sure, give me those numbers and I need more than PHB and DMG alone to beat 1e, but it remains beat.
Why don't you give me the numbers.
The numbers we know for a fact put TSR 1E way ahead.
You claim that the bookscan only account for 30-40% of 5E sales, I am claiming that the TSR numbers account for less than 50% of their sales.
Until you can find numbers for the 1E products you have no evidence at all 5E sold more (even if you insist on not including Dragon Magazine).
You already give yourself a bit of an advantage because you have so many 32 page modules while 5e has fewer ones
How is that an advantage?
The point is which sold more, this is one reason why 1E sold more.
And by magazines are print publications about 1E. I get that you want to exclude them because it blows your argument out of the water, but as a point of fact they were print copy of 1E material that WOTC sold.
The novels weren't I agree with that.
but in the 200-300 page range… so we could also compare $ (adjusted for inflation) instead of headcount, pretty sure you do not want that
We could. That is not relevant to sales volume though.
I am also not sure that would favor the new format. I think the modules were selling for around $8 each in the 1980s (I am not sure of that but I think it is about what we payed). You can pick up the hardcover adventures for about $30 in 2024.
It is a lot more than 50%. The adventures combined sold ~1M and the cookbook, DM screen and cookbook sold 500k, the rest sold ~2Mno idea if that is 80%, I doubt it is even 50%
… no idea how much is missing for 1e
Exactly, you don't. So you have no idea if your statement is true.
I on the other hand I do have an idea because I was alive and buying D&D while 1E was being sold and a lot of the stuff that is missing sold in very high volume.
If you take the bookscan numers and multiply them by 3 (33% of total) only 7 of the 5E adventures sold more than 250k and all of the adventures combined sold about 3M (note this includes the correction factor).all of Dark Sun sold like 250k units, so a third of the PHB for 2e, I am not expecting the 1e adventures to fare much better.
If you have 73 1E modules selling 250k units each that is 18 million units sold. I don't think it is that many, but if it was it would destroys your argument. Add that 18M to the 1E books we do have numbers for and you are at 28M (much more than 4s the bookscan) and you still have a ton of 1E material unaccounted for.