Countries with biggest rpg market?

[Turjan]

I would actually guess that Germany alone probably has more RPGers than Canada (don't forget how big the population is), but it won't be all D&D and a lot will not be on these english language message boards.

I know quite a lot of people playing RPGs in Germany. None of them visits these boards. A low but significant percentage of them plays D&D. Most of them play DSA (Dark Eye). Then there's GURPS, Paranoia and a few other games that are unknown to the American market. Quite a few of them are LARPers, too. This is just an anecdotal observation, though. Overall, I suppose that the percentage of tabletop RPG players in Germany in relation to the population is significantly lower than in the U.S., because there are many other games fighting for the tabletop niche, such as boardgames.

 

[Kae'Yoss]

I agree that Germany's probably among the top5. We have a couple of sysems that originate here (DSA is the biggest I think - It was released only a short time after the first translation of D&D into German, and by the Translator, too, AFAIK. Coincidences....) and the big games are played, too.
We also had no hysteria that branded D&D as the work of the devil (people blame computer games for stuff here), so I think there were less parents who forbade their children to play because of that.

The brazilian edition of the PHB costs around R$70, which is 25% of the minimum wage (soon to be US$100). That's 15 Big Macs (to use one way of comparing prices)! How many Big Macs can you buy in the US with the cost of a PHB?

I did a fast calculation using the printed price for the German Player's Handbook and 2,80 EUR for a Big Mac (don't know what they cost exactly, didn't have one for a long time). In Germany, I could get 10-11 Big Macs for my Spielerhandbuch (if I had one, I don't buy the translated stuff).

BTW: The Big Mac Index is actually used internationally to compare things, though usually tongue-in-cheek.

 

[Staffan]

I know that in the 1991 edition of the Swedish RPG Drakar och Demoner (which to Swedes is about as synonymous with RPGs as Dungeons & Dragons is to Americans), they claimed that they had sold enough copies of earlier editions that there were, on average, one copy in every ten households. Now, Sweden's a pretty small country population-wise (about 9 million), so that doesn't really translate into a huge absolute number.

 

[Aristotle]

Perhaps my view is skewed due to my involvement in the Shadowrun community, but I see Germany as a major player as far as the consumption of role playing games. I'm not sure how big fantasy d20 games are over there as they have their own fantasy RPG (Das Schwarze Auge) which has a following there.

Canada would certainly rank up there. And I've seen more and more people from Latin America and Australia posting to various sites in the past year or so.

 

[Sarellion]

I heard an estimate that Germany has somewhere around 100k to 200k gamers. But that´s more rough guesswork.

The DSA handbook has printruns of around ~10k

 

[Steel_Wind]

My expectation is the UK is next with Germany in third and Canada in fourth.

UK at 60 million.
Germany with 82 million.
Canada is at about 33 million now.

Language barrier and access to more games is the only issue with the German market. If that is much more of an issue than I've been lead to believe, than maybe Germany is not as high up there as we think. My expectation, however, is that they are easily third and might be second for all I know.

 

[Kae'Yoss]

Language barrier and access to more games is the only issue with the German market.

The language barrier is there. The problem is/was, that the German D&D translators did a less-than-stellar job. They would often use translations that could reduce a grown man to tears (either of sadness or laughter), and it would take aeons before they got the translation done. Luckily, the old company (Amigo-Spiele) is no longer in, but Feder & Schwert are, the same people who were handling White Wolf and Sword&Sorcery stuff, and I haven't heard any complaints about their work so far (they already do World of Darkness). They are apparently much quicker, too, since we'll soon have Eberron. With Amigo, we'd have to wait till 2007 or so...

Anyway, lots of people are sufficiently fluent in English to use the original rulebooks.

 

[Goblyns Hoard]

In order to get a real assessment you'd need to look at the market as a factor of the population size in order to get a true figure for who's #1 - might be that some smaller country has a higher concentration of gamers even though there are clearly a larger number of US gamers... just a theory of course

 

[yennico]

Germany has a big dis/advantage: RPGs are mostly books and German books are price-maintained. English books are not price-maintained. So with a translation into German a rpg book get fixed price.

 

[WayneLigon]

Germany has a big dis/advantage: RPGs are mostly books and German books are price-maintained. English books are not price-maintained. So with a translation into German a rpg book get fixed price.

So...what does that mean? The price is fixed here as well, unless a store owner for some reason decides to give a discount, or you buy it from something like Amazon.