WotC Comparing EN World's Demographics to the D&D Community's

WotC released some figures this week. I thought it would be fun to compare them to the demographics of our own little community here on EN World for the same period (2019).

WotC uses a metric it refers to as 40,000,000 'D&D Fans', but that's not defined. For the purposes of this, I assume a fan is a person who has interacted directly with D&D in some way (played a game, bought a book, watch a stream, played a video game, etc.) A fan's a fan, however they interact with D&D!

For comparison, I'm using people who have interacted with EN World in some way -- and what we can measure is unique visitors. Obviously this isn't on the same scale (40M people is a LOT) but it doesn't matter too much for what we're doing here; they're both samples for conversation. So, let's start at the top!

• Short version: EN World skews younger, but more male than the overall D&D community.

WotC is looking at 40M fans, we're looking at 5.6M unique users (as opposed to overall visits, which numbers in the tens of millions). We get this data using Google Analytics, which provides a lot of anonymized demographic data. I can't identify any individual person with this; it merely shows the overall numbers. Our demographic data includes just under half of those 5.6M users; I don't know how WotC's data is derived. I know they do surveys from time to time, but I don't know what percentage of those 40M fans fill out those forms.

As an aside - 40 million D&D fans is awesome! We're definitely living in a golden age of tabletop gaming, and as the market leader, WotC is the entity most responsible for bringing in new gamers. Well, maybe Critical Role is, but they're playing D&D!

Age

So, the controversial data that everybody on Twitter is talking about -- the age groups. Google Analytics breaks it down a little differently to WotC's figures, so here's what we have. GA doesn't give stats on people under 18 years of age. The figures below are those GA has data on for EN World -- obviously that's only about half of overall users.

Age​	Numbers​	Percentage​
18-24	592,401 users	24.58%
25-34	1,309,373 users	54.33%
35-44	330,755 users	13.46%
45-54	138,372 users	5.74%
55-64	26,689 users	1.11%
65+	12,631 users	0.52%

As you can see, the figures aren't as evenly distributed as WotC's. There's a significant number of 25-34 year-olds, and a higher number of 18-24 year-olds. Also, it shows people above the age of 45, who don't appear in WotC's stats.

• We show a slightly higher percentage of people 34 or under (79% compared to WotC's measure of 74%) although we're not measuring people under 18, which would skew it younger if we were.
• 26% of WotC's audience is over 25, while only 20% of EN World's is.
• 7.37% of EN World's audience is over 45.
• Under 18s are not included in the stats.
• EN World skews younger than the D&D community overall.

For comparison, here are WotC's figures.

I've turned them into a quick and dirty bar graph. The number of players increases slowly from 8 up until age 35, peaking at ages 30-34, and then it starts to drop off sharply. That's the same age that the drop-off on EN World's readership takes place, too. Seems about 30 is peak age.

And here are those same figures in absolute numbers -- 10% of 40,000,000 people is a LOT of people!

Age​	Percentage​	Numbers​
8-12	12%	4.8 million
13-17	13%	5.2 million
18-24	15%	6 million
25-29	15%	6 million
30-34	19%	7.6 million
35-39	15%	6 million
40-45	11%	4.4 million

Gender

The gender demographics here skew much more male than WotC's stats do. Google Analytics shows male and female (it doesn't track non-binary people) and reports on under half of overall users (2.3M out of 5.6M total).

Of those, it reports 85.56% male, 14.44% female. It doesn't provide data on non-binary visitors.

Geography

WotC's report shows that Europe is growing for them. As a European (at least geographically!) that's heartwarming news for me. So here's some figures on EN World's geographical distribution.

As you can see, it skews primarily English-speaking heavily, which is expected for an English-language community.

United States	3,376,839 users	59.14%
United Kingdom (yay!)	478,217 users	8.38%
Canada	411,179 users	7.2%
Australia	198,922 users	3.48%
Brazil	125,682 users	2.2%
Germany	109,248 users	1.91%
Italy	95,682 users	1.68%
Netherlands	74,139 users	1.3%
Sweden	51,479 users	0.9%
Spain	47,096 users	0.82%

The list goes on for pages, but we're under 1% now.

The average EN World reader is male, American, between 25-34.

 

[Morrus]

Just added this note, but the average EN World reader is male, American, between 25-34.

 

[Envisioner]

Statistics only require a sampling to measure things to a high degree of accuracy. A census is not needed.

That is a matter of opinion. My opinion is that I don't care if you've asked 6 of the 7 billion people on the earth to tell you something, and 3 billion of them all agreed; the 1 million people who you failed to survey might all share the same opinion, so what you think is 50% true could actually be 100% true in certain relevant subsets of the population. Statistics should never be extrapolated to any context larger than the original polling or surveying or whatever; they should be taken only as documentation, not as projection.

 

[Morrus]

That is a matter of opinion. My opinion is that I don't care if you've asked 6 of the 7 billion people on the earth to tell you something, and 3 billion of them all agreed; the 1 million people who you failed to survey might all share the same opinion, so what you think is 50% true could actually be 100% true in certain relevant subsets of the population. Statistics should never be extrapolated to any context larger than the original polling or surveying or whatever; they should be taken only as documentation, not as projection.

That's not how science works, but OK.

 

[Envisioner]

That's not how science works, but OK.

I am firmly convinced that in the future, we will not call statistics a science any more than we currently call phrenology a science, even though it was previously considered one. The two approaches were both based on taking seemingly-irrelevant bits of data and claiming to extrapolate upon them in order to produce meaningful trends; one is marginally more obviously-wrong than the other, but the dominance of the new one is as much due to politics as to scientific validity, as statistics lines up with the way the corporate backers of modern research like to see information organized.

 

[Mark LaVenia]

I find that fascinating. Given how much the old timers -- including me -- talk about the 1E days, I would have assumed there were a lot more of us.

Instead, we're just very, very loud, yelling at clouds.

I would have assumed the same

 

[atanakar]

...plus the fact that the old are FAR less enfranchised in digital means (which will be the majority of data collecting mechanisms regarding this)

Incorrect. From what I discovered last year, old gamers are legions on private Old School D&D FB Groups. Each TSR edition has it own group because even among the grognards there are edition wars. In these groups they can rant about WOTC and anything past 2e without being contradicted. They are in Safe Places and FB is collecting data on them.

 

[Fanaelialae]

@Zardnaar To find where the post without content that used to contain the explanation, search for a post by umbran that says "If you feel that's necessary, sure. You do you." and directly above that post my umbran the lowkey post will show up.

Not sure why so many deleted accounts are losing post content.

Also yeah. His life. His decision.

He totally rage quited too in near classic fashion. Just about the only thing missing was the "Good day to you sir. I SAID GOOD DAY!"

Aparently there is something odd going on with deleted account posts though.

From what I understand, at least in Lowkey's case, he requested that all of his posts be deleted. That's why the content isn't there.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

From what I understand, at least in Lowkey's case, he requested that all of his posts be deleted. That's why the content isn't there.

Ah. Thankyou. I was quite curious what was up with that.

 

[Mercurius]

Interesting stuff. I wonder, though, how this would look if it was weighted by post count. I'm guessing EN World would skew somewhat older, maybe significantly so. As with many large online communities, the forums are dominated by a relatively small group of diehard regulars, with larger number posting occasionally, but the vast majority of visitors never actually posting, and possibly only visiting once or twice. This is purely speculative, but I would guess something like so:

Diehards - daily participants: dozens
Regulars - several times a week: low hundreds
Semi-regulars - several times a month: mid hundreds
Occasional participants - every month or three: high hundreds/maybe low thousands

I'm guessing that most of the diehards and regulars are in the 35-50ish range.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Interesting stuff. I wonder, though, how this would look if it was weighted by post count. I'm guessing EN World would skew somewhat older, maybe significantly so. As with many large online communities, the forums are dominated by a relatively small group of diehard regulars, with larger number posting occasionally, but the vast majority of visitors never actually posting, and possibly only visiting once or twice. This is purely speculative, but I would guess something like so:

Diehards - daily participants: dozens
Regulars - several times a week: low hundreds
Semi-regulars - several times a month: mid hundreds
Occasional participants - every month or three: high hundreds/maybe low thousands

I'm guessing that most of the diehards and regulars are in the 35-50ish range.

I was wondering the same thing myself. Personally speaking, I lurked on Enworld for several years before I first started posting.