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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steel_Wind" data-source="post: 5665902" data-attributes="member: 20741">Short strokes: The drop off is huge. Way steeper than your guesses would indicate.Below is a proportional bar graph, showing year over year in dollar sales (to date) at the retail level for RPGs sold at Black Diamond Games. Black Diamond is a very successful store in the Bay Area (in Concord, California) and its owner, Gary Ray, has given presentations on Hobby Games retailing at GAMA, has been a featured retailer by Fantasy Flight Games and writes a very popular and much-watched Blog on the experience of retailing in the Hobby Games Business, called <a href="http://blackdiamondgames.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Quest for Fun.</a>As it so happens, this week marks Gary's premiere as a regular guest on Chronicles: Pathfinder Podcast to talk about the business of RPGs from the retailers perspective on the show.  (Well, when Episode #016 releases it will be a premiere; for now, it's just the first recording of his segment which starts this week. Ep #016 should be released in 2-3 weeks.)So that's the source of these numbers. I believe they are in dollars of overall RPG products sold by the store to date, during the year. They are not percentage market shares, as then the numbers don't add up. (I'll clarify that when I speak to him tomorrow and update if required)While I know there are large store variances, let alone regional differences, the below also shows the market share for each game in dollar terms, including a year over year comparison.  The numbers reveal that D&D sales have been steady at Black Diamond Games, but Pathfinder took off like a bullet in 2011. Gary has called 2011 "The Year of Pathfinder" in one of his recent blogs. Note: Black Diamond stocks the full line of all products published for both Pathfinder/Game Mastery and WotC.  If they make it -- he stocks and sells the complete and entire line offered by both leading RPG publishers.  These numbers are not a result of selective inventory choices in terms of the leading publishers' offerings.<img src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_g7Sm4W1RuM/Tg8426WaNNI/AAAAAAAAEz4/Gsf13E16aus/s1600/258649_349589384979_147071044979_1244375_3032628_o.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /></blockquote>

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