jprepo1 wrote:ICv2, self released sales stats, amazon, stores, et al. seem to indicate it as not just not a failure from a sales perspective, but a roaring success.
That's funny. We've discussed the ICv2 numbers
at length in this very thread and sussed out a ballpark sales figure for 5e that didn't exactly break any records. But that was a while ago now; maybe it's time to revisit those numbers. I grabbed the ICv2 numbers for market size each year as well as the numbers for Top 5 RPGs each Spring quarter of the corresponding years:
Rank
| Spring 2012
| Spring 2013
| Spring 2014
| Spring 2015
| Spring 2016
| Spring 2017
|
1
| Pathfinder
| Pathfinder
| Pathfinder
| D&D
| D&D
| D&D
|
2
| D&D
| D&D
| Star Wars
| Pathfinder
| Pathfinder
| Pathfinder
|
3
| Dark Heresy/Rogue Trader/Deathwatch
| Star Wars
| Shadowrun
| Star Wars
| Star Wars
| Star Wars
|
4
| Dragon Age
| Iron Kingdoms
| Fate Core
| Shadowrun
| Shadowrun
| Adventures in Middle-Earth
|
5
| Marvel Heroic Roleplaying
| Dark Heresy/Rogue Trader/Deathwatch
| Numenera
| Iron Kingdoms
| Fantasy/Dragon Age
| Shadowrun
|
Also, though not easily put in tabular form, the "hobby store" market has apparently been growing every year since the "crash year" of 2008.
"Fourth Consecutive Growth Year for Hobby Games" (ICv2, published March 2013). This is not same as the total hobby games market, since the market includes sales of products through hobby stores as well as other retailers.
So what's it all mean?
If we take these numbers at face value, you can spin up a narrative that a moribund Pathfinder-dominated RPG market got shaken up in June 2013 by Edge of the Empire, then totally turned upside-down in 2014 by the release of D&D 5e, which ushered in a renaissance in RPGs that has yielded remarkable year-over-year growth with D&D capturing the lion's share of the increase. But, that doesn't really jive.
For one thing, RPGs are a tiny footnote in the overall hobby games market. ICv2 alleges that from 2013 to 2016, the RPG market grew 200%, but in the same span the overall hobby games market grew 105%; the market share of RPGs in the hobby games space went from a paltry 2.1% to an also-paltry 3.1%. We are dealing with such tiny amounts here that any specific developments internal to the RPG market are likely to be no more influential than the rising tide of increased sales in all other categories (or just plain bad estimates from survey respondents).
There have been very few shakeups in the quarterly sales rankings since D&D 5 dropped in Fall 2014, and those are concentrated in the #4 and #5 spots. I assume that this is because sales in those positions are so tiny as to be essentially statistical noise; I don't think there's any insight to be gained in the random variations of 2015-2017 quarterly sales in marginal brands like Shadowrun, Fate, Adventures in Middle-Earth, Dragon Age, and Iron Kingdoms. The fact that Iron Kingdoms can be #3 in Spring 2013 and then #5 in Spring 2015 and Dragon Age can be #4 in Spring 2012 and #5 in Spring 2016 is telling, since both of these bridge the release dates of the new top brands. Even after D&D 5 and Star Wars dropped, you see the same names bobbing onto and off of the bottom of the list quarter over quarter. This suggests to me that the difference in sales between these brands is negligible and that they are all small potatoes compared to Star Wars, Pathfinder, and D&D, which remain comfortably in the top spots quarter after quarter.
The facts that we have available bear out that despite the reported market growth in absolute terms since 2014, no single one of the also-rans has captured enough of that growth to displace any of the existing top-level brands. We don't know exactly what the pie chart looks like quarter to quarter, so we can't say if the Big 3's overall market lead has been growing, shrinking, or remaining constant relative to the also-rans, much less how D&D's market lead over the other major brands has fared. However, we can make a few logical inferences from what we do know.
D&D 5e's release schedule has been
inarguably anemic in the years since its launch. Attributing the growth in the RPG market principally to D&D 5e invites the question: is it plausible that D&D 5 would have so few new offerings each year after its 2014 release if the brand really brought in up to $10m in 2014, up to $20m in 2015, and up to $30m in 2016 (these are the maximums if D&D 5 represents 100% of RPG market growth since its launch)? If we were really seeing 100% sales growth year-over-year for two years straight, we should be seeing a 5e shovelware rush. Hell, Onyx Path deals in numbers a literal
tenth of what we're talking about here and their pipeline is positively bursting in comparison.
From this, I'd infer that D&D 5 dropped into the top spot immediately based on strong core book sales (fueled by brand recognition) but hasn't realized meaningful gains in sales volume since then - hence there's no impetus to expand the range of titles on offer, which in turn keeps sales growth down; vicious cycle. D&D 5 has likely maintained a steady or gradually shrinking lead over Paizo, Fantasy Flight, and the also-rans since then due to continuing strong core book sales and weak splatbook offerings across all brands. It's not hard to stay on top even without splats if your core product is a hot item and Pathfinder is churning out bottom-of-the-barrel crap (and Starfinder doesn't appear to have changed the world). I don't think there's been anything in the recent releases for any of those 3 brands that would lend itself to any interpretation other than these 3 brands staying pretty much at status quo relative to each other.
Given the known fact that the relative market shares of the Big 3 have not reordered themselves in the last 3 years, can we say anything about the growth of also-rans versus the Big 3? To put it another way, can we determine if the proportion of the market eaten by the Big 3 has grown or shrunk since 5e dropped? The observable facts from
places like Roll20 don't seem to support the narrative that there is a profusion of also-rans eating up an increased percentage of market share and leaving the Big 3 on a dwindling iceberg of market dominance; to the contrary D&D 5 composed almost half of all Roll20 games in Q3 2017. Consider once again that Dragon Age and Iron Kingdoms have been bobbing around, cork-like, in the Top 5 since 2012. I think the most reasonable explanation for this since D&D 5 released is that the Big 3 have eaten most of the growth, increasing their relative share of the total market without any reduction in sales volume for the also-rans in absolute terms (even absolute increases, depending on how much growth you think is actually happening in the market).
I am deeply skeptical of the ideas that 1) the RPG market has actually grown by 200% from 2013-2016 and 2) D&D 5 has experienced accelerating or even consistent sales growth year-over-year. Overall, I believe that the RPG market is a very static place, despite the nominal absolute increase according to ICv2. I think that the ICv2 numbers are broadly accurate for the hobby market as a whole, but that the specific RPG numbers are so tiny as to amount to a rounding error. I think D&D 5 is selling well relative to other RPG brands and much of those sales come from new money that wouldn't otherwise have been spent on RPG products, but I do not believe that D&D 5's year-over-year sales are increasing much if at all. (Consider again the anemic release schedule for D&D 5.)
I think it's most likely that RPG sales have risen proportionately with the broader hobby market, as people for the most part are just buying whatever is already on the shelf when they pick up Magic cards or a
Cards Against Humanity expansion. I think that D&D will continue to be the market leader purely on the strength of name recognition and core book sales regardless of what other titles they publish (or not) in the near future. I think that D&D 5's sales growth relative to the overall hobby market has been pretty much nil since it dropped and that therefore the D&D line will not see major expansions in the near future.