Since Amazing Tales has now earned all the various ‘best selling’ metal badges from Drive Thru RPG, and since I see questions about this pop up from time to time I thought it might be useful to explain exactly how they work.

The metal badges are based on how many copies your game has sold. That does include products sold at a discount, but it doesn’t include products sold for free or ‘at cost’. So the dozen copies you bought for yourself to send to reviewers aren’t included.

The metal badges are also based on which storefront you sold through. At present DriveThru operates two storefronts – DriveThruRPG and RPGNow. You earn the badges separately on each store, so sales on DriveThruRPG don’t count toward badges on on RPGNow and vice-versa.

If you want to see how you’re doing on one site and not the other, then use the site selector in the sales report.

At some point in the not too distant future DriveThru are planning to merge their storefronts, so this issue will go away, and presumably, a lot of products will get higher medals.

So, how many copies do you have to sell to get a medal?

• Copper – 50+
• Silver – 100+
• Electrum – 250+
• Gold – 500+
• Platinum – 1000+
• Mithril – 2000+
• Adamantine – 5000+

DriveThru list the various products in each category in their metals page ( https://www.drivethrurpg.com/metal.php ). This page isn’t ordered by best selling, but by most recent entry per category. So the Number 1 product overall is the most recent product to have achieved Adamantine status, and so on per category.

The metals list is mostly interesting because it tells us something about the distribution of products on DriveThruRPG. We can use the data to calculate that there are over 107000 products on DriveThru, and that the overwhelming majority of these have sold fewer than 50 copies.

Here’s a graph, as you can see Mithril and Adamantium products are literally vanishingly rare.

At the time of writing there are 82000 products without a medal, and just 34 that have made it all the way to Adamantium.