D&D General D&D Beyond's Users Online Over Last Year

[Morrus]

Ok.
So specifically, the average number of registered DDB users simultaneously online at any given time ? Which, without any further details or context, does not tell you all that much, it seems ? (At least not anything beyond 'not further defined DDB usage' ?)

Sure.

 

[mamba]

Is that what was actually done. Or was it just a single 15 minute segment at any time of the day for 365 days?

that is how I understood @Morrus posts

The graph shows the average number of registered users online in any given 15 minutes each week

It's averaged. At 3am there were very few people. Now is peak time of the day. It's average number of people online over an entire week, not peak number of people online.

 

[FrogReaver]

that is how I understood @Morrus posts

I see. That wasn’t my understanding of that.

 

[SteveC]

It will be really interesting to see how much this spikes with upcoming book releases, as well as the starter set.

One of the things I was floored over was how well the core books for 5.0E continued to sell, year in and year out. The fact that this is happening so soon after launch in 5.5E is not good.

My own group has a bunch of Beyond users, but we're playing with 5.0E for the game we're picking back up, so they've already said they'll just level up on Roll20 at this point since the focus of Beyond is on the newest edition.

I do wonder how this will spike with the Eberron/Forgotten Realms books coming out, and the new starter set. I do think this can't be great news for WotC.

 

[DarkCrisis]

I'll sub when i run a 5E game, but that might be like once a year.

 

[Autumnal]

But this isn’t any kind of sales data. It’s DDB usage data, and in the US, this has been a time of great job stress for both political and non-political reasons: foolish use of LLMs, massive government employee and contractor layoffs, drastically increased instability, etc. it’s quite possible that all this stuff has also hurt sales, but it’s equally possible that people’s available time and sense of being up to RPGs are taking more of a beating than their actual game book budget. Looking at people I know, I see this among parents of trans and other queer children and people with significant disabilities and near edges of currently eligibility for benefits. But without sales data, that’s also me gathering anecdotes for my own guess at a plausible yet unproven situation.

 

[John Lloyd1]

The way I think about this data is that may be a combination of three groups of activity:

• Brand engagement - Engaging with the WoTC promotional activities, announcements, UA, surveys and forums, etc. You would expect this to peak in the lead up to a product being released, after a significant announcement or controversy.
• Purchase - Buying the product and the initial familiarisation with what you have just bought. This would peak around product release.
• Play - Preparing, running adventures, building characters and playing at the 'table'. The data excludes the app, so this is not a complete picture. This would be relatively constant and would vary according to the overall success of D&D, DND Beyond and seasonal factors. With the exception of new core books, I don't think individual product release would have much impact.

But, there is not enough data to pull these factors apart.

 

[Vicar In A Tutu]

0.5-editions don't generate as much excitement as a brand new edition (see D&D 3.5). Fifth edition has been out for over 10 years. The virtual table top (Sigil) was hyped, but failed horribly. Wizards' release schedule for the 2024 edition might not have been aggressive enough (why is there such a huge gap between releasing the core books and the starter set?). Other companies are taking advantage of the audience 5E built and putting out excellent new games, a few of which have serious reach due to strong media presence.

 

[Zardnaar]

Matches my expectations spike then decline.

Typical release. 5E was an exception.