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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Echohawk" data-source="post: 9565587" data-attributes="member: 9849">I've been thinking about the seemingly conflicting points of view on the financial success of 4e that we have from various parties and wondering if there is anyway to reconcile them. I think there may be. I reread [USER=8461]@Alzrius[/USER]'s summary of Riggs's presentation at GenCon 2023 as well as [USER=11365]@Alphastream[/USER]'s analysis of the various comments made by WotC staffers that 4e sales were solid. Something that leapt out at me was that despite [USER=7034611]@mamba[/USER] repeatedly claiming that Riggs said 4e was the worst selling edition, that's not what Alzrius wrote in their summary. They wrote: "At that point, Riggs noted that the 4E PHB sold far less than the 3E PHBs." For me this is an important distinction, because PHB sales is not the same thing as overall sales across an edition, especially when it comes to 4E. So let's assume that Riggs is correct on this specific point (that the 4E PHB sold less than the 3E PHBs), but also assume that Chris Sims is telling the truth when he says "the game did fine early in its life cycle" and that Alphastream is correct when he writes "4E [had] stronger presales and opening sales than 3E" and "Sales held strong throughout the edition's lifetime" and "4E enjoyed strong book sales, although they declined over time as all prior editions have declined". A key point in reconciling those is Chris Sims's comment that "Part of 4e's problem was too many books too quickly from the game's inception". Another important point is realising that the content that would usually have gone into the PHB was, in 4e, split across the PHB1, the PHB2 and (to a lesser extent) the PHB3. So let's spit-ball/make up some numbers that would support all of these facts. <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The 3.5 PHB sells 300,000 units. It does this over (mostly) six years, with sales of, say, 120k, 60k, 50k, 40k, 20k, 10k. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The 4E PHB sells only 200,000 units, and it does almost of these sales over the first three years, with sales of 150k, 30k, 20k. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The 4E PHB2 sells 120,000 units. It sells better than non-core 3E books because, for 4E it is also core. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The 4E PHB3 sells 60,000 units, etc. </li> </ul> In this scenario, it would be true that 4E had stronger initial sales than 3.5. Riggs would be still be correct when comparing total sales of just the 4E PHB against the 3.5 PHB. And, because WotC was churning out so many core books, it would also be the case that 4E had strong sales overall. Voilà! Of course, this doesn't resolve the question of whether or not 4E was the worst selling edition. To determine that, we'd first need to agree on how to measure. Is "worst selling" determined solely by number of PHB1's sold? Total print products sales over the lifespan of the edition? Total revenue earned including digital sales (which were significant for 4E)? Good luck getting agreement on that! And even if there was agreement on how to measure "worst selling", we still simply don't have enough information to answer the question. For now, at least, I don't think anyone on this thread can really make credible claims about 4E being the "worst selling" edition (or not!).</blockquote>

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