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.

 

[Fanaelialae]

How many of your pupils were younger than you though? Eh?

FWIW, some were younger than me. A few were older. You'll excuse me that I don't have exact numbers - this was over 30 years ago now. We were all generally in a similar age group though. A few years apart at most.

Edit: The largest technical age gap was probably when a friend's grandmother asked if I would run a game for her because she was curious about it (she was in her 70s at the time I think, while I was still in my teens). The timing didn't actually work out, so I never ran for her, although we did talk about it.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

FWIW, some were younger than me. A few were older. You'll excuse me that I don't have exact numbers - this was over 30 years ago now. We were all generally in a similar age group though. A few years apart at most.

If you dont recall thats a perfectly acceptable answer. Im satisfied. Data point filled.

 

[akr71]

shrug Anecdote - my goddaughter wanted to learn how to play, so I ran a game for her. She then picked up Critical Role, and then taught her friends, two of whom now also run their own games. Definite chain of mentorship there.

This is what I was trying to convey as well. The younger adults I have played with knew of the game and were interested in the game, but did not know anyone who played or how to get into it. They asked if I would run a game so they could learn. I said yes - fully expecting them to play a bit and then bail, starting their own group.

Nope, they fit right in with us and are now part of our regular crew. On guy had read all the Drizzt books and when I told him Forgotten Realms was D&D his mind was well and truly blown.

 

[Eltab]

If I am going to Target anyways (because no clothing bought on the Internet fits right when it is delivered) and while I price-check the clothes via the website I notice a D&D Basic set marked In Stock, is my purchase of the game at the cash register credited to the store or to the internet?

 

[Lanefan]

Even my grandma, before she died, bought knitting patterns on the internet. Everybody uses the internet.

I don't, unless I have absolutely no other choice.

I'm one of those oddballs who, when paying money for something now, wants it put in my hands now by the same person to whom I just gave the money.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

I don't, unless I have absolutely no other choice.

I'm one of those oddballs who, when paying money for something now, wants it put in my hands now by the same person to whom I just gave the money.

Respectable

 

[Morrus]

I don't, unless I have absolutely no other choice.

I'm one of those oddballs who, when paying money for something now, wants it put in my hands now by the same person to whom I just gave the money.

We're talking about people who use the internet to supplement their hobby. You are doing that right now.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

One of the reasons why I constantly tell people not to believe in the pseudoscience of statistics is because it invites attitudes like this. The people who are having the conversation are the ones who are important; any data which supposedly proves them "statistically irrelevant" is as wrong as Nazi pseudoscience about inferior races, because it is equally excluding real people from consideration on the basis of some dry intellectual nonsense that a bunch of ivory-tower academics produced through some sort of theoretical formulae.

You’re objectively wrong, in a laughable manner.

This sort of anti-scientific rhetoric is directly akin to flat-Earthers and people who believe in homeopathy.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I don't buy it. You can watch people discover things every day meatspace if you spend any time in retail stores. Now, they might see a thing and pull out their phone and google it right there, but they don't have to have been previously exposed to it prior to walking into the store to drop money on it. The real world has its charms, even after the advent of the internet.

There are offline transactions, but in every industrialized country with free (as in speech) internet, and many whose internet is restricted, so few consumers are fully offline that they round to 0%.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Well, anecdotally.

I would be unsurprised to hear that the physical store channel is small these days, by comparison to what Amazon delivers. Is there going to be a large channel of "never heard about it before, saw it in Target" as opposed to the "My friend showed me this Critical Role thing, and I then bought it on Amazon" channel?

IME, people are more likely to show their friend CR or whatever, and then tell them about the local store that sells all this stuff and you can pick out your dice and they’ll order stuff for you if they don’t have it in stock and you can hang out and talk about games there, etc.

Assuming they have a local store, and that it isn’t a toxic basement sort of a place.