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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GreyLord" data-source="post: 6230503" data-attributes="member: 4348">I'm going to point out something that isn't very easy, and hopefully will not be taken the wrong way, however ENworld's reputation is not really a hidden secret to anyone who is an Old School Gamer.ANY survey from ENworld in regards to OS or OSR folks is unreliable.  ENworld has the reputation of being the most hostile forum to anyone who plays a form of D&D prior to 3e.  ENworld has chased off most of this audience and they go to just about any other forum than ENworld at this point.  ENworld has banned, criticized, and put down the older editions to the point that hardly any of that audience comes to ENworld.  Any numbers in regards to that audience from ENworld are unreliable as a result.  It would be like asking how many atheist topics are popping up on the Anglican forums.  I'm not saying the information is absolutely flawed in the survey information, as it may be drawn from many different sites...but I'd say unreliable as Enworld has shown a distinct bias against the old gamers.  As such, most Old school gamers have nothing to do with ENworld, and I would be highly surprised if Enworld has knowledge of most of their hangouts/forums/blogs and sites.  There are over 1000 of such sites...possibly several thousand...and I don't think Enworld has even touched on even a small percentage of them.THAT SAID...I agree with the statements that OSR is incredibly small.  IT IS MY OPINION that even that 5% is HIGHER than the market penetration of the OSR movement.  I've heard several times that the amount made from most of the OSR folks isn't really enough for a good business design and that they do it more out of love rather than financial reasons.  There are some that are successful, but my thoughts are that the OSR folks are far smaller than even the percentage stated above, and that the amount of threads and such created by it make far more noise than the number of folks that are it's audience.  IN MY OPINION...once again.NOW that is specifically for OSR.  With OSG (Old school gaming) that audience is potentially massive.  Even WotC never had those numbers.  If I recall right, Dragon had over 150K subscribers with TSR.  WotC I think had around 30-60K?  That estimate of 25 million lapsed players, may be accurate.  There are a HUGE number of them.  However...getting them to play D&D now...I don't know if that's going to happen.  Many of them played D&D when it was cool to play D&D.  We're talking the jocks and everyone else playing in the US.  Furthermore, it was something they did when they were far younger.  Its' sort of like that He-man or Pokémon fads that went around.  Is it really possible to resurrect that nostalgia...maybe...with the right advertising campaign and right people...but I haven't seen that from WotC yet.The closest that ever came was 3e.  I'd put that success more in line with the A-Team movie rather than the Transformer's movies that came out.  Interesting, but Magic overshadows D&D basically.However, I still put D&D as an art rather than a technology.  This conversation mirrors art conversations in regards to Modern art and post 19th century art vs. are prior to that amongst art savants.  The way this conversation mirrors those types of conversation (well, except in art...it appears that while on the forums you might only get 5% who prefer art forms prior to the 20th century art...in the general populace a great majority prefer something older than modern art...then...maybe no so off...the great majority of people prefer monopoly over D20 games).</blockquote>

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