D&D 5E (2024) DnD 5e designer [Mike Mearls] explains how INDIE RPGs are taking over

Whizbang Dustyboots · 2026-04-01T02:53:25+0100

aco175 said:
Isn't Indie RPGs like 10% of the market? How does one grow that without killing D&D?

Because it's not a zero sum game.

I have a coworker who is on an apparently pretty popular actual play series and they never even brush up against D&D or anything like it.

There's a whole world of RPGs out there that have nothing to do with D&D and who have almost totally distinct audiences.

You don't need to kill Monopoly off to have a successful board game (see: Catan) and you don't need to worry about D&D for your RPG to be a success.

mattcolville · 2026-04-01T03:07:31+0100

Zardnaar said:
Couple of things he said.

Indie RPG Kickstarters/ crowd funding over 100k got 50 million dollars.

Lead up to developing 5E they went from 50 million to 10 million.

The data is freely available to anyone paying attention. You can just add up a bunch of publicly available numbers and get a pretty breathtaking total of revenue generated by rpgs that are not D&D. I think folks generally don't care though. Why should they?

To me, and I suspect Mike would agree, if you want to understand the hobby business, revenue is not the only thing you should be thinking about. For one thing, D&D makes a lot more money than 5E does. 5E is book sales and there's no growth there and there never will be. You just need to hang around and wait for some kid to do something alarming or wait for a global pandemic and suddenly there's an influx of new users. But that's not a growth strategy.

But what are people actually playing? That seems pretty important to me. And I think there are good and useful ways to find out! They used to publish, and I assume they still do, a list of all the RPG event tables booked at GenCon and which game system they were booked for and that is very revealing.

To me, that is a real indicator of market share.

Anyway, anyone's who's been around long enough remembers a time when RPGs were doing well, lots of independent companies able to make a go of it, while D&D was doing not-well.

Zardnaar · 2026-04-01T03:11:56+0100

mattcolville said:
The data is freely available to anyone paying attention. You can just add up a bunch of publicly available numbers and get a pretty breathtaking total of revenue generated by rpgs that are not D&D. I think folks generally don't care though. Why should they?

To me, and I suspect Mike would agree, if you want to understand the hobby business, revenue is not the only thing you should be thinking about. For one thing, D&D makes a lot more money than 5E does. 5E is book sales and there's no growth there and there never will be. You just need to hang around and wait for some kid to do something alarming or wait for a global pandemic and suddenly there's an influx of new users. But that's not a growth strategy.

But what are people actually playing? That seems pretty important to me. And I think there are good and useful ways to find out! They used to publish, and I assume they still do, a list of all the RPG event tables booked at GenCon and which game system they were booked for and that is very revealing.

To me, that is a real indicator of market share.

Anyway, anyone's who's been around long enough remembers a time when RPGs were doing well, lots of independent companies able to make a go of it, while D&D was doing not-well.

GenCon D&D /Pathfinder was number 1 and 2. If you count individual editions separately D&D was 1-5.

And yeah 60% of income is digital. Just under 300 million combined recently iirc.

John Lloyd1 · 2026-04-01T03:45:03+0100

mattcolville said:
They used to publish, and I assume they still do, a list of all the RPG event tables booked at GenCon and which game system they were booked for and that is very revealing.

I don't think GenCon is representative of general tables (for percentages). I had a look at the GenCon 2025 tables: