Does anyone have much of a clue about OBS sales or turnover?

Question prompted by genuine curiosity - I have no vested interest one way or another.

I've noticed some stuff on drivethru for games I like, but that I would have thought was pretty niche, achieving what seem quite high places in sales rankings. E.g. Mongoose is releasing some high-priced pdf's of Third Imperium (official Traveller setting) material, $30ish for pdf only. One such item is currently ranked 3rd. I can see a few hardcore Traveller fanboys buying this, but... really?

Likewise, there is a community-content item for Coriolis that is a "copper seller" (whatever that means). It's effectively an illustrated version of the setting calendar. It looks quite nice from the preview, and it's quite cheap, but still.

Either this stuff is far more popular than I would have thought (great, cos I like these games); or as I suspect, overall sales are incredibly low; or, the algorithms on the website are screwed.

Edit: I have heard of an exploit where a publisher can buy a ton of their own stuff through dummy accounts to bump it up the rankings. OK but at least for the community content guys, I would expect they would do this for more of their stuff, not just 1 item.

Well, I can answer about metal badges; copper means 50+ copies sold.

https://amazing-tales.net/2019/01/27/drivethru-rpg-metal-tiers/

that link has some numbers from 2019.

I sell only thru DTRPG (my first book reached gold in 2021 after many years!), and I buy mostly from there. Pretty sure it is the industry leader.

You could buy your own stuff to get badges, I guess, but that would cost you (DTRPG takes a 30-35% cut, and I think only items that cost more than one dollar count) ; probably not the best idea.

I consider most of my stuff on DriveThru to be of a hobbyist standard, not professionally published, so I'm definitely not an authority on sales for the bigger players. Hell, I'm still trying to figure out how DriveThru's crappy publishing interface works, but I think there are definitely ways to game the system if you are savvy enough. I've also read somewhere that they are cracking down on folks gaming the system.

There are some things to keep in mind:

Badges: Copper =50+ sales, Silver =100+ etc.  Badges are important. They are important as they show how popular something is, and some folks like to buy stuff other people are obviously buying. From some of my own stuff through a third party publisher 100 City Encounters and 100 Wilderness Encounters are good examples. As soon as they earned their Copper Medals, sales temporally increased 3 times what they had been. 

Ratings & Reviews: Sometime after 100 City Encounters earned its Copper Medal and after sales fell back to normal, someone posted a glowing review and a five star rating. Sales spike enough to carry it over to its Silver Medal, with another small spike in sales. It now sells constantly and should easily reach its Electrum or Gold, or whatever comes next.

Publisher Points: The more you sell the more publisher points you earn. You can do various things with them such as advertise on DriveThru and submit a product for Deal of the Day. Having spoken to other publishers, Deal of the Day not only gives you additional sales of the product, but is often followed by a spike in your back catalogue.

Visibility: All the above feeds into where you products are seen. Best seller page, medal best seller pages, Deal of the day on the front page, new products page, advertising etc. If you get enough momentum, it's a feedback loop and if you are savvy enough, even without breaking any rules, you can use it to your advantage.

One example of activity that I though was a bit 'suspicious' was for a product I uploaded as community content. It started well, became one of my best earners. Suddenly sales skyrocketed, but my income from it didn't seem to match the volume of sales. When I looked into it, the community content owner had put it in a sale and as soon as it hit the Copper Medal, removed it from the sale. Now imagine doing that with something that would naturally sell very well anyway. Suddenly you are earning medals, publisher points, probably a few ratings and reviews, and your visibly increases until it's almost a constant for a good period of time.  So if you were to add underhand dealings such as shill accounts and ratings and reviews, you could definitely influence your number of sales.

As a publisher, it's the sheer amount of content you are up against. I uploaded one product, came back a day later to upload another and there were 149 new products since my last visit. There is probably a good reason why most things sell less than 50 copies.

The guy who wrote Zweihander wrote pretty detailed notes somewhere in what you should do to maximize your performance with DTRPG without breaking any rules.  If you can track that down it would be a good playbook on how to run that part of your promotion machine.  Don't imitate his online behavior because I'm fairly certain it's got him banned from all the major and several minor RPG forums.  It's pretty bad when you can get the far left and far right and middle to all agree you're behaving like a jackass.

Hmm, interesting. Still, I'm not interested in tactics to boost sales myself as I'm not selling anything.

My question was prompted more by a suspicion that turnover on the site must be tiny, given that what seem to me like niche products (e.g. expensive Mongoose Traveller stuff) quickly reaches top seller status.

I'd expect the distribution of sales is: a ton of copies of Cyberpunk Red, quickly dropping off through some nostalgia VtM/Traveller etc. product, then down to next to zero for 99%+ of the titles.

You're not completely wrong; about 80% of the products sell fewer than 50 copies, and only 34 out of 100,000 had sold more than 5k copies in the link I posted above.

However, there IS some middle tier, independent products in there, selling a couple hundred copies, up to a couple thousand.

I wonder if coupons for PDFs count.  I get a lot of titles distributed through DTRPG that started at Kickstarter.  If those count for sales, than that would quickly jack up the number of units 'sold'.

Per this blog post

The White Box sold -- print copies -- across about 7 months:

Lulu: 66
DriveThruRPG: 65
Amazon: 1,446

-- I find this . . . shocking. Apparently everybody just buys stuff on Amazon.

Quote from: zircher on January 25, 2021, 11:54:08 AM
I wonder if coupons for PDFs count.  I get a lot of titles distributed through DTRPG that started at Kickstarter.  If those count for sales, than that would quickly jack up the number of units 'sold'.

They don't. I mainly sell my stuff in print, and provide buyers with free PDFs through DriveThru, and they are not included. (Rightfully so, too!)