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.

 

[ccooke]

Last couple of data dumps from Roll20 and FG both show the opposite for the last year or so. Other games are actually gaining a little ground (only a percent or two, but it's notably the opposite trend to just two years ago).

Which is exactly what you'd expect to happen. Some people will only play d&d, but a portion of the new people will branch out and find new games that work for them.

The interesting question I don't recall whether we could get from that data is whether the total number of 5e games was still increasing, and at what rate. Because if new people are still coming in to the hobby, you end up not just taking a bigger slice of the pie but enlarging the pie for everyone :-D

 

[Morrus]

Which is exactly what you'd expect to happen. Some people will only play d&d, but a portion of the new people will branch out and find new games that work for them.

The interesting question I don't recall whether we could get from that data is whether the total number of 5e games was still increasing, and at what rate. Because if new people are still coming in to the hobby, you end up not just taking a bigger slice of the pie but enlarging the pie for everyone :-D

The number of games on those platforms is increasing for everyone. And right now, during the pandemic, tenfold!

 

[ccooke]

The number of games on those platforms is increasing for everyone. And right now, during the pandemic, tenfold!

It's the rate of increase (and before the pandemic, of course) that interests me.

The interesting question (to me) is: How does the rate of increase of 5e games now compare to before other RPGs started to (re)gain their share of the market.

That would tell us some interesting things about how many people are playing multiple systems, how many new people are being brought in to the hobby (we can assume that almost every new player will come in via d&d, still), and so on.

 

[Jester David]

So, there's a discussion that keeps recurring every now and then about whether 5e has outsold the original golden age.

I think - given the sales data we have - that this rather suggests it has. I mean, this certainly feels like a golden age of d&d (and, probably started already as people branch out but definitely soon, a golden age of tabletop RPG).

We might even have enough critical mass to come through the current crises without losing that.

Yeah, but it was also a discussion that was going on in 2016. Back in the Long-long Ago, before Critical Role and streaming events.

It's probably a safe bet that 5e has completely crushed both 1e and Basic, possibly even combined.

 

[Morrus]

The interesting question (to me) is: How does the rate of increase of 5e games now compare to before other RPGs started to (re)gain their share of the market.

I think you could look that up as fast as I could! The figures are all publicly available.

 

[ccooke]

I think you could look that up as fast as I could! The figures are all publicly available.

grin

I wasn't asking you, don't worry.

(And when the maintenance I'm doing finally finishes, I think I will do that. I'm mostly reading and posting here to keep me sane(ish) while doing some rather complex and slow work)

 

[Burnside]

Out of curiosity, if you don't mind me asking and if you actually know, what is the LGBTQ distribution among these groups? One thing I have noticed is that with 5E D&D (and Pathfinder, with 2E) has become much more welcoming of non cishet people. My own groups are largely straight white 40-something dudes because we have been playing together a long time, but at cons and in pick up games I see more diversity.

Out of 22 people, as far as I know only one player is gay. But there are a few players, particularly in Group 3, where I just don't know anything about their sexual orientations.

 

[Parmandur]

Out of 22 people, as far as I know only one player is gay. But there are a few players, particularly in Group 3, where I just don't know anything about their sexual orientations.

That's about representative for a random sample.

 

[Jester David]

Last couple of data dumps from Roll20 and FG both show the opposite for the last year or so. Other games are actually gaining a little ground (only a percent or two, but it's notably the opposite trend to just two years ago).

But didn't Roll20 also completely change how they gathered data?

 

[Mark Hope]

I wonder whether some of us older players aren't being captured by WotC's numbers (although I don't know what WotC are doing to get these numbers). I know that I've gone back to earlier editions and don't really interact with the current game and community much anymore. I'm in three groups that are playing 2e (I'm DM in two of them), and friends are similarly running 2e games. Out of those groups, I'm the only one who bothers with online communities. So I think that some of this apparent attrition isn't necessarily down to people leaving the hobby behind (although some of it will be), but is also down to players' activities being in/moving into areas that can't be captured by these kinds of numbers. Our groups have never been so active - it's just all invisible to this kind of survey.