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.

 

[MNblockhead]

The 5e aesthetic is one of my favorite things about D&D and I'm an almost-50, upper-middle-class, white mid-western American. I think the 5e art team has done an Amazing job presenting the game in an inclusive way that is still damn cool.

 

[Zardnaar]

The 5e aesthetic is one of my favorite things about D&D and I'm an almost-50, upper-middle-class, white mid-western American. I think the 5e art team has done an Amazing job presenting the game in an inclusive way that is still damn cool.

Except halflings. Poor halflings.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

Except halflings. Poor halflings.

I'll forward the idea a halflings head and a halflings body are two separate equal-in-size entities living in a symbiotic relationship.

 

[Zardnaar]

I'll forward the idea a halflings head and a halflings body are two separate equal-in-size entities living in a symbiotic relationship.

That's the people who drew them.

 

[Envisioner]

Ageist much? (Also, I'm a receptionist at a doctor's office, not a barista).

I never said anything about age. I said "sheltered college students", many of which are 40-year-old women going back to school now that their kids are teenaged. Nice strawman, but your flame will need to be sacreder than that before it can set me alight.

So you want D&D to fail by becoming commercially non-viable so WotC discontinues it? What, are you working for Paizo?

There is an incredibly massive gulf between "ceasing to pander to the lowest common denominator" and "ceasing to become commercially viable". Wotco is just being greedy, and they're doing so by betraying their core fanbase in a desperate chase after new blood, much the same as Marvel comics has done by introducing ridiculous SJW characters that nobody wants, gender-flipping all their existing characters, turning every black character into an anti-white racist to pander to BLM, and otherwise taking a big steaming dump all over the people who have been buying their product since the 1990s if not the 1960s.

Yes, you eventually need new readers to replace your old diehard fans when they eventually die. But you don't need them within the next three financial quarters; your boss just tells you that you do, because he really wants to buy a Lamborghini. Short-term greed is the motivating force between all manner of disastrous business decisions; we badly need to restructure the way corporations measure their own success when figuring out how much the CEO is allowed to pay himself.

How about you take your own advice? Because it's increasingly looking like 5e isn't for you.

No, I vastly prefer 6E, and wish they'd hurry up and design it already.

 

[Envisioner]

Wait, did you just make a blanket statement about how all of "today's girls" just have incorrect opinions about what they like?

This just in: Water is wet, and children are idiots. Film at 11.

Like, women just can't know for themselves what they want to see in art, because they have been trained wrong, and can't possibly have thought this out themselves or actually know their own feelings on the matter unless someone tells them what to think?

Another glorious strawman. Adult women start out as baby girls, and baby girls, like baby boys, gradually develop their worldview by taking in information from the environment in which they're raised, which their parents have a lot of control over. When their parents are increasingly single mothers who work three jobs and leave a television (or, in this day and age, a smartphone with a few sloppily-constructed parental controls) to do the babysitting, and these pop culture sources are all being created by liberal-funded media companies with feminists on their boards of directors, there is a distinct narrative push happening. It's inevitable that some such social conditioning happened, but there used to be a less one-sided national consensus; the donkey and the elephant didn't used to hate each other with such quivering, frothing intensity that they refused to engage in civil public discourse. Time was, you could express conservative opinions without people instantly thinking you were literally Hitler; now, everybody's growing up in a bubble of echo-chamber proportions, and the only real difference is whether it's an isolationist conservative bubble of religious extremists hiding from the world's apparent insanity, or a radical-progressive liberal bubble of postmodernists who think that all meaning is artificially constructed and all the cultural traditions of the social mainstream are evil. The latter bubble is more likely to produce D&D players, and the former bubble produces most of the people whose tax money is paying to bail out all the failing corporate monoliths who indirectly produce an economy robust enough that people can afford luxury products like D&D books.

There is nothing wrong with sexy art, but my rpg books-- especially the older ones-- are littered with a lot of unsexy men, and a bunch of lingerie clad jailbait women. Honestly, the genders often don't look like they belong to the same game system or art direction.

I don't particularly want to see sexy men; a man which women will think is sexy will probably strike men as being slightly disgusting. And what is wrong with lingerie-clad jailbait women, exactly? Once again, this is fantasy, which is designed to appeal to a pre-existing audience which is mostly males, many of whom picked up the hobby while they were going through puberty. The fact that they imprint on those images doesn't make them evil; it just makes them guys. And I'm tired of seeing maleness demonized because women are insecure. If you're a woman, you can find a way to stand up for yourself without having to tear men down and step on their backs. By all means, put out an RPG sourcebook which appeals to your own aesthetic preferences - just don't expect me to look at it.

 

[ad_hoc]

I never said anything about age. I said "sheltered college students", many of which are 40-year-old women going back to school now that their kids are teenaged. Nice strawman, but your flame will need to be sacreder than that before it can set me alight.



There is an incredibly massive gulf between "ceasing to pander to the lowest common denominator" and "ceasing to become commercially viable". Wotco is just being greedy, and they're doing so by betraying their core fanbase in a desperate chase after new blood, much the same as Marvel comics has done by introducing ridiculous SJW characters that nobody wants, gender-flipping all their existing characters, turning every black character into an anti-white racist to pander to BLM, and otherwise taking a big steaming dump all over the people who have been buying their product since the 1990s if not the 1960s.

Yes, you eventually need new readers to replace your old diehard fans when they eventually die. But you don't need them within the next three financial quarters; your boss just tells you that you do, because he really wants to buy a Lamborghini. Short-term greed is the motivating force between all manner of disastrous business decisions; we badly need to restructure the way corporations measure their own success when figuring out how much the CEO is allowed to pay himself.



No, I vastly prefer 6E, and wish they'd hurry up and design it already.

#conservatives getting mad at the results of a free market

D&D has never been close to being this popular.

The current fan base is the core audience now. They will never go back, and hopefully the world won't either.

One of the lead designers is gay and the lead art director is a woman. How dare they betray their #real fans.

 

[ad_hoc]

By all means, put out an RPG sourcebook which appeals to your own aesthetic preferences - just don't expect me to look at it.

It's called 5e.

And no, they don't care that you don't want to play it. They would actually rather that you didn't.

 

[Zardnaar]

#conservatives getting mad at the results of a free market

D&D has never been close to being this popular.

The current fan base is the core audience now. They will never go back, and hopefully the world won't either.

One of the lead designers is gay and the lead art director is a woman. How dare they betray their #real fans.

My country let women vote in 1893. Shocking I know.

 

[Lanefan]

One of the most important jobs of the art in an rpg book - especially the player rules - is to make people say "I could make a character like that".

Agreed.

That's why I was so pleased with the 5e phb - the 'iconic human' (if 5e did those) is a black woman, and one who looks damned competent.

My only complaint is that somehow 'competent' seems to have become largely equated with 'scarred', 'chopped to bits', or just plain 'ugly' in fantasy art - for both genders, and most PC races as well.

I really noticed this in 3e art - in their attempts to make the characters look competent they also made most of them hideous-looking.

If I'm looking at art to try to find something that could be a representation of my character, I want the character portrayed to look competent at what it does, be suitably dressed (though please, not in head-to-toe metal armour; they don't wear that all the time!), and be halfway attractive (regardless of its gender or race). I don't want it to look like it just walked unarmoured through a Blade Barrier spell; and I'm tired of having to tweak pictures* to remove the scars. Oh, and not be a cartoon.

* - I'm also not very good at it.