I agree. This announcement is basically "Knowing the Unknowable".
-How do they know how many players there are? One set of core books could be one player, or 10 players. They didn't claim 15 million books sold, so they're using some assumption that one set of books = some number of players. So we can say with near absolute certainty that number is wrong.
-"Nearly 40% of players are women"? That number is complete fabrication. They could only know that percentage if the polled every person in every country in which they sell books, because they can't know how many people play. "Nearly 40% of players at conventions or organized play are women"? Sure, they could know that. But since most people don't go to either of those things, they have no idea what the metric is for total players.
-"Most than 50% of new players watch games online". Not only do they have all the problems I just listed above with this number, but now they also have the problem where they can't tell which hits are a misclick, which ones are bots, which ones are blind links from other forums, which ones are the same person on multiple devices, etc. Another totally fabricated number.
I have to wonder if this misleading data (at best) has a correlation to the recent Hasbro report that I understand indicates that Magic the Gathering has dropped by significant double digit percentages?