D&D: big as it ever was? (Forked Thread: So...How are Sales of 4E Product?)

[Rokes]

It reflects on social acceptance.

The real question is, which figure (percentage or hard numbers) makes it easier for me to find other players?

Which figure makes it more socially acceptable to play in public? (Not that I personally care...)

Which figure better guarantees the future of our hobby?

 

[thecasualoblivion]

The real question is, which figure (percentage or hard numbers) makes it easier for me to find other players?

Which figure makes it more socially acceptable to play in public? (Not that I personally care...)

Which figure better guarantees the future of our hobby?

Best thing for the hobby would be for one edition to win(regardless of which), and establish itself as THE D&D. Splitting and fighting amongst the two isn't good for the hobby.

The thing is, this isn't a war 3E can win. Either 4E will succeed or D&D as a whole will fail.

 

[FriarRosing]

Forked from: So...How are Sales of 4E Product?



But, but, but...the game was everywhere back then, from middle schools to college campuses. I was denounced in churches, and had its own cartoon! It was huge!

And most people exposed to it never really became serious gamers. Is this a definitional issue? How we define "player"?

My guess is that fewer people buy D&D products, or have an inkling to play it, or know about it, but that the "core" is bigger, and those that do buy more stuff per person.

Or something like that.

Graphs of popularity of various things are often referred to as being battleship shaped. The idea being that at first a few people know about it, but gradually more and more people do, and it's really popular, and then the population of people who enjoy/perform/do whatever it is gets smaller and smaller and goes to back to a few people or no one as fans, or whatever. It's used a lot to show social trends in archaeology and anthropology.

But anyway,
I don't know too much, but I'd imagine it was probably more popular with more people back in the day. Now it may be more niche or whatever. Especially since there's no cartoon or anything directly aimed at children, who I think D&D is excellent for. They should really make D&D themed action figures. I know that I would buy a mindflayer and a beholder or two.

But now I'm off topic.

EDIT
How do we definite "player?" I'd say a player is anyone who plays the game for whatever reason. If they're not currently playing (or buying, I suppose) Dungeons and Dragons, then they are not D&D players.

 

[justanobody]

But hold on; if the number of players has regained the amount from 1980, or even more, but the population has grown more, wouldn't that still mean DnD has shrunk? Why would hard numbers be more important than percentage penetration?

I think that is the point people are trying to make with sales figures.

80's sold only 1 million copies of the game
2008 has already sold 2 million copies!

Did the population grow at all during those times?

By just giving numbers of copies sold it makes a false statement of how well ANYTHING is selling compared to the past.

I prefer to see side by side full comparisons myself.

 

[rogueattorney]

I have no idea the actual numbers...

D&D doesn't seem to be in the cultural consciousness now like it was in the early to mid-80's. There isn't a Saturday morning cartoon. There aren't the D&D lunch boxes, action figures, beach towels, coloring books, etc. D&D isn't in the news now like it was (in this case probably a good thing).

How much any of that contributes to actual numbers of sales or players, I haven't the foggiest clue.

 

[malraux]

I have no idea the actual numbers...

D&D doesn't seem to be in the cultural consciousness now like it was in the early to mid-80's. There isn't a Saturday morning cartoon. There aren't the D&D lunch boxes, action figures, beach towels, coloring books, etc. D&D isn't in the news now like it was (in this case probably a good thing).

How much any of that contributes to actual numbers of sales or players, I haven't the foggiest clue.

In fairness, its a lot harder for anything to take that sort of place now. There's a zillion different tv channels, you can order just about anything via the internet, instead of consuming whatever it is that gets stocked locally, etc. The conditions that lead to any one thing being huge everywhere just don't exist now.

 

[doctorhook]

I think that is the point people are trying to make with sales figures.

80's sold only 1 million copies of the game
2008 has already sold 2 million copies!

Did the population grow at all during those times?

By just giving numbers of copies sold it makes a false statement of how well ANYTHING is selling compared to the past.

I prefer to see side by side full comparisons myself.

I don't really understand why the relative number of D&Ders (as opposed to the absolute) matters.

Yes, in the '80s, D&D was definitely more high profile in popular culture than it is today. That said, sales data also suggests to us D&D is being purchased by more people now than at any time in the past, including during its fad days. Thus, even though D&D might be played by a smaller percentage of the total population now than in the '80s, there are still significantly more people playing D&D (and therefore buying D&D products) than in the '80s. Since businesses succeed on the basis of whether or not their revenue exceeds their costs, rather than "more than X percentage of the population plays the game". Hence, D&D is played by more people now and making more money now; why does the relative number of players matter?

Perhaps another example: People living in A and B want to build football stadiums for their towns. In Town A, 100% of the population loves football and is willing to donate money for stadium construction, but Town B, only 10% of the population loves football and is willing to donate money to build a stadium. Which town can afford to build a stadium? Town A, you say? Not necessarily. Town A has a total population of one hundred people, of whom all one hundred are football fans. In contrast, Town B has a total population of one million (it's a big town), and of them, one hundred thousand people are football fans. So despite having a ten-times higher relative percentage of football fans, building a football stadium is much LESS economically feasible in Town A than Town B, because Town B has enough fans to make construction possible. Why is it this way? Because with absolute measures such as costs, relative numbers don't generally matter.

FWIW, also consider that being lower profile now than in the '80s has been good for sales of D&D. Remember it used to get a lot of negative attention which doubtlessly scared away at least some business.

 

[Delta]

To me, having worked in game companies in the past, this is an exceedingly easy call. This quote from Charles is one of the chief examples of some promotional language that got mangled by a lot of people.

What he was bouncing off at the time were a bunch of surveys that WOTC did, starting by asking random people "Have you heard of D&D? Do you ever play it?". So of course they were picking up everyone who played earlier versions, in addition to the current version.

Charles was trying to do some positive cheerleading for D&D (which was his job). But as he's clarified, players are not necessarily the same thing as buyers of currently-marketed D&D.

 

[darjr]

That survey has a summary at
Dungeons & Dragons - The Business of RPGs - The Role of Market Research

Stating that 3% of the us pop. played rpgs twice a month. 2.8 million, with 1.65 million playing D&D twice a month. All in 1999?

In the FAQ for the OGL at
Open Game Definitions:Frequently Asked Questions

The question "Why create Open Games" it claims that between 92 and 97 the business cratered 60-70%. Note it says the Business side did.

Then here Play D&D: Press

It says that GenCon attendance broke records in 92 with 18,000 attendies.

The 2008 GenCon number was 28,000 + unique attendees, taken from Gen Con LLC Indy : Press Release - 09/11/08

That was a record breakin year as well.

So, does it mean anything?

I guess one thing could be to say that the number of players has almost doubled, assuming that the same percentage of gamers attend GenCon.

Or if you assume that the precentage of gamers attending gencon has ballooned, then the hobby is smaller, maybe a lot smaller.

But I think that the Internet would tend to drive down the percentage of GenCon attendies... so that would make the gamer population more than close to double 92 numbers. Well, thats the optimistic angle I like.

Can anyone give a better wag at which of the three the truth might be closer to?

 

[justanobody]

I don't really understand why the relative number of D&Ders (as opposed to the absolute) matters.

When asking is the current work that is costing more to make these days worth the same as the past you have to look at your bottom line.

That bottom line includes the percentage of people playing. Now you can claim superiority of % of RPG gamers that buy D&D v other games, is one way to look at it, but actual popularity of the game itself must be based on all consumers.

So if 10% of the people played D&D in the 80's and only 3% of all the consumers that exist now play D&D, then something could correlate.

You have to look at that and see if it is your product, or the people.

Is your new product not doing as well because of problems with the product being something that consumes dont want.

You cannot make a blanket statement that more copies have sold this decade of a new game compared to a past decade, and leave out the fact the population has grown 10-fold in that time.

It is lying to people. What marketing departments and firms are made for.

But the accountants can tell the truth by checking past ledgers combined with the censuses taken of people in the country or world.

If you only want to know if you are selling more copies, then you can be blinded by the other information and look at the data with blinders on.

If you want to know how well your new product is doing compared to an old version of it (see Coke Classic/New Coke) then you must look at the entire consumer base to tell if the percentage of people is equal to a state in the past to see if you are doing as well as then.

I think it is NOT doing as well as it was then. That is also a job of marketing, but a hidden part not shown to the public as the public is only offered the advertising section of the marketing department in order to sale more product. This is for all companies.

So why should the consumer or gamers care? They don't have to, but some do.

So it is interesting for them to look at all the numbers to compare the "hype" vs reality.