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.

 

[FlyingChihuahua]

I completely disagree that this message is present in the situation; I think that people with your perspective always see that message only because you've been taught to look for it. It's a face in the clouds, which you only saw because you went looking for faces; if you go to a woman's studies course and they tell you to go hunting for things that seem misogynistic, then you can easily find things that look that way. But the cloud isn't actually face-shaped, it's just a cloud. The babe art isn't misogynistic, it's just something that a male artist, hired by a company whose produce had a mostly-male audience at the time, tried to make look pleasing so that people, mostly men but also some women, would enjoy looking at it. The fact that today's girls mostly look at it and see only sexism, that's the fault of the ideologues who have educated them with the idea that they should view the world through this lens. If we were raising our girls to be, say, artistically inclined, and to place their priority on evaluating the beauty of images from a technical and aesthetic perspective, then they'd look at those scantily-clad women and see only the artistic beauty being presented. Instead, they're being told to imagine sociological ramifications which aren't actually there, and they think everything has a message and is trying to change people's minds, instead of just being a pretty picture which is there for them to look at if they'd enjoy doing so, and can easily be ignored otherwise.

So people have been taught to think wrong, is that what you're getting at here?

 

[cmad1977]

Sounds like SOME ones been injecting bleach.

 

[Envisioner]

Sounds like SOME ones been injecting bleach.

Nope, just wishing I had some to drink....

 

[Reynard]

What's really interesting to contemplate is that if the forum membership is so unrepresentative of the general site traffic and of D&D fandom/customers in general, all of our debates and polls and threads are utterly meaningless.

 

[Envisioner]

What's really interesting to contemplate is that if the forum membership is so unrepresentative of the general site traffic and of D&D fandom/customers in general, all of our debates and polls and threads are utterly meaningless.

One of the reasons why I constantly tell people not to believe in the pseudoscience of statistics is because it invites attitudes like this. The people who are having the conversation are the ones who are important; any data which supposedly proves them "statistically irrelevant" is as wrong as Nazi pseudoscience about inferior races, because it is equally excluding real people from consideration on the basis of some dry intellectual nonsense that a bunch of ivory-tower academics produced through some sort of theoretical formulae.

 

[Parmandur]

What's really interesting to contemplate is that if the forum membership is so unrepresentative of the general site traffic and of D&D fandom/customers in general, all of our debates and polls and threads are utterly meaningless.

Well, obviously.

WotC has said as much in the past, it's why they don't engage in forums.

 

[ad_hoc]

Why? Guys weren't intimidated by the giant muscly barbarians with greatswords, why should girls have been intimidated by the floating glowing sorceresses with slinky silk nightgowns and plunging decolletage? This is fantasy wish-fulfillment; if it gives you an inferiority complex, then you're viewing it through the exact opposite of the intended lens.

Yes and both of those images are designed for the male gaze.

One of the first things the non-men I game with said they liked about 5e was the art direction. It was a breath of fresh air for them. They said they finally felt included and welcomed by the art.

 

[Envisioner]

Yes and both of those images are designed for the male gaze.

Thus goes the completely unproven assertion of social-scientists who don't even bother to try and demonstrate the actual truthfulness their dogmatic "theories", instead simply shaming and accusing of "wrongthing" anyone who doesn't automatically agree with these baseless claims.

 

[ad_hoc]

Thus goes the completely unproven assertion of social-scientists who don't even bother to try and demonstrate the actual truthfulness their dogmatic "theories", instead simply shaming and accusing of "wrongthing" anyone who doesn't automatically agree with these baseless claims.

Those are certainly all words.

 

[Envisioner]

Those are certainly all words.

Show me any proof of all this that doesn't rely on poorly-constructed surveys of people's subjective opinions. Has anyone found a woman who, having grown up in some rural community and thus not been indoctrinated with liberal philosophies by the university system, is hooked up to a brainscan so that you can measure the actual neurological impact of showing them a few D&D books, and actually documented whether they suddenly feel ashamed of themselves because they looked at pretty pictures created by the "male gaze"? I think that, absent that guilt-based "education", most people would not automatically have that negative reaction, that impulse to immediately feel inferior because they saw an example of something superior in a piece of FICTION. Most ordinary people would have better things to do with their time than even play D&D, let alone sit around analyzing what it supposedly symbolizes.

I'm tired of bored, sheltered college students, who are furloughed from their already part-time jobs as baristas, sitting around and crapping all over a hobby that wouldn't be making so much money if there weren't so many people with too damned much free time on their hands. It exists because of them, it's trying to pander to them, and they're never satisfied, all they can do is complain about it and try to destroy it. Nobody can come down from their elevated ego long enough to recognize "this isn't for me" and move on, let other people enjoy what they like, and stop trying to control things which aren't any of their business.