NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alphastream" data-source="post: 7658650" data-attributes="member: 11365">This is completely incorrect. By several accounts (including Ryan Dancey), 4E exceeded 3E in initial launch numbers. 5E has been off-the-charts (or should we say, "on the Amazon charts") in its success - it is unlikely anything other than the first Red Boxed set has done as well, and I would bet that 5E's PH has beaten that as well. Some data points:- Ryan on 2E and 3E sales: (3E released in 2000)"The one thing I can tell you is that when TSR did the transition from 1e to 2e in 1998, they sold 289,000 Player's Handbooks in 1998. We sold 300,000 3e Players Handbooks in about 30 days. And the trajectory of the rest of the product line mimicked the PHB."Escapist Magazine, Dec 2011:- "[3rd edition] was the most successful RPG published since the early years of 1st edition AD&D," Dancey said. "It outsold the core books of 2nd edition AD&D by a wide margin. - Preorders for the core books of 4th edition of D&D in June 2008 were extremely strong and - without any hard sales numbers released by WoTC - anecdotal evidence from local game stores supported the claim that it sold much better than 3rd at launch.- Acaeum with a former TSR soure:Adventures sell far less than rulebooks do (which is why we stopped doing them.)  Rulebooks are a whole different matter.  In 1989, TSR sold something like 1,000,000 copies of the D&D boxed set in one year.  It was amazing.(That's the Red Box)Ryan Dancey in 2014 Gen Con EN World interview on YouTube:- Not official numbers for 3E, but in 1989 transitioning from 1E to 2E sold 286,000 copies of PH. When went from 2E to 3E, "sold 300,000 copies of PH in one month and got better from there."5E's stay on the top Amazon charts is unprecedented and alone indicates a higher rate of sales than 300,000 in one month... and you add retail stores to that! The mention in the Hasbro quarterly report backs the success up further. My guess is the PH will be more successful than the Red Box across a full calendar year.I'll close with an interesting Dancey quote. (Dancey is a great source of data, though I don't usually agree with his conclusions, such as his prediction that the hobby is dying.)- Ryan on desired WotC annual revenue:"Success for 4e was defined (by Wizards) as generating annual revenues between $50 and $100 million. By that (self-imposed) definition, it is a failure.""Wizard's cost basis is several orders of magnitude higher than Paizos. They have more, higher paid staff. They pay more for art. They pay more for production. They have more overhead costs (rent, legal, etc.) And worse, due to the way Hasbro structures itself, they don't get to claim any credit for the royalties earned by D&D licensing. So the money Wizards gets to use to offset its costs is just from product sales and DDI.4e is also exclusively sold through middlemen. You can't buy D&D from Wizards of the Coast. Whereas Paizo earns 100% of many of its sales, Wizards only earns 40% on all of the stuff it sells. So Wizards has to sell 2.5 times as many units just to generate the same revenue as 1 unit of a Paizo product sold direct to a consumer."</blockquote>

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