The 2024 Player’s Handbook Breaks A 50-Year D&D Record

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According to a recent press release from Wizards of the Coast, the new 2024 Player’s Handbook has officially established a new record stretching back over Dungeons & Dragons’ 50-year history. The achievement? Becoming the fastest-selling DnD product ever, just weeks after the new PHB was fully released on September 17th, 2024.

It’s not entirely surprising given that the previous version of the Player’s Handbook is over a decade old and that anticipation among both casual and hardcore DnD players for the new version has been particularly high. In fact, 3,000 early release copies sold out in just a few minutes at the 2024 Gen Con in early August.

So just what does this early sales record mean for fans of DnD? Below, we look into all the details.

How many copies of the Player’s Handbook have been sold?

In the press release, Wizards of the Coast doesn’t specify the numbers of copies of the new 2024 PHB that have been sold, instead noting only that it shatters a record that was previously held by the November 2020 release of Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. From an archival USA Today publishing story, however, Tasha’s had reportedly sold over 105,000 copies in the first month after its release, which does give us some benchmarking data to go.

WotC also adds that 2024 Player’s Handbook has already sold three times as many copies as the 2014 Player’s Handbook did at launch. According to an archived Publisher’s Weekly page, the 2014 PHB sold over 22,000 units in the first week after publication.

Collectively, this suggests that we’re probably looking at anywhere from 120,000 to 150,000 copies of the new 2024 Player’s Handbook being sold (although this is a rough estimate and it’s not clear if Wizards of the Coast is counting any of the digital version of the product which are sold via D&D Beyond and which would not have been a factor in 2014)

Wizards of the Coast does, however, note that they have also printed three times the number of 2024 Player’s Handbooks than the previous 2014 version in 2014, making it the largest physical first printing of a book in the history of D&D.

“We couldn’t be more pleased with the resounding critical and fan acclaim and record-breaking launch of the 2024 Player’s Handbook, and we have our loyal fans to thank for it. They played a major role in helping make this product what it is,” Jess Lanzillo, VP of D&D Product and Franchise notes in the press release. “Our team has been analyzing feedback from players since the release of the 2014 Player’s Handbook and have worked hard and thoughtfully to implement it into the new core rulebooks to create something that we hope everyone will enjoy.”

Final thoughts

2024 marks a been a major milestone for Dungeons & Dragons with a new version of the game kicking off and Wizards of the Coast celebrating DnD’s 50th anniversary. It’s also safe to say that there’s lot riding on just how well the new materials for DnD 5e are received. Fortunately for WotC, most of the reviews of the new Player’s Handbook have been largely positive, including Polygon, ScreenRant, ComicBook and WarGamer (in our own review we gave a 19 out of 20).

The high volume of early sales of the new 2024 PHB suggest that players are also enthusiastic about it and that adoption of the new rules is likely to become widespread. In other words, chances are we’ll see more record-breaking for Dungeons & Dragons in the days ahead.

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