Pathfinder 1E Pathfinder sales

[BryonD]

So to conclude anything at all about the D&D brand based only on the limited information we have about RPG print sales seems highly problematic.

Actually, I completely agree.
I see the available data NOT as proof at all. But I find it completely consistent with the overall observations of the marketplace and general mood and talk of fans. Which is to say that D&D remains a very key players. But its singular dominance was once obvious, and now there seems to be no evidence of THAT anywhere.

 

[cyderak]

I can't say I meet people who change to PATHFINDER everyday but I meet people on a regular basis who are either starting up with RPG's in the PATHFINDER universe or switching from 4E to PATHFINDER.

At least in my area, 4E is on the decline and PATHFINDER is on the rise.

Makes me smile everytime I hear it.

is kickin butt.

 

[UnknownAtThisTime]

At least in my area, 4E is on the decline and PATHFINDER is on the rise.

Interesting. In my area, 4E is on the rise, and nobody has ever even heard of pathfinder, let alone played it! Ever!

Never mind what the terms "on the rise" and "my area" mean.

Isn't this fun?

 

[Dannager]

I give up. You really don't grasp this do you?

Sure I do. I can tell that you're not really much of a fan of me grasping it, though.

Yes, my number WAS stupid. It was INTENDED to be stupid. That was the point. I was making a case and intentionally stacking the deck WAY against myself to show the case still works. That is a rational form of argument. If one can use extreme worst case scenarios and then demonstrate that one's position still stands, then that provides a logical case.

I understand that this was what you were trying to do. However, instead you came up with a reasonable number (four players per DM) and decided to call it stupid, and then used that to make my equally reasonable number (five players per DM) seem even more stupid by association.

This is not acceptable debate.

Taking those extremes and instead putting them IN your favor and then compounding them, on the other hand, is not REMOTELY a rational form of debate.

Again, the four-players-per-DM number is not extreme. If you wanted to call a number "stupid", you could have gone to the one-account-per-two-groups number. That would be a much better place to start, and it seems from what you're saying now that this is actually what you were going for the whole time despite quoting a completely different number.

And, I never said four players per D&D game was crazy. I said assuming that as a multiplier is crazy because it assumes every single subscriber is a DM and through all these thousands of hypothetical players not a SINGLE ONE is a subscriber.

Actually, it's really just a way of saying there is one subscriber for every ten people playing D&D. You clearly believe that this number ought to be higher, and that's fine. I think it's reasonable, in the sense that I would not be surprised if it were higher and I would not be surprised if it were lower.

What you do not need to be doing is dragging this debate down to a level of discussion and treatment of your opponent that makes a bar brawl look downright cordial. You strive for denigration rather than understanding, and for imaginary argument points rather than a well-reasoned conclusion. This is not an appropriate way to behave, and it is why I have been trying (and failing) to avoid getting sucked into arguments with you.

You said you hear of new people starting 4E "every day". "Every Day."

I'm not calling you a liar because I disagree with you. I'm calling you a liar because you said you meet new people starting 4E "Every day".

No. As you said, I hear of new people trying D&D for the first time practically every day. I don't meet them personally, but I didn't say I did so that's hardly the point.

If you want "nice things" in a conversation, don't poison the conversation with patently asinine claims.

Don't color reasonable claims as patently asinine.

 

[Mournblade94]

Only for a little while, and very intermittently thereafter:

Sep 2009: 7972
Oct 2009: 14392
Nov 2009: 18911
Dec 2009: 21570
Jan 2010: 23816
Feb 2010: 26101
...
Jul 2010: 35997
...
Aug 2011: 59750

I am not of a business mind but these numbers seem pretty dire. It didnt really hit me until I read another post, but really, 60K subscribers is very low. The amount of non subscribing players I beleive would be 5x that number at most. Anyway, that is a really low number of Pen and paper rpgs players.

 

[Dannager]

I am not of a business mind but these numbers seem pretty dire. It didnt really hit me until I read another post, but really, 60K subscribers is very low. The amount of non subscribing players I beleive would be 5x that number at most. Anyway, that is a really low number of Pen and paper rpgs players.

What number of subscribers would strike you as not-low? And what criteria are you using to determine those levels?

And what sorts of standards for business success do you have where a 5% month-to-month growth rate for an established product is bad, in your mind?

 

[Dannager]

At least in my area, 4E is on the decline and PATHFINDER is on the rise.

Makes me smile everytime I hear it.

Huh, it had been a few days since I'd heard a Pathfinder fan celebrating the imagined failure of a game they don't play.

I'd been starting to think that maybe they'd cleaned up their act.

 

[Mournblade94]

What number of subscribers would strike you as not-low? And what criteria are you using to determine those levels?

I am not using any criteria. I would just like to THINK that active roleplayers are around 1% of the US population. Lets say 3 million. These subscriptions include our friends from over seas, so I would find it a stretch to estimate 3 million people play pen and paper RPGs.

I think it is fair to say that D&D and Pathfinder hold the majority of TTRPG players. Lets just call it D&D fantasy. I would really expect the DDI subscriptions to be in the 6 digits at least.

I have no criteria or any idea. It just seems to me that with 9 million WOW subscribers Table top should be about a third (because I think so, no other reason). I find it hard ot extropolate 3M people by those numbers.

 

[Wayside]

I have a really hard time seeing any basis for conclusions about the D&D "brand", and certainly nothing that comes close to "strongly suggesting" anything at all.

To put it in perspective, we know that Pathfinder sells more print RPG books than Warcraft, World of Darkness, Warhammer, etc. Is Pathfinder a stronger brand? No. It's not even in the same league.

All the tabletop RPG books in the world could vanish tomorrow and D&D would still be an enormously valuable brand. The same obviously goes for Warcraft, World of Darkness, and Warhammer. But not Pathfinder.

People like to pretend that D&D's value is in RPG books, but tabletop RPGs are small potatoes. Let's not forget all the best-selling novels, the two+ video games per year, board games, comics, movies, TV, etc.

As with comics these days, the strength of D&D is in the brand itself, not the medium that produced it. D&D, World of Darkness, Warhammer -- these are brands. Pathfinder is just a game.

 

[prosfilaes]

Frankly, I don't think either @BryonD nor @Dannager is making credible extrapolations above. To put that another way, and to link back to the original post: "Citation needed"!

When you've got a calculation where you have one real number, multiplied by a series of mostly unknown factors (e.g. Drake's Equation), there's two things you can do: plug in a bunch of numbers you like, and get the results you like, or plug in realistic ranges and discover that the equation doesn't tell you much of anything. Personally, I think a factor of four could be taken as a rough safe lower bound, and thus we're talking about roughly 200,000 D&D 4e players; I'd give a factor of 30 as a rough upper bound, giving 1,700,000 players ... but the problem with these type of equations is that even broad bounds are controversial, with one person giving upper bounds that are less than another person's lower bounds. I'm sure that someone will with a straight face argue that even higher bounds are perfectly plausible.