Last week we got to hear from Jeremy Crawford and Wes Schneider, Co-Leads for the 2024 Monster Manual, about what we can expect when the third part of the 2024 Core Rulebooks release in a little over a month. Before that though Jess Lanzillo, VP of Franchise and Product for Dungeons & Dragons, walked us through 2024 as a year for Dungeons & Dragons including some interesting comparisons to the 2014 5th Edition release.
D&D and D&DBeyond in 2024
Lanzillo began by discussing the way Wizards of the Coast have been tracking the sales for the 2024 Core Rulebooks released so far; the Player's Handbook in September 2024 and the Dungeon Master's Guide in November 2024. In the past four months these two books have already sold as many copies as it took the 2014 edition three years to meet including all language versions.
This is an impressive amount of growth, but also not an incredibly surprising number considering the monumental boom that Dungeons & Dragons has had in popularity over the past 10 years including the popularity of Actual Plays like Critical Role, Dimension 20, and Acquisitions Incorporated, the increase in play seen over the pandemic and past that, and even the releases of a movie and popular video games like Baldurs Gate III.
You can check out our reviews for the Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide, and be sure to look out for a review of the Monster Manual before too long.
Lanzillo expressed that now that the final Core Book is almost released they're looking forward to 'finally beginning'.
"We're going to have this really nice base of what's going to be setting up D&D for the future. [...] It's going to be a springboard for all of the exciting stuff that we are going to be doing in the future."
After discussing that Wizards of the Coast was happy with the engagement in the new Core Rulebooks Lanzillo discussed some other milestones that they were seeing across other D&D related platforms.
For D&DBeyond she was able to reveal that over 3.6 million characters have been made on D&DBeyond with the 2024 ruleset, there are over 19 million registered users on D&DBeyond, and that 1.3 million maps have been used in the D&DBeyond VTT (This is not including the new 3D VTT that we know is on the way).
Lanzillo bookmarked all of the statements about D&D and D&DBeyond by mentioning that all of these milestones also don't include all of those who are playing the game completely physically.
The Greater Dungeons & Dragons Brand
Talking about Dungeons & Dragons outside of the Tabletop experience Lanzillo brought up the continued success of Baldurs Gate III which continues to be in the top 10 most played games on Steam and regularly breaks into 100K+ concurrent players. There was also mention of continued support from Larian into 2025 with new sub-class options.
Finally to wrap up the discussion on the D&D Brand Lanzillo was able to reveal that in 2024 around 85 million fans have engaged in D&D across movies, video games, merchandise purchases, or just by playing the game.
