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​
18-24592,401 users24.58%
25-341,309,373 users54.33%
35-44330,755 users13.46%
45-54138,372 users5.74%
55-6426,689 users1.11%
65+12,631 users0.52%

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.
Screen Shot 2020-04-25 at 12.09.27 AM.png

For comparison, here are WotC's figures.

Screen Shot 2020-04-25 at 12.42.49 AM.png


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.

wotc_age.jpg


And here are those same figures in absolute numbers -- 10% of 40,000,000 people is a LOT of people!

Age​
Percentage​
Numbers​
8-1212%4.8 million
13-1713%5.2 million
18-2415%6 million
25-2915%6 million
30-3419%7.6 million
35-3915%6 million
40-4511%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.

Screen Shot 2020-04-25 at 12.08.51 AM.png



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 States3,376,839 users59.14%
United Kingdom (yay!)478,217 users8.38%
Canada411,179 users7.2%
Australia198,922 users3.48%
Brazil125,682 users2.2%
Germany109,248 users1.91%
Italy95,682 users1.68%
Netherlands74,139 users1.3%
Sweden51,479 users0.9%
Spain47,096 users0.82%

The list goes on for pages, but we're under 1% now.

The average EN World reader is male, American, between 25-34.
 

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See, that's why I have to crawl through to the end before replying, I guess.
I can't, because I have ADD(Haven't been hyper since I was in my 20s) and if I don't respond as I see things, I'll usually forget to respond completely. Sometimes it gets me in a bit of trouble in cases like this one. :p
 

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It's not a weird theoretical value; it's a more accurate way of measuring the relative success of different editions

You may be interested in an edition popularity contest (though, as I'll mention in a minute, that doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means, and is probably impossible to define). But WotC doesn't care - they care about absolute sales numbers, and what the current likely customers want.

That historic popularity does not tell you anything at all about what the current market wants. Even if it told you that 1e was the most popular edition, relatively speaking, that doesn't say, "Make 1e again," because that historic taste doesn't talk about today.

I mean, really - food embedded in aspic was popular once. Do, please, try to sell a "stuff in aspic" cookbook today. Tastes change.

Moreover, you have an issue defining "the market", in a historic sense. What was "the market" back in 1975? Or in 1985? Just defining it is hard, and you are unlikely to actually have the data for any historic period.
 

You may be interested in an edition popularity contest
I already said that I wasn't. I was merely pointing out to those who are interested in making such comparisons that raw sales numbers are not the end-all-be-all of measurements. There are other factors to be taken into consideration, such as market size.
 






You should move away from Google Analytics anyway. Giving away the privacy of all your users to google for free is rubbish.

Maybe someone has already shown this, but check out these results from Google Trends;

1588041772273.png


This is search traffic for D&D (blue) and Pathfinder (red). I didn't include anything before this, as it's relatively flat before.

This trend is honestly kind of incredible. In the past five years, you see D&D search traffic increase by about 3x! And this trend is unique to D&D, as Pathfinder does not have any growth at all (it may have actually declined marginally). Other games like Call of Cthulhu only crack 1% of D&D's popularity, so this does not seem to be a resurgence in TTRPG's overall.

The obvious connection is to Critical Role (the trend starts ticking upward right when the show started), but I do wonder if the popularity is partly out of CR's control now. As in, the more popular D&D gets, the more people are talking about it, the more people talk about it, the more people learn about, the more people try it, the more people talking about it... so on and so on.

The trend is continuing upward gradually, and doesn't seem to have plateaued or peaked just yet.
 


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