gamer numbers

[alsih2o]

in another thread umbran wrote: "Which means there are a couple of million non-newbie gamers who haven't heard of this"

now, will all respect to umbran, this leaves me wondering..are there really a couple of million gamers out there?

to simplify, i would like to start with just the u.s. of a.

last i heard we as a country were short of 300 million. something like 280 million.

is one out of every 280 people in the u.s. a roleplayer? this seems unlikely. there are vast swaths of non-gamers around, and i know of noplace where the gamer density is high.

does anyone have any #s on this? how many us's are there in a we?

i realize hard numbers are gonna be hard to come up with here, but does anyone have some fuzzy numbers we can start with? maybe the # of phb's sold? i realize that doesn't represent everyone, but i would bet it represents a goodly percentage.

zulkir, got any info you can share? any other publishers?

any representatives of other countries have hard #'s for their homelands?this question intrigues me greatly and i would love to roll it around.

 

[maddman75]

IIRC according to WotC market research two million people in the US play a role playing game once a month or more. And this would be before the d20 renissance.

 

[JeffK1966]

I went to a 400 or so person high school in the early to mid 1980s, and there were at least 7 or 8 gamers that I knew about, which was quite a bit higher than the one in 280 ratio, or even 1 in 140.

And, my first college in 1985-86 had about 8000 students, and the RPG club there had a good 80-100 members, at least. We took up a whole cafeteria, if my memory serves me correctly.

 

[alsih2o]

I went to a 400 or so person high school in the early to mid 1980s, and there were at least 7 or 8 gamers that I knew about, which was quite a bit higher than the one in 280 ratio, or even 1 in 140.

And, my first college in 1985-86 had about 8000 students, and the RPG club there had a good 80-100 members, at least. We took up a whole cafeteria, if my memory serves me correctly.

yes, but balance this against the multiple nursing himes without any gamers. also the mental wards, jails, yada yada.

i would expect high schools and universities to far outstrip the rest of the nation in gamers per capita.

as for madmanns 2 million #, wow, this seems way off to me, tho i would love for it to be true

 

[Eternalknight]

I went to a school of 800 people and our club had around 25 people, which is 1 in 32. The town I live in has around 14,000 people, and the local gaming club (of which my group has nothing to do with; reason better left unsaid) boasts around 55. Add to that the 6 people in my group, and we get around 1 in 230.

 

[Sir Osis of Liver]

No numbers at hand but the boston area seems to have a heavy gamer population.

 

[Henry]

I can believe it, though the only statistics I have to back it up are WotC's. (Their number, by the way, was 2.25 million)

Section 3: Basic Demographics

The study provides the following information about the basic demographics of
the tabletop RPG marketplace:

Size: 6% play or have played TRPGs (~ 5.5 million
people)
3% play monthly (~ 2.25 million people)

Gender: 19% are female (monthly players)

Crossover: 17% of the total play MWGs monthly
46% of the total play computer RPGs monthly
26% of the total play TCGs monthly

MWG = Miniatures Wargaming, by the way.

 

[alsih2o]

ah, crpg's....this explains a lot. i am always curious as to whether these belong lumped in with pnp rpg's.

seems lots of pnp rpger's are interested in crpg's, but i find many people who playt crpg's never play any other kind, and see what they do as little more than a videogame.

i shoulda known this was gonna get fuzzy

where did you get that info henry? (oh, and thanks)




makes me feel even worse that i can't find a live group here.

 

[Henry]

Note: they weren't being lumped in - that is a full 6% of their respondents played Tabletop RPG's at one time or another.

The "Crossover" topic states that of the totals, 46% of them played Computer RPG's.

So, if their figures are to be believed, as of February 7th, 2000, about 5 million people played RPG's, and of those a little over 2 million of them have kept playing.

The figures are from a report from Ryan Dancey back when he was with WotC as Brand Manager of D&D. The report was called "Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0 Release Date: February 07, 2000" and should still be available with a web search.

 

[John Crichton]

good topic...

I think it's the job of the tabletop RPGer's to take advantage of the CRPGer's interest. Most of my current group are guys who played CRPG's for years and now play both. And I'm pretty sure they look forward to the social interaction of our sessions more than any videogame.

I think there will be increasing trend of this in the coming years, considering d20 has only been around for about 2-3 years. I don't see it going "mainstream" but I can see another spike in popularity.

It would be nice to see more recent numbers, but I couldn't find anything recent or solid that hasn't been mentioned already.