Dungeons & Dragons has 15 Million Players in NA Alone; Storyline Is "The Da Vinci Code meets Gangs o

Interesting. The following tidbit has me excited about the new storyline:

“The Stream of Many Eyes” ... story — which will be revealed on June 1 — was described by one D&D staffer as 'The Da Vinci Code meets Gangs of New York.'”

 

[Rygar]

Seems to be going well but once again they decline to provide sales numbers. They can claim anything they want I suppose how they get 15 million players IDK.

Personally I think D&D is doing great, I'm not claiming its failing or anything like that. They don't provide any evidence, sales figures or how they arrived at the 15 million conclusion, there is no data, primary sources or anything like that provided. Its basically PR.

12 to 15 million is also 25% growth not 44% in the OPs post lol. Wife watches some zombie show (I Zombie?)and they were playing D&D in that which I thought was funny.

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?

 

[Gradine]

15 million! That’s an impressive 4.5% of Americans. Or nearly one in twenty Americans are D&D players.

That seems fitting

 

[Warpiglet]

Wtf?!

It's a good time to be a D&D enthusiast...

 

[R_Chance]

If you read the article, it mentions SALES grew 44% in 2017 over 2016.
But they can’t be doing *that* well given apparently less than one in fifteen people has bought a PHB.

I just bought my 3rd set of core books. I have an extra set loaned out... and out... it may return some day. I finally bought a new back up set. That way I can keep one set at home and one set at school (for the Game Club I advise). Even if not everyone has bought one, some of us have made up for it

 

[Morrus]

(Just a note, this thread was promoted to an article, but I had to write the (brief) article in place of the OP, which was pretty much just a link. It’s still credited to Parmandur, but the words (thus the mistakes) are mine.)

 

[DM Howard]

That's very impressive and I'm not surprised at all! It would be interesting to know how they came to those numbers though.

 

[BookBarbarian]

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?

Businesses, News departments, election polls, etc make these kind of estimates all the time. The take a sampling of people and solicit feedback. It has been going on for so long now that methods have been refined to be pretty good, but by no means perfect.

Of course they don't strap every human being to a lie detector test to determine how many play D&D and what gender they are when a sampling will be good enough.

Whether or not this sample and methods used to collect data was good I not I can't say, but to assume it's meaningless just because it didn't include every human being in every country is pretty silly.

Edit: this point is made more eloquently by the poster after me.

 

[R_Chance]

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?

They are probably using a sample of known data that they do have and extrapolating. It's the basis of every poll done, and the heart of social science research. It's not like they call millions pf people on the polls used in your daily news. You have a sample size and a margin of error built into it. If you've constructed it properly it works. Not perfect accuracy, but it allows for broad generalization and produces useful information. Market research is no different, and they do have better access to a set of players through AL and FLGS as well as online games. As for the data they did release, how much valuable trade information did you want

*edit* Yeah, what BookBarbarian said in the post just above mine!

*edit* Geez, not only do we post in sync, we edit in sync too...

 

[AmerginLiath]

As usual, I would love it if the actual statistics involved here were linked in some fashion, since newspapers do a poor job of handling such matters (the only journalists who ever seem to see a stats class in college are those writing about electoral polling...at least some of them). There are different references to sales data and surveys, but we aren’t told whether the aggregate information on how well D&D is doing is a package of numbers that WotC presented or partly background that the Seattle Times aggregated. In any case, we don’t know the methods of the surveys used (it appears that 40% of surveyed players were female, which could arguably be telling of the often-younger digital audience, given the survey methods we’ve seen WotC use, unless the reference is to an external survey).

Like other reports, bookseller lists, and popular culture references, the numbers here certainly reference that D&D is popular, wide-selling, and catering to a diverse audience. But the numbers as provided in this column (especially without notes on statistical methodology) don’t inform us exactly on how well. To what degree of confidence can they (and we) assume the percentage given of total players, for example? There’s no information here like a more “serious” story extrapolating numbers from surveys would contain (much less a breakdown of the actual definition/question of player by current, modern, or lifetime status).

 

[happyhermit]

15 million! That’s an impressive 4.5% of Americans. Or nearly one in twenty Americans are D&D players.

Mind blowing, really, considering the level of investment compared to something like watching TV. To think that the number of D&D players could rival the number of people watching the most popular and influential shows! This hobby is dying in the most peculiar way.