Pathfinder 2E Release Day Second Edition Amazon Sales Rank

[Snarf Zagyg]

I think that is part of it. But this has happened at least three times now. So there does seem to be some underlying pattern. I wonder if there are large(ish) groups of related purchases.
Or maybe it is just what you are saying.
I dunno.

Up is good. How's that for a conclusion?

I found this quickly googling (not going to say it's 100% correct, but it's better than my speculation):

Amazon Sales Ranking and Calculator for Authors - Rob Eagar

Discover what the Amazon sales ranking really means and use a handy calculator to project your book sales in real-time from marketing expert, Rob Eagar.

www.startawildfire.com

It looks like the difference between #2,500 and #5,000 is .... 25 copies sold per day.

So random variance. In addition, it updates every hour, so it might just be someone ordered it right before you looked, and there were no orders when I looked.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

In comparison, the difference between:
1. The number I see for PF2 equates to 55 books a day.
2. The best number you saw (2974) equates to 66 books a day.
3. The worst number for 5e (127) equates to 562 books a day.
4. Whereas for 5e to move to 118 equates to 587 books a day.

Another way to look at this is that Pathfinder2 can "move up" 1000 spots because of a fairly random 11 book fluctuation, whereas that wouldn't even be noticeable for D&D.

Or .... noise.

(Source- Amazon Book Sales Calculator | TCK Publishing again, not claiming it's the gospel, just what I googles)

 

[Porridge]

I just looked and it says #3761.

Yeah, the ranking posted on Amazon changes from hour to hour. What you want to look at is a daily aggregator of the ranking which is much more stable. The daily aggregate numbers are the one's I've been posting, taken from here:

Amazon Sales Estimator

I found this quickly googling (not going to say it's 100% correct, but it's better than my speculation):

Amazon Sales Ranking and Calculator for Authors - Rob Eagar

Discover what the Amazon sales ranking really means and use a handy calculator to project your book sales in real-time from marketing expert, Rob Eagar.

www.startawildfire.com

It looks like the difference between #2,500 and #5,000 is .... 25 copies sold per day.

So random variance. In addition, it updates every hour, so it might just be someone ordered it right before you looked, and there were no orders when I looked.

There's a lot of variation between these different predictors. For example, this calculator (looking at monthly sales):

https://www.tckpublishing.com/amazon-book-sales-calculator/

yields significantly greater differences than this one:

FREE Amazon Sales Estimator - Predict Your Sales | Rank Calculator

And more generally, if you look at the first link I posted above, you can get up to 2 years of data on the daily aggregate scores for various books. If you look at that, you'll see there are definitely spikes and valleys, which makes it worth looking at values averaged over a couple days. But you'll also see clear trends at various points, especially if you find large swings in values that are consistent over a couple of days (as in this case).

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

. But you'll also see clear trends at various points, especially if you find large swings in values that are consistent over a couple of days (as in this case).

Right ... but it seems that large swings for books down on the list just don’t matter in comparison to small swings at the top of the list.
In other words, going from 3000 to 2000 and back to 3000 isn’t the same as going from 120 to 130 and back again.

its comparing apples to Death Stars.

 

[JFranklin3000]

Right ... but it seems that large swings for books down on the list just don’t matter in comparison to small swings at the top of the list.
In other words, going from 3000 to 2000 and back to 3000 isn’t the same as going from 120 to 130 and back again.

its comparing apples to Death Stars.

yea the numbers are really confusing on what daily sales are between the different estimators. I saw one yesterday that had 108 as 32 books a day, and this one you have has 500 I really have no idea which one is right.

 

[darjr]

I think it depends upon the group. Out of ALL books is important.

 

[Morrus]

Really?

How big's the RPG market?

How big is the RPG market? Pretty damn tiny, is the answer. As of 2016/2017 it's about $35m in size, according to ICv2. That's of a Hobby Games market currently worth just over a billion dollars. The RPG segment is a mere 2.9% of the overall Hobby Games market, which includes boardgames...

www.enworld.org

Note those figures are four years old. The RPG market in NA is $80M now.

US/Canada Hobby Game Market ($ millions)

The below table is based on figures from ICv2. For timescale context, also compare chart changes with events listed in the chart [URL='https://www.enworld.org/threads/tsr-wotc-paizo-a-comparative-history.662357/']TSR, WotC, & Paizo: A Comparative History[/URL]. [ATTACH...

www.enworld.org

 

[BryonD]

I found this quickly googling (not going to say it's 100% correct, but it's better than my speculation):

Amazon Sales Ranking and Calculator for Authors - Rob Eagar

Discover what the Amazon sales ranking really means and use a handy calculator to project your book sales in real-time from marketing expert, Rob Eagar.

www.startawildfire.com

It looks like the difference between #2,500 and #5,000 is .... 25 copies sold per day.

So random variance. In addition, it updates every hour, so it might just be someone ordered it right before you looked, and there were no orders when I looked.

I was under the impression it is "updated hourly", but that update is a rolling average of a couple days or more. So it would take a pretty big slug to suddenly swing the number.

But maybe I'm just wrong there.

 

[Retreater]

The Roll20 version would benefit greatly of a fully functional charactermancer as well. The D&D 5e one is super helpful.

This would be fantastic. I wonder if it might be too late at this point, nearly a year after the game's release?
If Fantasy Grounds were an option for our group, we would've tried that. Unfortunately I vastly prefer Roll20 - which after having used both of them I can say that if Fantasy Grounds were the only VTT option, I'd not be gaming at all during this pandemic.

 

[Porridge]

In comparison, the difference between:
1. The number I see for PF2 equates to 55 books a day.
2. The best number you saw (2974) equates to 66 books a day.
3. The worst number for 5e (127) equates to 562 books a day.
4. Whereas for 5e to move to 118 equates to 587 books a day.

Another way to look at this is that Pathfinder2 can "move up" 1000 spots because of a fairly random 11 book fluctuation, whereas that wouldn't even be noticeable for D&D.

Or .... noise.

I think you got confused about which numbers I'm comparing. (Which is reasonable; I can see how my post was confusing without some context.) To help provide that context:

• The May 5th-7th numbers weren't the big dips and drops I was talking about -- those are the numbers I was saying were very stable. (As you say, the difference between 118 and 127, and between 2900 and 3700, is relatively small.)
• If you expand the earlier post I quoted, you'll see a description of the contrasting numbers I was talking about. These were differences between, for example, 50, 210, 25 and 120 (rough 5e averages, respectively, before the coronavirus slump/during the coronavirus slump/during its recent sale/during the last couple day slump). Those differences indicate substantial changes in sales numbers.
• The reason 5e numbers are interesting isn't because anyone thinks there's any real competition between 5e and PF2 -- 5e sales are an order of magnitude larger. The reason they're interesting is because there are big peaks and valleys to all TTRPG book sales throughout the year (e.g., there's always a big dip right around Christmas), and 5e sales are big enough and stable enough to provide a good reference point for whether an increase or decrease in sales of a product (e.g., PF2) is due to something specific to that product, or whether it's due to a general ebb/swell in TTRPG sales.
• In order to get a feel for assessing when changes are due to noise or not, I highly recommend looking at the first link I gave above, with the daily aggregate rankings over time. Looking through those gives one a clear sense for what the noisy changes of day-to-day variation look like, and what the trend line differences look like.

Right ... but it seems that large swings for books down on the list just don’t matter in comparison to small swings at the top of the list.
In other words, going from 3000 to 2000 and back to 3000 isn’t the same as going from 120 to 130 and back again.

Yeah, absolutely true. (And I'll add to this that the interesting differences are percentage increases/decreases in sales, not how many books were sold. A 200 book difference in monthly sales is a much bigger deal for Paizo than for WotC.)

But the shifts I was talking about take that into account. E.g., the PF2 numbers I was comparing were numbers in the 3000 range (over the last couple days) and numbers in the 5000-10000 range (averaging around 7500) that PF2 has been mired in since early March.