The EN World Best Sellers List 4Q2015

Books have the New York Times (and many others) Bestsellers List. Movies and television shows have websites that track box office numbers and Nielsen ratings. Comics have sales lists all over the place. What we don’t have a lot of for role-playing games are lists of what is selling. There are some publishers who go public with their sales figures, but it is harder to build an overall idea of how things are working from something like that. Now we have an EN World Bestsellers List for RPGs.
Will these lists tell us what the most popular game in gaming is right now? No, but it will allow us to have a starting point for conversations. Which is a good thing.

Thanks go out especially to Michael Webb, VP of Marketing and Data Services for Alliance Game Distributors, helped me out by putting me in touch with those he considered to be “top retailers.” Hopefully we will see these articles on a quarterly basis. These lists all refer to the stores’ last quarter of 2015 sales.

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From Angie Blackmon of Dragons Lair Comics and Fantasy Austin, TX comes:

The top five RPG items overall are…
D&D 5th Edition PHB
D&D 5th Edition Starter Set
D&D 5th Edition DM Screen
D&D 5th Edition DMG
D&D Fantasy Miniatures Icons of the Realm (Assorted Sets)

The top five RPG systems are…
D&D 5th Edition
Pathfinder Core Rules
Fate Core Rules
Star Wars RPG Edge of the Empire
Shadowrun RPG 5th Edition

This information is from our Merchandising Manager, Michael Wolff, on indie RPGs.
"First, the new version of the Dragon Age RPG released this year and it’s a marked improvement over the previous version. Green Ronin streamlined their system a lot and pulled from all corners of the Dragon Age world to make new character options, backgrounds, and campaign ideas. Even if I wasn’t a Dragon Age superfan I’d still be interested, since it’s a simple 3d6 based system that is still tactically rich and intuitive. The best part about it to me is the inclusion of “stunt points”, which occur on a doubles roll from any 2 dice. This ability lets you add flair or other effects to whatever you’re rolling, and keeps games and stories interesting, sometimes when you least expect it. I’m still itching to run a game of this, especially since it’s all (so far) in one book at a good price. They should be releasing various sourcebooks and add-ons in the coming year."

"The other main book I’ve been keeping an eye on is Star Wars: Force and Destiny. Fantasy Flight’s not exactly a small company, but the creation of a game that lets people play out their childhood fantasies of being a Jedi and using the Force is fan service incarnate. That’s not a bad thing, if you ask me. The best part, if you ask me, about the Star Wars RPGs is that they all have a unique dice system of variable success or failure which keeps games from falling into binary pass/fail mechanics, which I and others I know appreciate. Force and Destiny, like all other Star Wars RPGs, is definitely hanging around for a while, since FFG has a solid release schedule of expansions as the games age. I’m hoping that after the movie comes out, they create a campaign or book related to the Force Awakens events and characters."

"The last one I’ve noticed lately is the Dread RPG. This is the horror themed game that’s played with a set of Jenga blocks. Every time a difficult decision is made or an action happens, a player has to pull from the tower and hope it doesn’t fall. If it does, bad stuff happens. It’s gained in popularity after being played on TableTop, and because of this unique inclusion for decision making. It’s definitely more suited to one-shot type games rather than long campaigns but it still seems very different compared to its peers. This one is an older one, so it’s not getting updates anytime soon, but it’s still grown vastly in popularity thanks to Wil Wheaton."

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Travis Severance of Millennium Games in Rochester, New York provided:

Individual Products:
1. 5th ed PHB
2. 5th ed DM Screen
3. 5th ed Monster Manual
4. 5th ed DMG
5. 5th ed Starter Set

Lines:
1. D&D
2. Shadowrun
3. Pathfinder
4. Star Wars
5. Fate

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Paul Butler of Games and Stuff in Glen Burnie, Maryland provided this list of product by quantity sold.

1. Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide (Dungeons & Dragons 5e)
2. Player's Handbook (Dungeons & Dragons 5e)
3. Monster Manual (Dungeons & Dragons 5e)
4. Bestiary 5 (Pathfinder)
5. Dungeon Master's Guide (Dungeons & Dragons 5e)

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Steve Ellis of Rainy Day Games in Aloha, Oregon sent in this list:

Top 5 RPG Items:
- D&D5 Sword Coast Adv Guide (Wizards of the Coast)
- D&D5 Players Handbook (Wizards of the Coast)
- D&D5 Starter Set (Wizards of the Coast)
- D&D5 Spellbook Cards Cleric (Gale Force Nine)
- D&D5 Dungeon Masters Screen (Wizards of the Coast)

Top 5 RPG Systems:
- D&D5 (Wizards of the Coast)
... HUGE GAP
- Star Wars RPGs (Fantasy Flight Games)
...another decent gap
- Mouse Guard RPG (Archaia Studio Press)
- Pathfinder (Paizo)
- Savage Worlds (Studio 2 Publishing)

Putting on my analyst cap, I think that the obvious is shown: D&D is a big seller across the country. I don’t think that surprises anyone. What I think surprises me is the fact that there really isn’t a clear “winner” for the second place spot. Fantasy Flight Games Star Wars lines look like they are battling it out with Paizo’s Pathfinder for second place, with a pretty much everything else fighting for the other places at the table. Certainly not as clear cut as you would think.

Pinnacle’s Savage Worlds and Evil Hat’s Fate games have a good standing, and it is good to see Mouse Guard getting a mention.

Hopefully we will be back next quarter, to see how these games fared into the new year. As with anything new, we are all learning what we want to do with these lists and I learned more about the questions that I want to ask retailers. With the next quarter, I hope to pick up a retailer or two who were unable to respond, and maybe even convince OneBookShelf to give us a peak into some of their best sellers.

Updated 2/18/16
Matt McElroy, the Director of Publishing and Marketing at OneBookShelf has contributed their top five best sellers for last quarter (and they will be contributing to this list going forward):

Top Five selling titles:
Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition - Onyx Path Publishing
Shadowrun: Rigger 5.0 - Catalyst Game Labs
Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition - White Wolf Publishing
Chronicles of Darkness - Onyx Path Publishing
Shadowrun: Hard Targets (Deep Shadows Sourcebook) - Catalyst Game Labs


Top Five selling Systems:
World of Darkness, classic (Storyteller System)
Pathfinder
World of Darkness, new (Storytelling System)
Savage Worlds
Fate

 

[Hussar]

That's a regular $100,000 per campaign, including campaigns for supplements. The overall turnover of The Onyx Path would be in the millions. They have about 20 gamelines in their RPG programme. The director, Richard Thomas has stated that he does not regard the traditional retail market as being worth bothering with within their own business plan. It's not the number of books that are produced that is the business factor, it's the time it takes to sell them.

Moreover, White Wolf (the license owner) was recently bought for a multi-million deal with Paradox Entertainment, with the expressed value of the WoD IPs being the second biggest IP in roleplaying (after D&D).

You'll also note that one of the titles on your list was actually launched via a kickstarter (FATE).

As I say, we could speculate the value of what is produced on kickstarter, or pdf or POD, but the fact is neither of us truly know what the figures are and they aren't factored in these charts as they stand.

Let's try from another direction though.

Estimates place the RPG industry at somewhere between 20 and 30 million dollars a year. If you combined all the Onyx Path stuff into a single year (and I assume these Kickstarters have been run over more than one), we're still talking about, at the absolute outside, 15% of the RPG market. Since the Kickstarters are spread over multiple years, the percentage is actually quite a lot lower.

I imagine if you combined all the Kickstarters, PDF, POD, and non-traditional venues together, it would still be less than 10% of the total market. And that's spread across multiple games and multiple companies. Any individual company using a non-traditional venue is still far less than 1% of the total market.

This is why I don't think they need to be included. They're just too small. This is exactly the same argument that used to go around about OGL. People talked about how the OGL was such a huge factor in the hobby, when, typical OGL products only sold in the hundreds or a few thousand copies. Yup, there were outliers, but, by and large, the vast majority of OGL products were only seen by a tiny fragment of the hobby.

I mean, good grief, in the thread about DMsGuild sales, people are talking about how their free products are being downloaded about 2000 times. That gives you an idea of just how tiny the OGL market is when a free download, with very little competition (there aren't that many DMsGuild products up yet) is getting about the same views as this single thread on En World.

 

[darjr]

Except the impact of the OGL is far beyond sales of third party content. And DMSGuild isn't OGL.

The impact the OGL has is in others being able to experiment and growing a cadre of designers outside of WOTC who are familiar with their game. The OGL is also a guarantor that if the company screws up big, d&d can live on.

 

[TrippyHippy]

I mean, good grief, in the thread about DMsGuild sales, people are talking about how their free products are being downloaded about 2000 times. That gives you an idea of just how tiny the OGL market is when a free download, with very little competition (there aren't that many DMsGuild products up yet) is getting about the same views as this single thread on En World.

You are choosing a particularly bad example, here. It's not even a product that generates money. The major advantage of PDF is that the overheads are reduced to a minimum, and even if the overall sales are a fraction of the hardcopy, they sell at an exponential rate quicker because all the issues of distribution are negligible. Moreover, you are comparing the top echelons of the traditional market (i.e. D&D/Pathfinder) to a tiny third party publisher. Even your own feedback suggest that the gap between D&D5E and the rest is enormous, and considering that both FATE and Shadowrun make a significant effort through their non traditional markets indicate that there must be something of worth for them through these channels.

The point about all of this, again, is that the traditional model is not the only one out there any more. Indeed, the traditional distribution isn't even that big - there are only a handful of specialist game stores around the world these days and many of them closed down because it simply wasn't cost effective to import books when you're competing against Amazon and the like. 7th Sea is just running a kickstarter that is running over half a million and rising - so who's got the more effective business?

 

[Christopher Helton]

I've update the story to reflect new top five lists from Matt McElroy of OneBookShelf. I'll paste it here, too.

OneBookShelf top five sellers lists:

Top Five selling titles:
Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition - Onyx Path Publishing
Shadowrun: Rigger 5.0 - Catalyst Game Labs
Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition - White Wolf Publishing
Chronicles of Darkness - Onyx Path Publishing
Shadowrun: Hard Targets (Deep Shadows Sourcebook) - Catalyst Game Labs

Top Five selling Systems:
World of Darkness, classic (Storyteller System)
Pathfinder
World of Darkness, new (Storytelling System)
Savage Worlds
Fate

 

[darjr]

That's not what I expected. Interesting. Do you know if this includes sales from dndclassics and DMSGuild?

 

[Christopher Helton]

DnDClassics is no more, and DMSGuild didn't launch until this year.

The first quarter sales of this year are made up of the items sold in the last quarter of last year.

 

[darjr]

Yes they are merged, I get that. But wasn't dndclassics around long enough for it's sales to be counted. Do you know if they were?

 

[Christopher Helton]

Why would they exclude sales? That doesn't even make sense.

Mage, for example, is a $30 PDF. That means that Wizards has to sell three copies of OD&D (for example) to make the sales of one copy of Mage. Assuming that their criteria is dollar amount sold, which is what I would guess.

I would imagine, just from these figures that we have in this post, that D&D sells better in brick & mortar stores, while other games do better in PDF sales. The fact that the top PDF sellers that are also in stores did well on the OBS lists would support the strength of those second and third tier titles.

Would these numbers be different if Wizards sold D&D 5e in PDF form? Probably. Although the face that the Onyx Path stuff is only at OBS is probably why it has a strong showing there (and would likely still cause it to be competitive against D&D).

 

[darjr]

I thought this was unit items sold, not in revenue generated.

 

[Christopher Helton]

I left how the sources wanted to generate their lists up to them. I'm assuming that those numbers are based on revenue, but that is just an assumption.

Regardless, it doesn't surprise me that the OBS best sellers would differ from that of brick and mortar, since they don't have access to the same items for sale.

And if the OBS sales follow the logic of the brick and mortar stores, we already know that core books sell better than supplements, which sell better than adventures. I'm not convinced that a 10 page PDF adventure is going to be a comparative "hot" seller.