2300AD - A suggestion

[TrippyHippy]

That's the print run, but graph it by year:

View attachment 5305

Traveller was no longer the best selling rulesset. Twilight: 2000 overtook Traveller in 1985-6. Remember, this is all materials, including supplements etc.

Well, the claim was that Twilight: 2000 was GDW’s biggest selling game. It clearly wasn’t over time and the chart doesn’t include the data following 1986 - Mega Traveller was released in 1987 as a replacement new edition of Traveller and, I’d imagine at least would have overtaken Twilight: 2000 sales again. Classic Traveller probably wasn’t producing much new stuff in 1985 and 1986 to sell.

Either way, Twilight 2000 in no way replicated the overall success of Traveller, even when it was first released. GDW as a whole had declining sales from the late 80s onwards.

 

[Avollant]

what really killed GDW was the Desert Storm Factbook, much more so than the lawsuit, and the reason for the Desert Storm Factbook was the out of the park succsess of the Desert Shield Factbook. that made them more money than they knew what to do with.

I recommend Shannon Applecline's EXCELLENT book "This is Free Trader Beowulf: a System History of Traveller" for a really fascinating in depth history of what happened.

I agree

 

[boggo2300]

Well, the claim was that Twilight: 2000 was GDW’s biggest selling game. It clearly wasn’t over time and the chart doesn’t include the data following 1986 - Mega Traveller was released in 1987 as a replacement new edition of Traveller and, I’d imagine at least would have overtaken Twilight: 2000 sales again. Classic Traveller probably wasn’t producing much new stuff in 1985 and 1986 to sell.

Either way, Twilight 2000 in no way replicated the overall success of Traveller, even when it was first released. GDW as a whole had declining sales from the late 80s onwards.

Don't put words in my mouth I didn't say or even imply "over time" I said it was their biggest selling game while 2300AD was out, and it was. It would be silly to expect a game on sale for 3 years during an industry downturn to sell more copies than something that had been on sale for a decade, most of which was during the industries BOOM period...