Fantasy Grounds Game Stats for 2017: D&D 5E Up By 6%, Pathfinder Holds Steady!

It's time for the statistics which tell us what games are being played on Fantasy Grounds, the virtual tabletop. This always gives a great sampling of which games are popular at the moment. As usual, D&D 5E leads by a large margin, followed by Pathfinder, D&D 3.5, then Savage Worlds. "Core RPG" in the data below refers to Fantasy Grounds' 'default' RPG module, so can reasonably be viewed as the "other" option. These stats represent the whole of 2017.

Fantasy Grounds' Doug Davison notes that there is a bit of a dip around December, but that same thing happened in the previous two years.

See 2016's figures here. Over the year, D&D 5E increased again, this time from 58% in 2016 to 64% in 2017. Pathfinder held steady at 12%, and Savage Worlds at 6%, while D&D 3.5 dropped from 6% to 4%.​

Ruleset	Total Games
5E	395,748
PFRPG	74,551
SavageWorlds	37,693
3.5E	21,992
CoreRPG	12,704
Call Of Cthulhu	10,928
4E	9,948
MoreCore	8,975
Star Wars EotE	7,642
GURPS	6,176
AD&D	4,028
DSA	3,657
Castles and Crusades	3,638
WFRP	3,261
RolemasterClassic	3,208
WH40K	2,593
Numenera	2,507
Fate Core	2,300
VtM	1,852
Basic Roleplaying	1,482
Shadowrun	1,044
Mutants and Masterminds	1,006
World of Darkness	997
DCCRPG	783
d20 Modern	768
Grand Total	619,481

 

[darjr]

Is steamcharts a reliable source of data for fantasy grounds? What percentage of fantasygrounds is sold via steam?

http://steamcharts.com/app/252690

 

[Myrdin Potter]

Not super reliable, as I bought it via steam originally, but I run direct and do not start in Steam these days. I do have close to 2K hours logged in steam on the game, though.

 

[R_Chance]

Not super reliable, as I bought it via steam originally, but I run direct and do not start in Steam these days. I do have close to 2K hours logged in steam on the game, though.

Steam knows when I play a Steam game, even when I start from a desktop shortcut. I was playing Fallout 4 earlier (started from a desktop shortcut). I fired up Steam and it knew I played Fallout 4 today. I imagine it would be the same with any Steam game / program.

 

[Morrus]

What is the CoreRPG?

This is explained in the first paragraph of the article.

 

[Myrdin Potter]

Steam knows when I play a Steam game, even when I start from a desktop shortcut. I was playing Fallout 4 earlier (started from a desktop shortcut). I fired up Steam and it knew I played Fallout 4 today. I imagine it would be the same with any Steam game / program.

My hours played on steam do not increment when I run the FG client directly. I can run FG without Steam even being started up or running.

 

[damned]

StarFinder is currently using a Pathfinder extension so the numbers are in the Pathfinder stats.
CoreRPG and MoreCore are both generic tabletops used for running "other" games.

 

[mykesfree]

Is Adventures in Middle-earth OGL, by Cubicle 7 part of the 5E number?

 

[HawaiiSteveO]

D&D has the broadest appeal for my group, although we took a brief foray into Savage Worlds (6 or so sessions) and I really liked it. Glad to see it has a strong following, great game! Maybe one day I'll be back.

 

[Ghost2020]

This is explained in the first paragraph of the article.

I was told there would be 'no reading required'!


Still doesn't help me much as I know nothing of Fantasy Grounds.

Here's a good video...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuIQgasy42g&feature=youtu.be

Looks like there's a lot already built into the CoreRPG. Very interesting, I might have to look into this for our online sessions.

 

[smiteworks]

I suspect Steam Charts is fairly accurate for recording game play for people who bought through Steam. If you launch from Steam or the Steam installed shortcut, it will know that you started it up and will record your hours there. There is also a separate listing for the Fantasy Grounds Demo since it is technically a different app. Those would mostly be free users running through Steam and connecting with a DM running an Ultimate license - either on Steam or outside of Steam. From what we can tell, we fluctuate between 1-3 thousand users per day.

Our Steam installation on Windows is just a wrapper for our standard program and therefore, anyone who runs from the default location (non-Steam) will not get picked up. Users outside of Steam obviously don't show there either. We still get the majority of our sales directly from fantasygrounds.com but Steam makes up a sizable chunk of our new audience starting from 2014 forward. FG has been around in some format or another since 2004, so we have 10 years of users before we were available on Steam.

There are some other good locations for researching Steam information that we look at, such as SteamSpy and Steamdb.

https://steamspy.com/app/252690
https://steamdb.info/app/252690/graphs/

... and the Demo
http://steamcharts.com/app/300790