A Gaming cafe. Singular. One. With a largely unknown clientele that may favor expatriates and foreigners.
There's also a couple of other things to consider about the information provided from the Daydream cafe website:
1) Sheer quantity of games.
D&D was tops with around 200ish games from 2010 to 2012. 213 it slipped behind Sword World, but it got back on top in 2015. Then C'thulu came in and set the record for games played at 313 sessions in 216. Then 468 sessions in 2017. Their business REALLY took off at that point. In 2018 it hit 714, then 769 in 2019! There were 134 different games being played and Call of C'thulu was only one of them.
In 2019, the second and third place games had more total players than the top ranked game which had broken all records. D&D 5e broke it's record that year and -every- other D&D's record in that place the same year. You put 4-10 together and they beat Call of C'thulhu, too. Absolute BANNER YEAR for the company. More games than have ever run in the store. And 2021 would see 156!
This ties down to point 4, but first:
2) Covid.
2020 saw a massive decline in total games played, much less games played in Call of C'thulhu. And in 2021 it dropped even further. They combined all of their D&D versions into a single category that year so it would inflate the number 1 position a bit. Same thing in 2022 with 286 total games. And their Online GM? Well...
3) The Employees Preferences.
Hiroko Ueno GMs Ruin Breakers, Insane, and 5e. She wants to play Insane, Embryo Machin, Cthulhu, Goblin Slayer, Sword World 2/2.5, Fallen World, Fiasco, Labyrinth Kingdom, Ryuutama, and Long Horizon. D&D isn't on the list of games she wants to play in. Quail doesn't include D&D in his recommended systems, GM Systems, or show interest in D&D. He does only play 11 other games, though. Okumi Makimura includes D&D in the 48 games he's "Good At" and his standing table systems don't include it among the 19 games he's ready to play at the drop of a hat. Shiori Miyane has 5e D&D among her specialty systems, but also lists 13 other game systems she can GM at the drop of a hat. And finally Rionose doesn't actually do D&D at all out of the 20 games they run and play. Then there's Magic Cat their Online GM who puts D&D at the top of their systems! Then Pathfinder. Then 25 additional games.
This shows there's a lot more variety in what people like due to the massive quantity of games that are not D&D in Japan that are popular but not quite so singular. How many DMs do you know in the US who are comfortable with running 12 systems? 20 systems? 48+ Systems?
Also: Remember how there were 134 different games played at the company in 2019? Remember how 4-10 had more than Call of Cthulhu and there were another 120 games beyond them that were also played? Well...
4) The Publishers.
Out of alllllll the games listed only D&D is published by WotC. Most of the rest are published by... Group SNE, Kadokawa, and a handful of small time publishers. (And several of those small time publishers are subsidiaries of Kadokawa)
Index of Group SNE's currently supported game brands, not including editions and individual scenario books: 製品情報 - 株式会社グループＳＮＥ
It's hard to find Kadokawa's list because their investor site is just a few highlights of their videogames including Elden Ring. Because yes. Kadokawa does boatloads of videogames, mountains of manga and visual novels, and magazines, and comics, and has their own storefronts across Japan, and a freaking MUSEUM. But here's a listing of their Main Consolidated Subsidiaries...
GROUP COMPANIES | ABOUT KADOKAWA GROUP | KADOKAWA GROUP GLOBAL PORTAL SITE
An introduction to the KADOKAWA Group. You can view a message from the president and information on our group philosophy, company profile, our history, a list of group companies, and more.
And it's Kadokawa Futures that does most of their TTRPG publishing.
5) Summation
There's no denying D&D is the top of the list in this cafe, for sure. And if you're -just- looking at the games played by individual game, it's one of the most popular. The issue rises when you look at the Market. 'Cause while D&D shows up on the pie as the biggest slice for a few years, WotC's slice of the pie is significantly smaller than Group SNE's or Kadokawa's. (Especially since Call of Cthulu is done through Kadokawa in Japan)... in that -one- cafe.
And, again, this is a single cafe. Looking at the broader market...
Horror RPG Call of Cthulhu is bigger than D&D in Japan
The classic RPG has seen its popularity explode in the last decade thanks to web series and anime.
www.dicebreaker.com
In 2021, Kadokawa announced that they'd sold more Call of Cthulu (300,000 copies since 2004, 60,000 of 7th edition since it was released in 2020) than D&D had sold in Japan, total. So D&D has sold less than 300,000 books in Japan since 2004 if Kadokawa's bragging is to be believed.
Meanwhile over in Sword World RPG:
Sword World RPG - Wikipedia
10 million copies. Though in fairness that includes Replays and light novels and is recorded since 1989. And Record of Lodoss War has similar sales numbers.
6) History and Context
Kamiab Ghorbanpour explains it really well here: Exploring Sword World, Japan’s answer to Dungeons & Dragons from the studio behind the Elden Ring tabletop RPG
But the short version?
D&D made it to Japan in the early to mid 70s and was mildly popular, mostly thanks to foreign college students. Roy Mizuno ran his Lodoss War campaign and it was so popular that it wound up getting replays in Comptiq magazine (A Computer magazine) as an amusing aside in 1986. Roy took that success and created a Manga series, then a movie, then a TV series. (Published and Produced, respectively, by Kadokawa Shoten)
Hitoshi Yasuda put together Group SNE with the intention of doing more with RoLW but didn't want to get tied up with TSR who had created D&D. So he created a slightly different "Lodoss War" game. It was built on Japanese Sensibilities using the AD&D system as a baseline, so some rules were changed, some stuff drastically altered.
But then he went back and did a little reworking to file those D&D serial numbers off a bit harder. More "Dragon Quest" and "Final Fantasy" style stuff was added to make it more Japanese and less American... and it became Sword World which was a MASSIVE hit with high schoolers. Runaway success! It's practically the basis of the "Japanese Fantasy World" that you see in almost every anime and manga made into a TTRPG.
And the whole thing is based on d6s. Making it "Easier" than a d20 centric multi-polyhedral game. But then Shinwa went out of business... And they were the ones providing D&D to Japan, which made it practically impossible to find materials right around the same time TSR went nuts on flinging out so many books it isn't funny and murdered their own business. It lead to the "Winter of TTRPGs" in Japan that would last into the aughts.
Then Sword World 2.0 hit in 2008 and reignited the country's enjoyment of TTRPGs. Replay books and -videos- basically Critical Role'd Japan years before Mercer got the idea.
Sword World is bigger in Japan than D&D for a simple reason: It is D&D. But it's Japanese D&D. And while WotC can try to make D&D more Japanese, they're fighting against 30+ years of a dominant product in the market.
D&D had sold less than 300,000 copies as of Q1 2021. Unless they managed to sell a few million copies in the last two years... Sword World is the dominant force.
Last edited:
