Demo groups and the online play

[Enerla]

The basics

• In several countries we don't see any singificant advertisement for D&D or Roleplaying Games in general in mainstream media or on non RPG related portals
• So called Brick and Mortar stores were main source of local advertisement. They also ran events, invited people to try the game.
• Competition from online vendors (both amazon.com, other smaller online vendors of harcopies and PDF vendors) can reduce profitability of Brick and Mortar stores, and this reduces the money they can spend on events and local advertisement. And in many places such stores are closed.
• Demo groups are, were and will be important ways to advertise the game.
• In Demo groups most players don't have the rulebooks yet.

Misc info

• Some suggests that most of the profit came from customers who played for 1-5 years, but this date predates release of 4, and this group of people probably started with 3e (the current edition). I suspect new edition tries to attract new audience. I am not 100% sure about the data, but I still have good reasons to say: new players are importatn.
• Starting to play D&D is still considerable investment, both in money (core books, dice) and time (reading the books). And for many seeing 3 volumes of core rules can be "frightening", demo groups are important as a quick way to start before purchase.
• With less and less places to run demo groups offline running them online are more important

How demo groups work

• There is a DM who has most of the books he considers important for the game
• There are players who don't have books, don't know the game yet
• There can be additional experienced players who can help the DM (and who can bring their own copies of rulebooks, so more people can look at same book at same time)
• With the help of the experienced people and using their books, the newbies can make characters and play, with an experienced DM running the game.​

As you see using the books of experienced people is the key of demo groups and such demo groups both offline and online can be the key for any future of D&D. Running demo groups, promoting the game is encouraged behavior to my best knowledge.

I think it is time for Wizards or anyone who say sharing PDFs is bad to come with a way that lets new players in demo groups to use the books (PDFs) of their DM without any "illegal filesharing".