I mentioned upthread that I would look at the Gen Con numbers and give some thoughts on them. I track based on number of available seats for TTRPGs, then track how many of those seats fill before the show. Roughly speaking:
- D&D has the most seats of all games, but it is not a majority of all seats. Its around 25% to 30%.
- A game's presence is almost entirely driven by a publisher's willingness to pay for event space, recruit GMs, and provide content.
- You do get individual GMs or groups running games. They account for a big chunk of the total seats available, but they tend to be scattered across a lot of games.
Comparing pre and post-pandemic, two things stand out:
- More publishers than ever are organizing and sponsoring events at the show
- D&D's share of events is down quite a bit, but at the same time the total number of TTRPG events is up a lot
Broadly speaking, I think this maps to a key shift in TTRPGs over the past 10 years. It also highlights a fundamental difference between this fad-level resurgence of D&D and the early 1980s.
In the early 80s, once TTRPGs started to lose shelf space in mainstream retailers the hobby had no way to keep drawing in new players at scale. I vividly remember buying my D&D stuff at Child World in Salem, NH. One day my mom took me there and... the D&D stuff was just gone. That was it. At that age, in that area, I had no way to find D&D products.
Jump forward to 2020. Pandemic lockdowns have closed everything. I want to get into D&D, whether I'm new or returning. What do I do?
I buy online. Stores are literally closed.
I think that buying pattern stuck. Whether it's Kickstarter, buying on Amazon, eBay, or whatever other platform, D&D Beyond, or buying direct from a publisher, a huge cohort of people learned to buy TTRPGs online.
Stores picked up some of those people post-lockdowns, and gamers who shopped there before COVID went back. TCGs in particular helped drive this - it's
better to buy an expensive Pokemon card in person than online. You get to inspect what you're buying and ensure it's legit.
That's created a marketplace that the 1980s could never deliver. I think that's why we're seeing dozens of games hit six or even seven figures in crowdfunding each year. It has also opened up a vast swathe of people who never would have ventured beyond D&D. When your next game is a click (or a Facebook ad) away, it's much easier to move beyond D&D.
Today, I think D&D is about 25% of the TTRPG market. It's by far the biggest - I'd peg the next company at about 10% - but there are far more publishers around than there were 10 years ago. I believe that TTRPGs are slowly transforming into something that looks like a hybrid of miniatures and board games - one big player with mainstream reach at the top, but a vast and diverse ecosystem driven by different creative approaches.
(As an aside, TSR also specifically undertook strategies to choke out competitors at retail. The massive flood of products from the early 90s up to the end of 4e was designed to tie down so many distributor dollars that other games couldn't take root. Instead, the net result was TSR and later WotC publishing lots of products that never sold enough units to make a reasonable return on investment. It's also clear that the strategy didn't work well. It didn't protect D&D. It hastened its decline.)
