Sales Indicators Paint A Dismal Picture For 2024 Dungeons & Dragons Core Books After Multiple Controversies Turned Off Players
Sales indicators show that the new 2024 edition of Dungeons & Dragons is not performing nearly as well as its predecessors, as it appears Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro have turned off the tabletop RPG’s core fan base.
2024 Dungeons & Dragons or 5.5 edition as some are calling it has had more than its share of controversy over the last year of its release with players voicing concerns over the game’s direction.
The Player’s Handbook was filled with diversity, equity, and inclusion imagery and language that shows that Wizards of the Coast does not want returning players but seems to be trying to chase a modern audience with most of their art in the book centering around black people and women, and includes content removing terms like “race” in exchange for “species” and removing Half-Orcs from the book.
This is exactly what former Executive producer Kyle Brink called for in an infamous 2023 interview where he said, “This is not the face of the hobby anymore,” Brink said, “and I think there’s been mistakes made in years past where people assumed that D&D players were all, you know, white dudes in a basement. Which has been a faulty assumption for a lot of years and gets more and more false every day. And so in my viewpoint, guys like me can’t leave soon enough.”
On top of this controversy, the new Monster Manual excludes orcs and caters to extreme gender ideology by turning traditionally female characters like Hags and Dryads into something non-gender exclusive, and more changes that have left players scratching their heads about its content.
The icing on the cake came last year when Senior Designer Jason Tondro penned a forward to a history of Dungeons & Dragons book attacking its creator Gary Gygax as misogynistic and accusing him of colonialism.
Beyond the content problems with D&D, the focus on One DnD as a brand, urging players to get on a subscription model where the content shifts online and they don’t own their own content has turned off a lot of people from the hobby who enjoyed it being an offline pen and paper activity with their friends.
D&D Fifth Edition designer Mike Mearls posted stats regarding the current sales of the new core books comparing them to the last Fifth Edition release of Tasha’s Cauldron Of Everything prior to the launch.
He posted, “So with the Monster Manual released, we can start to see where 5.5 is landing. Here are the USA Today sales ranks for Tasha's compared to the core rulebooks. Interesting that DMG and MM both lasted only a week. PHB holiday bump tracks with the rate of new Amazon customer ratings.”
Along with this he had a spreadsheet showing dismal numbers for the new editions. Where Tasha’s Cauldron Of Everything premiered at #5 on the USA Today Bestseller List, none of the new core books came anywhere close to that. The best was the Player’s Handbook at a paltry #57, but the Dungeon Master’s Guide, the one guide needed by the person controlling the game to run scenarios, fell all the way to #95. Meanwhile, the Monster Manual premiered at #85.
These numbers are significant because core rule books for tabletop RPGs generally sell much better than later supplements. That’s the reason companies like Wizards of the Coast resets their game system every ten years to try to get that sales boost and influx of new players.
While we don’t have exact numbers for how the original Fifth Edition player’s handbook to compare, Mearls implied it did much better in sales than the current crop, saying, “Good question! It hit #1 on Amazon per an article on ICv2, and was on the NYT's games and hobby list for about a year after release. List archives don't go back that far, but I dug up a few news stories about it.”
It appears as if the 2024 edition of Dungeons & Dragons is bombing among players.
Even non-political channels on YouTube that cover D&D are voicing frustrations. Esper The Bard, with more than 120K subscribers, posted a full-length video saying “I’m Done Supporting WotC…what now?” where he details how frustrated he is with the brand.
If influencers like Esper are leaving the hobby because of WotC’s insanity, the new edition has sales troubles, one wonders what the company is thinking, that they continue in this direction, the players don’t seem to want.
What do you think about the 2024 Dungeons & Dragons sales numbers? Leave a comment and let us know.
If you enjoy great fantasy fiction with great worldbuilding and a D&D feel, read The Adventures of Baron von Monocle six-book series and support Fandom Pulse!
"includes content removing terms like “race” in exchange for “species”"
In all fairness, this is more accurate in a lot of cases. It's downright nuts how 40k and other IPs use the term 'race' to refer to beings as disparate as Necrons and Humans. Unless Necrons and humans are having babies together, they are not different 'races'.
In DnD it might be more nuanced since orcs and humans can interbreed, but clearly the term 'race' is terribly inaccurate in a lot of settings.
MOVE OVER CHUDS!! All the black folxs and women of color coming to replace you dudebros any minute now!!