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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alphastream" data-source="post: 9468948" data-attributes="member: 11365">I'm thankful to Glicker for his 2022 BookScan video, from which I worked up my own Excel figures and put together the blog series that has been mentioned here a few times (thanks, folks!). I am very much a nerd that enjoys trying to understand our industry. I think there are a few kinds of people related to this thread, including folks who have a strong desire to root for or against a game, folks who like pondering how the industry works, and folks who study how the industry works. So long as we are respectful, those can all be valid.If you like studying how the industry works, I think this path is a hard one. It requires being able to draw a box around your preferences and suppositions and leaving those behind.For example, there are editions/versions I like more than others. When I look at math, I try to check those preferences. I also have ideas on how the industry works based on what I see. I try to clean my mind of those, or at least be open to them being faulty. Time and time again I find my preconceptions have been wrong. Three quick examples:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">When I moved to Oregon and played Living Greyhawk, I was sure these were all of the active D&D players, and therefore the size of all D&D players in my area was about 50-100 players. When I organized D&D Encounters in stores, we had over 300 unique players in just one season of Encounters, and 3 of those players were people I had known from LG. This upended my worldview as I realized I knew absolutely nothing about the number of D&D players in my city and had vastly under-counted them. I should mention that my gaming store was one of 3-5 running at least one table of D&D Encounters, and many ran 3 or so tables.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">When I traveled the US for work, I would stop in at various gaming stores and join their LFR 4E and later 5E AL games, or start one. I was shocked to find that maybe 1 in 6 players was online in some capacity. For the vast majority of store players, they were not part of any online community and their worldview was the store's shelves. Their views were completely different than what I experienced online and their knowledge of D&D very different.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Recently I have helped coordinate D&D games at large Seattle conventions. The number of brand new players who want to try D&D is staggeringly large and these new and also casual players are incredibly positive about D&D. While an online community might complain about various 2024 rules changes, these folks were absolutely excited for the new game. And when they tried it, they loved it. There are so many thousands of people who want to try their first game of D&D, just in Seattle, every year.</li> </ul>What's my point? If you really want to understand our industry, it's a wild ride and it will almost certainly upend what you think you know, time and time again.</blockquote>

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