In previous years, Geek Native has been able to end the month with charts kindly provided by DriveThruRPG of what was published and sold well.
For example, the best-selling fantasy RPG published last year was Fabula Ultima Atlas: High Fantasy by Need Games.
Sadly, we’ll not be able to recreate that this year. A lot has changed at DriveThruRPG and OneBookShelf, which is now part of the Roll20 family, along with Demiplane.
The good news is that we have got a different set of charts with a much broader scope. We just can’t do it by genre.
Is that all? No, sorry, one final twist! Each year, these charts always provoke debate along the lines of, “Is that really the best seller?” and all we can do is cite our source and trust in DTRPG’s system.
DriveThruRPG Top Sellers (any release date) of 2024
The list below is a cut’n’paste of the bestselling products on DriveThruRPG this year, regardless of the year they were published.
- Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Deft Steps Light Fingers
- The Painted Wastelands
- Cyberpunk RED
- Blades in the Dark: Deep Cuts
- Exalted: Essence
- Worlds Without Number
- Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition
- Car Wars Companion
- Household
- Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory, Space Marine 2 – Purge the Swarm
Cubicle 7’s Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Deft Steps Light Fingers was published days ago and has an Electrum badge. It’s higher in the chart than Blades in the Dark: Deep Cuts, which has a Platinum badge. That’s odd, but Deep Cuts has also been in bundles.
We’re thankful for Roll20’s data and are just calling out the oddness in the stats because others will do if we don’t. The answer, we suspect, is that there are various ways in which DriveThruRPG and sister sites can deliver products to people;
- By sales that meet the minimum price threshold for a metal badge.
- By sales that don’t meet the minimum price threshold for a metal badge.
- By sales that would meet the minimum price threshold for a metal badge except for a discount coupon that lowered it.
- Through bundles.
- And perhaps through other mechanisms, such as crowdfunding fulfilment.
Perhaps the data we have uses one tallying system, and the metal badges another. Maybe we just have the list the wrong way around, with the download in the 10th position shown here in the 1st.
Stay tuned for more data, more charts, and perhaps some ways to cross-check and corroborate.
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