The Orr Group (who produce the Roll20 virtual tabletop platform) has just sent along its latest quarterly statistics which look at what folks have been playing over the last three months. The group reports that "Once again, 5th Edition is widening the gap as the most popular DnD option. 4th Edition activity decreased slightly, but the biggest change is that 3.5 Edition players seem to be migrating to 5e. This is a continuation of a shift we noticed in Q3, so it will be interesting to see if the trend continues in 2016." The statistics below are from Quarter 4 2015.
Some other analysis provided by The Orr Group:
The above is the short version. The Orr Group gets the data from Roll20 member profiles. Player numbers are derived from the "Enjoys Playing" and "Seeks Group For" sections; game numbers come from the "My Campaigns" section. Where percentages exceed 100%, that's because players list multiple games. There's a more in-depth description of the methodology here.
D&D 5E is increasing its lead (there was speculation that its new lead would be short-lived, but so far it's still growing), although only by a percentage point or so. You can see the group's last report from October 2015 here. Much like Fantasy Grounds' report, the first few places are all flavours of D&D either current or past.
Below is the "long" version of the data. Every quarter or so, we get data from three sources - Fantasy Grounds, the Orr Group (Roll20), and ICv2's surveys. By and large, they tend to agree.
Some other analysis provided by The Orr Group:
- Stars Without Number continues to climb the charts, hopping over FATE since Q3.
- We were also interested to see that, despite the big news that Paradox Interactive bought White Wolf from CCP in November, this hasn’t affected World of Darkness game activity on Roll20.
- The latest season of Yogsquest by popular steamers Yogscast caused activity to double since Q3.
- Increases in Smaller Games: We’ve also added new titles to the report, which were pulled from the Other Games umbrella section when we noticed an increase in activity. The recent release of the Fantasy AGE ruleset saw a nice pop of players, and Fallout 4’s popularity led to more people playing the Fallout RPG.
- Increase in Non-English Games: We recently implemented Transifex to improve the accessibility of games and character sheets for non-English users. We were thrilled to see that, as a result, there’s been an increase in foreign-language games. We noticed in Q3 that players were using character sheets for two particular games, Le Donjon de Naheulbeuk and Das Schwarze Auge, so we added them to the report. This is an ongoing process and we’ll keep looking for ways to bring games to international players.
D&D 5E is increasing its lead (there was speculation that its new lead would be short-lived, but so far it's still growing), although only by a percentage point or so. You can see the group's last report from October 2015 here. Much like Fantasy Grounds' report, the first few places are all flavours of D&D either current or past.
Below is the "long" version of the data. Every quarter or so, we get data from three sources - Fantasy Grounds, the Orr Group (Roll20), and ICv2's surveys. By and large, they tend to agree.
