Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University.  This week, Thorne delves into a claim that Wizards of the Coast drastically over-reported its Dungeons & Dragons 2024 Player’s Handbook sales.

Sales of the D&D 2024 Player’s Handbook has set records, at least according to Wizards of the Coast (see "Fastest Selling Dungeons and Dragons Product Ever").  Based on our store sales, I certainly will not dispute that, even though I have fond memories of the sales of the D&D Player’s Handbook 3E, but back then, Dungeons & Dragons had not penetrated the public imagination to the level that D&D has today.  When you have National Public Radio doing a story on the effect D&D has had on people over the decades and The Indicator podcast discussing the proxy fight over seats on Hasbro’s board, D&D has embedded itself in popular culture to a level that I never would have imagined (see "My Interview on the Hasbro Proxy Fight").  WotC, however, did not release actual sales figures for the 2024 Player’s Handbook, just saying it outsold Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, the previous best-selling book, and sold three times as many copies as the Player’s Handbook 5E sold during its first week of release in 2014.

Or maybe not, at least according to Stephen Glicker of the Roll for Combat YouTube channel, who says he looked at sales data for the first week release for the 2024 Players Handbook, finding only a total of 3,773 copies sold, making sales of the book far lower than Wizards of the Coast reported.  From what I can tell, Glicker pulled his data from BookScan, the data service publishing weekly sales figures of trade book sales in the U.S. from most chain retailers and over 800 independent booksellers, covering about 85% of the market.

There are a few problems I have with Glicker's analysis:

  • Most sales of the 2024 Player’s Handbook and other RPG books take place through hobby game stores, rather than book stores, and from what I've been able to determine from a limited number of queries, very few hobby game stores contribute information to BookScan.  This means that sales of the 2024 Player’s Handbook through them would not get recorded in BookScan's results.  BookScan may have provided accurate information regarding sales of the 2024 Player’s Handbook through bookstores, but I doubt it captured all of the sales through hobby game stores.
     
  • WotC sent 3,000 limited edition copies of the 2024 Player’s Handbook to Gen Con 2024, and all of them sold out (see "Thoughts on GenCon 2024").  Assuming that this figure is accurate, and given that copies of that edition sell on eBay for two to three times cover price I believe it is, that would only leave 773 copies sold at retail (which is a patently ridiculous number).
     
  • If the 3,773 figure were accurate, I know several stores which reported sales figures of the book totaling 5%, 7%, even 9% of that figure in the first week.  For a single hobby game store to sell 9% of all 2024 Player’s Handbook sold during the first week of release is pretty impressive, or more likely, not possible.

Why make such a claim?  Well, given the OGL debacle, sending Pinkerton agents to raid a Magic: The Gathering streamer's house and embracing AI after distancing the company from it, a large segment of the RPG players are predisposed to distrust WotC already.  So, believing WotC would deliberately overstate sales plays into that storyline and would attract attention, which it did (after all, I just wrote a column on it).

Comments?  Email them to: castleperilousgames@gmail.com.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.