Basic D&D Was Selling 600,000+/Year At One Point

Recently Ben Riggs shared some sales figures of AD&D 1st Edition. Now he has shared figures for Basic D&D from 1979-1995, and during the early 80s is was selling 500-700K copies per year.

Ben Riggs' book, Slaying the Dragon, which is a history of TSR-era D&D, comes out soon, and you can pre-order your copy now.

Slaying the Dragon - Macmillan

The secret and untold story of how TSR, the company that created Dungeons & Dragons, was driven into ruin by disastrous management decisions, then ...

read.macmillan.com

You can compare these figures to those of AD&D 1E in the same period. Basic D&D sold higher than AD&D's PHB and DMG combined for 4 years running, again in the early 80s.

If you take a look at the overall sales from 1979-1995, here are the two beside each other (again, this is just PHB and DMG, so it doesn't include the Monster Manual, Unearthed Arcana, etc.)

More actual D&D sales numbers!

Below you will find the sales numbers of Basic D&D, and then two charts comparing those to the sales of AD&D 1st edition. For those who don’t know, early in its life, the tree of D&D was split in half. On the one side there was D&D, an RPG designed to bring beginners into the game. It was simpler, and didn’t try to have rules for everything.
On the other side there was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax’s attempt to throw a net around the world and then shove it into rulebooks. The game was so detailed that it provided rules on how Armor Class changed depending on what hand your PC held their shield in. (It may also have been an attempt to cut D&D co-creator Dave Arneson out of royalties…)

I am frankly shocked at how well Basic D&D sold. Having discovered AD&D 2nd edition in the 90s, I thought of “Dungeons & Dragons” as a sort of baby game of mashed peas and steamed potatoes. It was for people not ready for the full meal that was AD&D. (I have since learned how wrong I was to dismiss the beauty of what Holmes, Moldvay, Mentzer, Cook, et al created for us in those wondrous BECMI boxed sets…)

I figured that Basic D&D was just a series of intro products, but over its lifetime, it actually outsold AD&D 1st edition. (Partly because 1st edition was replaced by 2nd edition in 1989. I’ll start rolling out the 2nd ed numbers tomorrow FYI.) These numbers would explain why in a 1980 Dragon article Gygax spoke of AD&D not being “abandoned.”
Still, between 1980 and 1984, Basic outsold AD&D. The strong numbers for Basic D&D prompt a few questions. Where was the strength of the brand? Were these two lines of products in competition with each other? Was one “real” D&D? And why did TSR stop supporting Basic D&D in the 90s?

The only one of those questions I will hazard is the last one. A source told me that because TSR CEO Lorraine Williams did not want to generate royalties for Gary Gygax or Dave Arneson, Basic D&D was left to wither on the vine.

I will also say this: TSR will die in 1997 of a thousand cuts, but the one underlying all of them was a failure of the company to grow its customer base. TSR wanted its D&D players to migrate over to AD&D, but what if they didn’t? What if they wanted to keep playing D&D, and TSR simply stopped making the product they wanted to buy? What if TSR walked away from what may have been hundreds of thousands of customers because of a sort of personal vendetta?

Tomorrow, I’ll post numbers for 2nd edition AD&D, and comparisons for it with Basic and 1st edition.

And if you don’t know, I have a book of D&D history coming out in a couple weeks. If you find me interesting, you can preorder in the first comment below!

Also, I'll post raw sales numbers below for the interested.

 

[Zardnaar]

They are the ones that got purchased. Their numbers must be good, but they can't be better than a tenth of WotC's, probably far less.

Well available figures are they sold more.

I have no doubt WotC is better run so yeah sales and profit are two different things.

People like pointing out Amazon sales but an ex Amazon employee posted years ago were 5E you can get that position on around 100 books a day (35k).

Amazon's only one point of sales as well. And there's estimates of the RPG market size as well.

I suspect 5E sales are lower than a lot of people assume. But even that lower number is still higher than every other edition of D&D with Basic being the exception.

 

[CleverNickName]

This is blowing my mind...not at all what I expected. I know beggars can't be choosers, and the data probably doesn't exist for each separate version of 'Basic' Dungeons & Dragons (Mondvay, Holmes, and Rules Cyclopedia) but I would really love to see it if it does.

A while ago at the beginning of the pandemic lockdown, I was missing my friends and feeling all nostalgic about D&D. I decided to do a series of survey threads about each edition of D&D: I went through each edition of the game one by one, asking people if they'd played them and what they thought of them. And the results:

(full results here, as of January 2021)

From each of the individual surveys, it looks like AD&D 1E was ENWorld's clear favorite of the TSR-era. But if we combine both the Holmes and Moldvay sets and the Rules Cyclopedia into a single category called "Basic," which seems to be what was done with the sales graphs upthread, we get a different picture:

149 -- I played one or more of them, and I remember liking them​

20 -- I played one or more of them, and I wasn't impressed one way or another​

7 -- I played one or more of them, and I didn't really like them​

24 -- I'm playing one or more of them right now and so far, I like them​

1 -- I'm playing one or more of them right now; I'll have to let you know later​

1 -- I'm playing one or more of them right now and so far, I don't like them​

29 -- I never played one or more of these editions, but I'd like to​

16 -- I never played one or more of these edition, or even considered it tbh​

14 -- I never played one or more of these editions, and I don't really want to​

Doing this, Basic would beat out all other contenders, even 3rd Edition. Which...seems to match the graphs above.

Wild.

EDIT: Yikes, that survey summary is out of date. Looks like there's been a lot of activity in the 18 months since I last checked them. I'll see about updating it later this weekend.

 

[Zardnaar]

This is blowing my mind...not at all what I expected. I know beggars can't be choosers, and the data probably doesn't exist for each separate version of 'Basic' Dungeons & Dragons (Mondvay, Holmes, and Rules Cyclopedia) but I would really love to see it if it does.

A while ago at the beginning of the pandemic lockdown, I was missing my friends and feeling all nostalgic about D&D. I decided to do a series of survey threads about each edition of D&D: I went through each edition of the game one by one, asking people if they'd played them and what they thought of them. And the results:
View attachment 253037
(full results here, as of January 2021)

From each of the individual surveys, it looks like AD&D 1E was ENWorld's clear favorite of the TSR-era. But if we combine both the Holmes and Moldvay sets and the Rules Cyclopedia into a single category called "Basic," which seems to be what was done with the sales graphs upthread, we get a different picture:

149 -- I played one or more of them, and I remember liking them​

20 -- I played one or more of them, and I wasn't impressed one way or another​

7 -- I played one or more of them, and I didn't really like them​

24 -- I'm playing one or more of them right now and so far, I like them​

1 -- I'm playing one or more of them right now; I'll have to let you know later​

1 -- I'm playing one or more of them right now and so far, I don't like them​

29 -- I never played one or more of these editions, but I'd like to​

16 -- I never played one or more of these edition, or even considered it tbh​

14 -- I never played one or more of these editions, and I don't really want to​

Doing this, Basic would beat out all other contenders, even 3rd Edition. Which...seems to match the graphs above.

Wild.

You can take some pretty good guesses what version of basic is selling. 81/82 Modvay, 83 probably red box 91 black box and maybe RC.

Black box by itself has outsold everything except 1E/2E other Basic versions and 5E.

 

[Jer]

Doing this, Basic would beat out all other contenders, even 3rd Edition. Which...seems to match the graphs above.

Wild.

You probably have multiple votes from the same person tallied in there though. Folks who voted for all three of them getting triple counted.

But if it turns out to be true that Basic was their biggest seller I wouldn't actually be all that surprised. There would have been a lot of people who got a Basic set as a gift or to check it out who never got further than that, and then there would be the folks who went from Basic to either Expert or to Advanced. And a lot of those folks would have gone on to Advanced, so they're in both groups. That means that Basic was working as TSR hoped it would when Holmes wrote his first set of Basic rules - as a lead in to teach people to play the game so they'll buy more D&D. (That after Holmes Basic TSR lost the plot on that angle and made D&D and AD&D two separate game lines and yet Basic still worked that way is a testament to what a good idea the Basic Set was in the first place. And makes it even more shocking that so few game companies even try to do something similar.)

 

[CleverNickName]

You probably have multiple votes from the same person tallied in there though. Folks who voted for all three of them getting triple counted.

This is possible. But it's also possible that people who bought the B/X set also bought the Rules Cyclopedia (I know that I did).

For what it's worth, my surveys were set up to record the names of the voters. So if you're curious about any overlap, you can see who voted for which editions.

 

[Jer]

This is possible. But it's also possible that people who bought the B/X set also bought the Rules Cyclopedia (I know that I did).

Good point - especially because I bought Moldvay Basic, Mentzer Basic, and the RC. So TSR got my money three times and I guess I should be triple counted.

 

[Helldritch]

Good point - especially because I bought Moldvay Basic, Mentzer Basic, and the RC. So TSR got my money three times and I guess I should be triple counted.

If everyone bought triple copies, does it mean that only 200,000 people bought the basic sets? Boy were they rough on their books. No wonder they had to buy three....

Come to think of it... I own two... Doh!

 

[darjr]

If everyone bought triple copies, does it mean that only 200,000 people bought the basic sets? Boy were they rough on their books. No wonder they had to buy three....

Come to think of it... I own two... Doh!

new? No. We thrashed our books but also migrated to 1st ed AD&D. Also didn't buy the Red Box nor any other D&D starter box until the 3.0 and 3.5 ones I bought to get my kids involved.

 

[Jer]

If everyone bought triple copies, does it mean that only 200,000 people bought the basic sets? Boy were they rough on their books. No wonder they had to buy three....

Come to think of it... I own two... Doh!

Oh I own more than 3. But I only paid TSR for 3 (2 really - the first was a gift).

Finding cheap used copies of the Rules Cyclopedia in the early 00s was too good to pass up, even if I couldn't actually find anyone who wanted to play it.

(For me personally BECMI D&D will be my favorite D&D because it's so nostalgic. But unless I find other 50 year old grognards who grew up with BECMI instead of 1e I probably won't ever be able to actually run it again. Even my long term gaming group who are my age won't play any version of D&D older than 4e at this point. I've also tried with my 14 year old who loves 5e and it's tough to convince them that it's even the same game. But it was fun to see their reaction to the different XP tables for each class and race-as-class mechanics. One of these days I'm going to run them through a Palladium game and see if I can blow their mind even more)

 

[CleverNickName]

For me personally BECMI D&D will be my favorite D&D because it's so nostalgic. But unless I find other 50 year old grognards who grew up with BECMI instead of 1e I probably won't ever be able to actually run it again.

Roll20 is your friend.