According to Mike Mearls' latest tweet, ""5e lifetime PHB sales > 3, 3.5, 4 lifetime" "

He clarifies that the 5e D&D Player's Handbook sales since the edition began have outsold the lifetime PHB sales of 4e, and 3.5e, and 3e.  Individually, not collectively (it has not outsold the lifetime sales of all three combined, though at this rate that could happen).  And that is in books sold, not money (money-wise Mearls implies that would be cheating as the 5e PHB sells for more than the others did due to inflation). He also says he doesn't know if it's outsold the 1e or 2e PHB as they have only sketchy records on those sales.

This comes at a time where ICv2 says retail sales of RPG books in general are up by 40% over last year, with 5e D&D leading the way.

Don't get me wrong, 5e is quite playable, but I find it hard to believe all the same. Would love to see actual numbers...though I reckon I'm not alone in that regard.

I am happy for Mike. He's a good guy and I really liked his 3e stuff. I knew he was an innovator back then. So please understand I mean this with all due respect to Mr. Mearls: I don't care.

Let me clarify. I don't care in that 4e was enough of a departure for me, that my group gave up on it after a few sessions. We simply stopped playing for a while. The one guy willing to DM was a big fan of 4e, the rest of us were not. When the rest of us felt like getting together again, we had an extra guy that wanted to game with us and he was familiar with and had books for a game I had never heard of: Castles and Crusades. I read the books, felt it was similar enough to previous editions I had DM'd so I'd run it. I have not looked back since. I love the Siege Engine mechanic and that it kept saves tied to attributes instead of a separate save table. Ascending AC is a bonus, too. 5e may be the one ring of RPGs, but I'll never know, because I found satisfaction in another system, or rather, the older system.

Once I discovered other OSR games. I picked up all the BFRPG books in print and may run a family game for my wife and kids using it. I have all my old B/X, BECMI, and a Rules Cyclopedia from ages 8 to 18 as well, so I may just flat out run D&D the way I remember and loved best. If anyone knows of an OSR conversion of the Scarred Lands campaign, I would probably have my gaming nirvana. If Hasbro/WotC do ever manage to lure me back, it would be with a backward compatible edition, one that ignored 3e and 4e. And I readily admit to liking 3rd edition as an RPG in its own right, but that was the beginning of the fork in the road for me, from the path that left what felt more like D&D into a different game.

The 5E PHB may have outsold the PHB for 3.0, 3.5, and 4E, but as it is in all things, context is key here.

For 3.0, the Open Gaming License made the SRD public, which was a very big deal at the time. While they were initially tucked away in RTF files on WotC's website, it didn't take long before we had them being reposted not only on various websites, but also had third-party publishers releasing them in PDFs and even in print files, often for almost nothing (if not completely free). 3.5 rode this wave as well, thanks to websites like //www.d20srd.org.

For 4E, the DDI was a repository of rules that allowed for all of the content in the PHB - and pretty much everything else for that edition - to be viewed in a one-stop database that could easily be downloaded for offlight use. Even after they turned it into online-only access, it was still something that a lot of players used, to the point of abandoning creating their characters on paper in favor of DDI use.

By contrast, the 5E SRD under the OGL only came out a few months ago, and is not only very incomplete in terms of the material that's been released, but has also been completely overshadowed by the DM's Guild web-store.

So while the 5E PHB may be selling like hotcakes, that doesn't necessarily indicate that more people are making use of it than made use of those rules for earlier editions.

Yeah, I'm kind of shocked by this, because the advent of 3rd edition brought more new players to the table in our area than anything before or since.  I mean, our group itself got an influx of three new players, plus they eventually brought in girlfriends.  

I mean, 5e was swell, but it was more undoing the player drift from 4e in this area, as near as I could tell, rather than actually bringing new players in who buy stuff.  But maybe our area is an outlier.

Quote from: Future Villain Band;912728Yeah, I'm kind of shocked by this, because the advent of 3rd edition brought more new players to the table in our area than anything before or since.  I mean, our group itself got an influx of three new players, plus they eventually brought in girlfriends.  

I mean, 5e was swell, but it was more undoing the player drift from 4e in this area, as near as I could tell, rather than actually bringing new players in who buy stuff.  But maybe our area is an outlier.

For what it is worth (which isn't much) Los Angeles seems filthy with new D&D players playing 5e.  When I was gaming every week at a local game store we had a new player (or three) every week.  We kept splitting tables to accommodate so many players.  They were all 20-somethings or under (some teens even), and most said they saw the game mentioned on TV in things like Community or Big Bang Theory, or mentioned in an article on Boing Boing, or saw it on Critical Role, or heard Wil Weaton mention it, or things like that.  It just seems (again, this is purely anecdotal) D&D has entered popular sub-culture in a strong way with this edition for some reason.

Quote from: Alzrius;912726The 5E PHB may have outsold the PHB for 3.0, 3.5, and 4E, but as it is in all things, context is key here.

For 3.0, the Open Gaming License made the SRD public, which was a very big deal at the time. While they were initially tucked away in RTF files on WotC's website, it didn't take long before we had them being reposted not only on various websites, but also had third-party publishers releasing them in PDFs and even in print files, often for almost nothing (if not completely free). 3.5 rode this wave as well, thanks to websites like //www.d20srd.org.

For 4E, the DDI was a repository of rules that allowed for all of the content in the PHB - and pretty much everything else for that edition - to be viewed in a one-stop database that could easily be downloaded for offlight use. Even after they turned it into online-only access, it was still something that a lot of players used, to the point of abandoning creating their characters on paper in favor of DDI use.

By contrast, the 5E SRD under the OGL only came out a few months ago, and is not only very incomplete in terms of the material that's been released, but has also been completely overshadowed by the DM's Guild web-store.

So while the 5E PHB may be selling like hotcakes, that doesn't necessarily indicate that more people are making use of it than made use of those rules for earlier editions.

The 5e PHB has bee out less than 2 years.  And it's outsold the ENTIRE LIFETIME of sales of each of those editions.  3e SRD was meaningful for some publishers in those first 2 years, but not to most players - in fact it was not functioning very well as an online thing those first 2 years.  Meanwhile, WOTC had a full retail chain in most malls in America through their Wizards of the Coast stores for the first three years of 3e.  d20srd.org came out in late 2006 by the way, three years after 3.5 was released. And the 4e DDI was similarly mostly non-functional for a huge chunk of time in the beginning - it started as 100% nonexistent and then they only had a character generator for the bulk of that first 2 years, with a monster generator for the last few months of those two years, and no "repository of rules" online at all in those two years.

So you're right that context matters, but your dates (and implications) are all wrong.  Those editions didn't have any of those things in their first 1.75 years.  And the 5e PHB just outsold the lifetime sales of each of those PHBs in it's first 1.75 years.

I'm not really surprised.  Fallowing a product for a few years tends to work wonders on its sales.  4e was like New Coke if Coca Cola was the US government and made a law that all water treatment plants could only produce New Coke.

But also, 3 and 3.5 were really designed to answer the complaints other companies always leveled at D&D in their introductions.  It provided more character customizability and a more rigidly defined combat system.  It was very much a game by gamers for gamers.  The people in charge seriously believed that new blood was inconsequential and went around saying so.

4 was a massive shift towards tightly structured tactical play.  It was about as readable as Traveller 5th edition and as bland as a 200 page user's manual for a bread box.  Okay, there are harsher complaints I could level.  It was like D&D by the Avalon Hill Game Company.  If you think I'm being unreasonable, consider, I could have said it was like it was by Leading Edge Games.  Avalon Hill's games were dry reading in small type but they were pretty well editied and designed.

5 tries to be approachable.  There's places where it's over designed or doesn't work too well.  Personally low level magic is over powered but that's less likely to drive away a new player than one crappy spell a day is.  The allocation of cleric and wizard spells is a confusing mess.  There are WAY too many Charisma based casters.  The naval and siege combat rules are kinda there but all spread out and not really in depth enough.  Oh well, what I'm saying is it could be a little cleaner but it's the most approachable and usable version of D&D since Basic and it's got a softer, more survivable first level game.  And it's right at the time when the media is actually testing the water to see if it can talk about D&D in a positive light without causing the end of absolutely everything.  Twenty years from now, we might even be mainstream!

The PHB according to last check on the WOTC site was up to its 6th print run.

The big question is will WOTC keep 5e or will they inevitibly throw it under the wheels of the damn "5 year plan" for a 6e. So save Mearls statement 5e is doing well because if they do drop it for 6e then sure enough they will claim "It didnt sell well" as the excuse.

So gamers like to gobble shit? Who knew?

Maybe people are buying new ones to replace the ones that have fallen apart?

Quote from: Mistwell;912734The 5e PHB has bee out less than 2 years.

"Less than two years"? You need to check again, since the 5E PHB says right inside it "First printing: August 2014." That certainly matches up with the article from Mike Mearls on August 11, 2014 saying how the 5E PHB had hit the stores "last Friday."

QuoteAnd it's outsold the ENTIRE LIFETIME of sales of each of those editions.

Yes, and as you admitted, there's a context that needs to be taken into account.

Quote3e SRD was meaningful for some publishers in those first 2 years, but not to most players - in fact it was not functioning very well as an online thing those first 2 years.

It was meaningful for a lot of publishers, and as for "most" players, that's a very loaded term. It was functioning fairly well as an online thing after the first few months, however, once the SRD went up and replaced the initial "gentleman's agreement."

QuoteMeanwhile, WOTC had a full retail chain in most malls in America through their Wizards of the Coast stores for the first three years of 3e.

Yeah, no. The "full retail chain" that was in "most malls in America" consisted of fifty-three stores when WotC bought the chain, and after that they planned to open only one hundred "seasonal" locations. So they didn't have a very large presence to begin with, and even then it seems likely that they sold more Magic and Pokemon than D&D.

Quoted20srd.org came out in late 2006 by the way, three years after 3.5 was released.

Hence why I only used it as an example, since it's the best-known instance of what other sites were doing not just at that time, but up through that point. There were a number of websites that hosted the SRD quite early (often alongside other Open Game Content), but most of them have been abandoned over the years, usually due to not wanting to update after the 3.5 changeover (hence why even most of the longest-lived SRD websites that are around today only date back to early 2004) or were overshadowed by other websites doing the same thing. (This happened even to Open Game Content-repository websites that came later; anyone remember the Grand OGL Wiki?)

For example, SystemReferenceDocuments.org was up in early 2004, and is one of the longer-lasting ones today; the same can be said for d20 Resources, which back then was called d20 Exchange. The Open Gaming Foundation website had been up since April of 2000, several months before 3.0 even came out, and was very quick to host the SRD when it was initially released, which makes it admirable for still being around.

QuoteAnd the 4e DDI was similarly mostly non-functional for a huge chunk of time in the beginning - it started as 100% nonexistent and then they only had a character generator for the bulk of that first 2 years, with a monster generator for the last few months of those two years, and no "repository of rules" online at all in those two years.

The character generator was the "repository of rules" that I was referring to; that's what made buying the PHB (and myriad supplemental materials) superfluous for a lot of the 4E players that I knew. They much preferred that to having to buy, haul, and reference a large number of books.

QuoteSo you're right that context matters, but your dates (and implications) are all wrong.  Those editions didn't have any of those things in their first 1.75 years.  And the 5e PHB just outsold the lifetime sales of each of those PHBs in it's first 1.75 years.

Except that we can see that this isn't the case. In the first two years, those editions had all of those things, which help to explain why the 5E PHB is selling at the level that it is.

I want to see the numbers, otherwise it is just talk.

Place me in the "I don't care" group. I have happily snatched the free stuff. Have played and respect what they did with it. Still too fiddly for my tastes. Glad it's been a success, and that we're (hopefully) bringing in new players.

Quote from: Mistwell;912734The 5e PHB has bee out less than 2 years.  And it's outsold the ENTIRE LIFETIME of sales of each of those editions.

Sure. But let's keep in mind what "lifetime" means here: 3.0 sales plummeted in 2002 when 3.5 was announced, so it had a meaningful sales lifetime of 3 years. 3.5 had 4 years. 4th Edition had only 2 years before Essentials was announced (and only 4 years in total before 5E was announced).

So 5E's performance is impressive, but let's not pretend that 2 years isn't, in fact, a substantial fraction of D&D edition's lifetime.

QuoteThose editions didn't have any of those things in their first 1.75 years.

5th Edition PHB had an official release date of August 19th, 2014. I'm not really convinced that 5 days counts as 0.25 years.