D&D Survey

[Pedantic]

WotC has a big marketing survey up via Facebook. The latter half is all about what kind of promotions they should put out, but the first bit seems targeted at trying to figure out the audience they should design for. Maybe it's portentous of some kind of product/edition change?

[Chamomile]

Editions one through three all tended to last about eight years. 4e bucked that trend by only lasting four. If they're getting ready for an edition shift within the next year or two, that would mean 5e gets the ignominious prize of "at least you lasted longer than 4e."

[WiserOdin032402]

I personally don't think 5e deserves that prize, given that I remember even 4e put out more material.

[Pedantic]

I personally don't think 5e deserves that prize, given that I remember even 4e put out more material.

What percent of an average D&D edition is 5e, if we measure by number of sourcebooks? How much worse does that get if we measure by rules content inside those sourcebooks?

[WiserOdin032402]

Well, if I had to measure 5e against something, it'd be AD&D 2e. Similar setup, similar gimpy gameplay, Grognard heaven. The works.

In the same amount of time that 5e has been running, 2e cranked out the PH, DMG, Forgotten Realms, Legends & Lore, Tome of Magic, Dark Sun, Book of Artifacts, with 3 to 4 monster manuals per year and 2 Complete X Handbooks per year. With TSR's budget.

TSR. The company that was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy constantly.

This is why 5e should be forever be regarded as a failure. Despite riding the biggest wave of nerd culture ever it failed to outperform D&D 2e with several hundred times 2e's budget.

[Schleiermacher]

Overall, I've seen worse surveys, but some of these questions are just spectacularly unhelpfully framed - it's not at all clear what "very important" means, and for some questions that actually makes it impossible to give a useful answer.

#43 is a great example, that I ultimately just had to leave blank:

How important are the following to you when deciding to buy a D&D book?
>lists various types of mechanics and setting information.

The trouble is, not all "D&D books" are the same.

It is very important for me that setting books have sufficiently detailed setting information that I can run a game in that setting without just as well making everything up myself, and that the races, classes, spells etc. in the core books are well written. It is not important for me that monster manuals contain setting information, or that there are necessarily a lot of different races, classes, spells etc. in the system (that depends on how they are written) and I actively don't want a constant churn of new races, classes, spells etc in supplements.

[Mord]

This is why 5e should be forever be regarded as a failure. Despite riding the biggest wave of nerd culture ever it failed to outperform D&D 2e with several hundred times 2e's budget.

Why would 5e have a larger budget than 2e? Hasbro posted net revenue of $5,209,782,000 (page 39) in 2017. Dungeons & Dragons brought in less than $50,000,000.

Dungeons and Dragons is worth less than 1% of Hasbro's annual revenue. The USD-RMB exchange rate is a bigger deal to them. TSR wasn't exactly a Fortune 500, but their whole business was D&D and whatever money they made that wasn't embezzled was funneled back into more D&D. Also, 2e D&D had a massive release schedule, whereas 5e has a barely-alive release schedule.

I think it's a very safe bet that in inflation-adjusted terms, TSR's average annual expenditures for 2e D&D were greater than Hasbro's average annual expenditures for 5e D&D.

[PrometheanVigil]

This is why 5e should be forever be regarded as a failure. Despite riding the biggest wave of nerd culture ever it failed to outperform D&D 2e with several hundred times 2e's budget.

Why would 5e have a larger budget than 2e? Hasbro posted net revenue of $5,209,782,000 (page 39) in 2017. Dungeons & Dragons brought in less than $50,000,000.

Dungeons and Dragons is worth less than 1% of Hasbro's annual revenue. The USD-RMB exchange rate is a bigger deal to them. TSR wasn't exactly a Fortune 500, but their whole business was D&D and whatever money they made that wasn't embezzled was funneled back into more D&D. Also, 2e D&D had a massive release schedule, whereas 5e has a barely-alive release schedule.

I think it's a very safe bet that in inflation-adjusted terms, TSR's average annual expenditures for 2e D&D were greater than Hasbro's average annual expenditures for 5e D&D.

Why would you even bother to explain this to him? Obviously the intellectual capacity and business mindset to understand this is foreign to and otherwise unavailable to him.

[Mord]

Why would you even bother to explain this to him?

I like talking about financial statements.

[Finkin]

in 2017. Dungeons & Dragons brought in less than $50,000,000.

Not saying you are incorrect at all, but I am wondering where you gathered this information. Please share?

[erik]

in 2017. Dungeons & Dragons brought in less than $50,000,000.

Not saying you are incorrect at all, but I am wondering where you gathered this information. Please share?

Sounds legit. I brought in less than 50 mil as well.

[deaddmwalking]

in 2017. Dungeons & Dragons brought in less than $50,000,000.

Not saying you are incorrect at all, but I am wondering where you gathered this information. Please share?

Sounds legit. I brought in less than 50 mil as well.

Hasbro reports it's quarterly earnings. Q2 2018 had a total Gaming quarterly sales of $313M, but they also break out Hasbro Gaming (which includes Dungeons and Dragons) ($134 M)) separately from Magic: The Gathering which is considered a Franchise Brand.

If we know that total gaming was $313M, and Gaming minus Monopoly and Magic: The Gathering were $134M, we know that the Franchise Brands included in Gaming made $179M separately from the non-franchise brands.

The $134M includes D&D, Duel Masters, Jenga and new games, but overall gaming was flat. They did call out a Growth in D&D.

[Mord]

in 2017. Dungeons & Dragons brought in less than $50,000,000.

Not saying you are incorrect at all, but I am wondering where you gathered this information. Please share?

We have several sources that reinforce each other to set a rough upward boundary on D&D revenue. deaddm explained one, the Hasbro financial statements. The Q2 2018 statement can be found here, just search "Hasbro Gaming" and you'll find the numbers deaddm cited.

Anyway if you want to talk actual 2017 figures, here's the Hasbro 10-K filing for 2017. Magic: The Gathering and Monopoly count as big boy "Franchise Brands," and together they collected $604.8m. Hasbro Gaming (so excluding those 2) made $893.0m. What is Hasbro Gaming?

Hasbro Gaming includes brands such as DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, JENGA, THE GAME OF LIFE, OPERATION, PIE FACE, SCRABBLE, TRIVIAL PURSUIT and TWISTER as well as social games including FANTASTIC GYMNASTICS, SPEAK OUT and TOILET TROUBLE; in addition, Hasbro’s games portfolio also includes many other well-known game brands.

[...]

2017 versus 2016 [overall]
The Hasbro Gaming portfolio grew 10% in 2017 compared to 2016. Higher net revenues resulted from new social gaming products such as SPEAK OUT, TOILET TROUBLE and FANTASTIC GYMNASTICS and other Hasbro Gaming products such as DUNGEONS & DRAGONS as well as the successful launch of DROPMIX, an electronic music mixing game. These increases were partially offset by lower net revenues from PIE FACE products.

[...]

U.S. and Canada
In the Hasbro Gaming portfolio higher net revenues from DUNGEONS & DRAGONS products and new social gaming products including SPEAK OUT, FANTASTIC GYMNASTICS and TOILET TROUBLE drove a revenue increase in 2017. These increases were only partially offset by lower net revenues from PIE FACE products as well as certain other games brands.

[...]

International
In the Hasbro Gaming portfolio, higher net revenues from social gaming products including PIE FACE, SPEAK-OUT, FANTASTIC GYMNASTICS and TOILET TROUBLE as well as higher net revenues from certain other traditional games brands, including LIFE, OPERATION and CLUE products contributed to revenue growth.

So, D&D gets first billing among the 11 named brands (8 established and 3 new) within the "Gaming" portfolio. Can we infer anything else from this? Well, we have a rough estimate of what it takes to be a "Franchise Brand" from Ryan Dancey, who is evidence source #2:

Sometime around 2005ish, Hasbro made an internal decision to divide its businesses into two categories. Core brands, which had more than $50 million in annual sales, and had a growth path towards $100 million annual sales, and Non-Core brands, which didn't.

[...]

This came back to haunt Wizards when Hasbro's new Core/Non-Core strategy came into focus. Instead of being able to say "We're a $100+ million brand, keep funding us as we desire", each of the business units inside Wizards had to make that case separately. So the first thing that happened was the contraction you saw when Wizards dropped new game development and became the "D&D and Magic" company. Magic has no problem hitting the "Core" brand bar, but D&D does. It's really a $25-30 million business, especially since Wizards isn't given credit for the licensing revenue of the D&D computer games.

Dancey goes on to explain how 4e was self-consciously an attempt to build D&D to hit that $50m mark, with a hypothetical future MMO taking it to $100m, and we know that was a failure. It's a really interesting series of posts and I recommend it to anyone interested in the business side of RPGs.

D&D never became a "Franchise Brand," which means its revenue is under $50m or, best case, its revenue is over $50m but they don't have a plan to push it to $100m.

As a fact-check on the scale of numbers, we can consult ICv2. Their 2017 figure for the RPG market is up to $55m total, up from $45m in 2016 (which I find somewhat fishy). This is in an overall hobby games market worth $1,545m.

We define “hobby games” as those games produced for a “gamer” market, generally (although not always) sold primarily in the hobby channel of game and card specialty stores. We define the “hobby games market” as the market for those games regardless of whether they’re sold int eh hobby channel or other channels.

The total hobby games market estimate is derived from estimates for five individual categories: collectible games (which include Trading/Collectible Card Games, Collectible Miniatures Games, and Collectible Dice Games), miniatures (non-collectible), board games, card and dice games, and roleplaying games.

Our primary means of collecting data about hobby games sales is interviews with key industry figures with good visibility to sales in various categories and channels. We also review data released by publicly traded companies, and Kickstarter data and analysis, especially that released by ICO Partners. There were no major changes in methodology for 2017.

So, ICv2 is obviously not Nielsen or S&P when it comes to the accuracy of their statements, but maybe they're a Forbes. What they give us, more than specific numbers, is a context in which to interpret the Hasbro numbers and an order of magnitude guess for the RPG market. Also every quarter they give their estimates for top 5 best-selling RPG games (here's Fall 2017). A kind soul at ENWorld is maintaining a list, bless his heart, which shows 5e has been on top continuously since it launched.

All these things help us to narrow in on the $10m-$100m range for what order of magnitude a plausible D&D sales figure is in. Even the most generous assumptions in the context of the available evidence still have D&D top out around $50m.

Tackling this from the ICv2 side: if we assume that 100% of the market growth as reported by ICv2 since 2013 has gone to D&D (that's the jump from $15m sales in 2013 to $55m sales in 2017), then D&D still only brings in $40m, so you'd also have to assume that ICv2 has understated the size of the market with an estimate that's 70% of the reality on top of your unrealistic "D&D got all the growth" assumption. Gonna call that one "busted". Assuming that D&D represents 50% of the market as it exists now is plausible, and I'd believe it if you said the RPG market was actually $75m instead of $55, but that still leaves D&D around $38m.

From the Hasbro side, if D&D were really worth $100m right now, we would expect D&D to be promoted to Franchise Brand just like "Baby Alive" (Hasbro financial filings for 2017 mention that "Littlest Pet Shop" is being demoted back to Emerging Brand and replaced with "Baby Alive" starting in 2018). There have been some noises lately about D&D as an eSport so is D&D near that $50m threshold and they are starting to think about the road to $100m..? I doubt it.

Plus, D&D has to be in basically the same league as the other brands named in the "Hasbro Gaming" portfolio, none of which seem to be really hot shit. I mean Jenga is fun, and The Game of Life... exists... but none of the other stuff on that list is exactly setting the world on fire or pumping out licensed adaptations like Monopoly. If D&D sales grew by $10m from 2016 to 2017 I'd think of that as plausible even if it came from a starting point of $25m.

I would not estimate D&D revenue to be less than $20m, but barring additional evidence, I think the idea that D&D annually brings in $50m or more is just not plausible. Putting this in terms of number of core books sold, at $30 each that's somewhere between 50,000 and 130,000 books sold every month. If we take the low end figure, assume half of those books are Player's Handbooks, and throw in some dubious counting of .pdf sales included with Amazon book purchases, and the Mearls tweet that 5e PHB lifetime sales have exceeded the PHB lifetime sales for each of 3e, 3.5e, and 4e (but less than their combined value) sounds like it could be true.

[Dogbert]

I personally don't think 5e deserves that prize, given that I remember even 4e put out more material.

In addition, for all purposes, 5E was was a stillbirth. Ever since the DMG and MM's no-show on the release date, it was obvious the game was dead on arrival.