduced again or updated or revised or... etc) but my understanding is that what will become evident is that ,in general, each new setting sold less than the new setting before it, that sales of the newest setting also dropped off more quickly, and it might even be possible to see immediate decreases in sales of other settings when another new one is introduced. At least, that's what Dancey said that Wizards found when THEY first started analyzing TSR's sales (something that apparently TSR themselves never did).
The actual numbers are likely just a curiosity at this point. Because TSR's sales practices and product creation were SO screwed up the numbers can't possibly really be translated as evidence of, say, ACTUAL popularity of a setting. When TSR was putting out a new setting or RE-introducing a revised/altered setting nearly every year they weren't always selling to NEW gamers. If you start with 1 setting (World1), everybody is gonna buy it because it's the only setting you sell. When you introduce a second one, then each NEW gaming group will be choosing between them - and only a limited percentage of OLD gaming groups are going to switch settings, cancelling their current ongoing campaign to start a campaign set in the NEW setting of World2. By the time you're already selling 4 different settings and introduce a 5th, then ALL the completely new gamers are going to split their purchases of the game world they choose to play in among all the ones that are available to buy. Similarly, current gaming groups that DO start a new campaign may not even buy a new setting to do so. They may have already bought one the previous 4 and simply not used it yet. If the established group DOES buy a new setting, now instead of 4 to choose from there's 5. So instead of sales more assuredly going to brand-new World5, the sales for those groups are being split among World1 to World4. And all of that is assuming they are interested in even buying a setting to use rather than going with a homebrew or a setting from another game publisher entirely. And then there's the number of new players coming into the game itself to consider. When expansion of the customer base slows, so do sales of EVERYTHING, especially settings which are a buy-once-and-it's-yours-forever product that few DM's or groups are actually just going to collect and let sit unused. When the expansion halts altogether or possibly even starts to shrink, then you are REALLY in trouble because the only people you're selling to at that point are by definition people who already have one or more settings that they have purchased and therefore less interested in buying another one just because it might be "New/Improved!"
All of that means that sales numbers actually fails to tell you anything meaningful other than the numbers were shrinking from every side and a lot of it was TSR's own fault. But we already knew that, when WotC bought TSR and Dancey eventually let the broad strokes of what he'd found in looking at their books be known.
So... curious, but without deep analysis (which I'm not gonna do...
) I don't see anything new being revealed.
The actual numbers are likely just a curiosity at this point. Because TSR's sales practices and product creation were SO screwed up the numbers can't possibly really be translated as evidence of, say, ACTUAL popularity of a setting. When TSR was putting out a new setting or RE-introducing a revised/altered setting nearly every year they weren't always selling to NEW gamers. If you start with 1 setting (World1), everybody is gonna buy it because it's the only setting you sell. When you introduce a second one, then each NEW gaming group will be choosing between them - and only a limited percentage of OLD gaming groups are going to switch settings, cancelling their current ongoing campaign to start a campaign set in the NEW setting of World2. By the time you're already selling 4 different settings and introduce a 5th, then ALL the completely new gamers are going to split their purchases of the game world they choose to play in among all the ones that are available to buy. Similarly, current gaming groups that DO start a new campaign may not even buy a new setting to do so. They may have already bought one the previous 4 and simply not used it yet. If the established group DOES buy a new setting, now instead of 4 to choose from there's 5. So instead of sales more assuredly going to brand-new World5, the sales for those groups are being split among World1 to World4. And all of that is assuming they are interested in even buying a setting to use rather than going with a homebrew or a setting from another game publisher entirely. And then there's the number of new players coming into the game itself to consider. When expansion of the customer base slows, so do sales of EVERYTHING, especially settings which are a buy-once-and-it's-yours-forever product that few DM's or groups are actually just going to collect and let sit unused. When the expansion halts altogether or possibly even starts to shrink, then you are REALLY in trouble because the only people you're selling to at that point are by definition people who already have one or more settings that they have purchased and therefore less interested in buying another one just because it might be "New/Improved!"
All of that means that sales numbers actually fails to tell you anything meaningful other than the numbers were shrinking from every side and a lot of it was TSR's own fault. But we already knew that, when WotC bought TSR and Dancey eventually let the broad strokes of what he'd found in looking at their books be known.
So... curious, but without deep analysis (which I'm not gonna do...
) I don't see anything new being revealed.
