D&D's Lead Slightly Increases On Roll20 & World of Darkness On The Rise

Industry stats are a bit like buses - you wait ages for one, and then two come along at once. I covered Fantasy Grounds' latest stats a few days ago, and now Roll20 has weighed in. The two data sets usually line up reasonably well at the top end (taking players as the metric, both give 62% to D&D 5E, although Fantasy Grounds has the next highest at Pathfinder with 11%, while Roll20 reports nearly 20%). In third place, Fantasy Grounds features Savage Worlds, but that system is #14 on Roll20. For Roll20, as well as Fantasy Grounds, D&D's lead increased slightly over the last quarter. Interestingly, World of Darkness is now above D&D 4E for the first time.

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Roll20's explanation of their figures: "We pull our data from two locations within Roll20 member profiles. Player numbers are drawn from the “Enjoys Playing” and “Seeks Group For” sections, while Game numbers come from the “My Campaigns” section. Our percentages can total more than 100%, particularly Player numbers, since each player will list their interest in multiple games. The report is meant to be a representative sample, and the game listings are curated by Roll20 staff. For more details about how our report works, you can always look back at our in-depth explanation."

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[mykesfree]

Where does the Adventures in Middle-earth game sit? Is it under D&D 5E or is it under The One Ring?

 

[fantasmamore]

Is is my idea or everything is falling except 5e? I look at the % of games played. However the number of players and games played is rising, which is a good sign.
P.S. 3790 players played in 21 games of Munchkin at some point... That's 180+ players per game? What exactly is considered a "game"?

 

[Jester David]

Is is my idea or everything is falling except 5e? I look at the % of games played. However the number of players and games played is rising, which is a good sign.
P.S. 3790 players played in 21 games of Munchkin at some point... That's 180+ players per game? What exactly is considered a "game"?

Don't just look at the %, which are deceptive as D&D is just growing in terms of games faster than other systems. It's new people coming in more than people converting.

I did some charts a while back (and will update those) that showed while the top 5 games all dropped in % in terms of D&D, many actually grew in terms of game. Pathfinder had a jump in games betweeen Q4 and Q1. And while it dropped a bit in the last quarter, it's still generally up.

As far as player per game, each player lists the systems they like and are interested in. So there can be a lot of overlap there. The actual games being played is the metric

 

[Grimstaff]

Interesting that 1-2% a quarter of 5e's growth appears to be coming directly from the Pathfinder piece of the pie. They seemed like a pretty diehard bunch, I wonder what the makes the difference?

 

[Over the Hill Gamer]

5e seems to be driving new players to roll20. It may be helping the hobby as a whole. This might require some heavy duty data mining but I wonder what percentage of 5e players also play another RPG? And what percentage of players of other games play another RPG? Or to put it another way what is the exclusivity of 5e players compared to the players of other RPGs?

 

[fantasmamore]

Interesting that 1-2% a quarter of 5e's growth appears to be coming directly from the Pathfinder piece of the pie

Well, the number of PF games went from 9800 to 9400 so there are about 400 less games. On the other hand, as friend Jester explained, there are about 1000 more players interested in playing this game. What I understand from these numbers is that Pathfinder in the last months has more fans but less GMs willing to play. Since however 400 is not such a great number (only 4% of the 9800 players, though I was never good at math and may be wrong) it's not safe to say that there is a tendency.

 

[Jester David]

As mentioned above: CHARTS:

View attachment 86283

View attachment 86284

As you can see, D&D continues to gain gamers at a steady rate, and increase in the number of games being played on the service. However, most other games are maintaining their playerbase.

 

[PMárk]

I suspect the cause of WoD's rising might be because either people want to try the new playtest or the recent stirring of WW made people to bring out the old books and give them a dust-off, but it would be interesting to know which version/edition of the WoD/CofD games were played?

 

[Over the Hill Gamer]

5e is definitely driving players to roll20. I don't see a lot of evidence to suggest that "all boats are rising," however, at least not by very much. There are so many other fun RPGs out there that I wonder if some better effort could be made to at least make these 5e players better aware of their options. How do you reach casual 5e players? Apparently, you can reach them on roll20. If I had an RPG on the market, I'd promote it on roll20.