How many people subscribe to D&D stuff?

[darjr]

I never thought to get another account to check if I was listed. Or to count the users and number of pages. Genius!

 

[D'karr]

Also, these are subscriptions we're talking about. There's a reason the subscription model is such a powerful one. Without a subscription, people actively decide when they want to pay money for a product or service. With a subscription, the onus is on the individual to stop paying that money. They are much more reliable, even in the face of drops in functionality.

Exactly, and that is why with a subscription model you will not see a significant change from month to month, unless a significant amount of people cancel all at once. The billing/expiration cycle sort of precludes that visibility, except at the backend level (their billing department).

I'm not saying a) is certainly the truth, but it's not like it doesn't make any sense. You also need to avoid falling prey to the idea that there is widespread dissatisfaction with DDI. Some people are unhappy, but most of us think it's great, and we'll continue to subscribe for as long as we run 4e games.

This is absolutely true, I continue to run 4e games and the only reason I let my subscription lapse is that I don't need the online tools, as I've got other alternatives, and I wanted to start cutting some extraneous costs.

Again, there's an easy way to check. Let a subscription lapse, and have someone check the group's members to see if they were removed.

And we just did that. Lo and behold my subscription has lapsed, and I'm no longer a member of that group, or counted in its rolls.

Sometimes I feel like on the internet there is this "perverse" desire to see that DDI is somehow failing.

 

[Dannager]

The membership list shows 10 members per page, and 8125 pages. There are only nine members on the last page of the list. So that's 81249 members actually listed, and 81263 members claimed, a difference of 14 members.

If you were looking specifically at the Members tab, the discrepancy is probably due to the moderators and admins for the group not being listed in the Members tab.

 

[Dannager]

Glad this was put to rest, though. Now we'll have something to point to the next time someone tries to claim that people aren't removed from the DDI group when their subscription ends.

The next step would be to have someone who has never subscribed before and does not have a community account start up a new subscription to DDI so we can check whether he is automatically added to the DDI group without having to create a community account.

 

[Ferghis]

If you were looking specifically at the Members tab, the discrepancy is probably due to the moderators and admins for the group not being listed in the Members tab.

The members tab had 7 fewer members. I was quoting the numbers present in the "All" tab. I'm wondering if there is an option somewhere to not be listed even if you belong to a group.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

There's a pretty straightforward way to test this. Find someone who had a subscription but let it lapse. Get his D&D Community username, then have someone with an active DDI subscription check whether that username is in the DDI group.

Also, notably, there was a point in the past where you were only added to the DDI group once you created a D&D Community account. I'm not sure whether the process is different now, but if it's the same then DDI group membership reflects only a fraction of actual subscribers.

Exactly, but the point is this has been done/observed. My own DDI has lapsed a couple times, and as soon as it was the flag on my account went away (the DDI moniker on the forum) and the group DDI no longer showed up in the list of groups I was in.

Obviously it isn't possible to really say if the COUNTER for the number of group members is really accurate or not. Those sorts of things could be quite far off either because it never decrements, because it just isn't that reliable, because the number has been changed in the course of various updates and whatever of systems, etc. Having run many commercial web-based services myself I am not one to put TOO much stock in counters like that, chances are the admins of the site don't worry about their accuracy much, and its hard to say how they are calculated or if they always work right.

Still, it is the only number we have, aside from just personal observation. Mine is still that people are using DDI at least as much as ever. Over time I've observed that the people I play with have tended to realize just how super handy it is and sign up. At first there was much skepticism, but I think it is slowly becoming a sort of ordinary part of people's game play.

 

[Dannager]

Obviously it isn't possible to really say if the COUNTER for the number of group members is really accurate or not.

As others have noted, it appears to be almost perfectly accurate. You can list the members of the group, 10 to a page. The number of pages lines up almost perfectly with the reported number of DDI group members divided by 10.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

So... the two possibilities are
a) DDI has never suffered a noticeable net loss
b) the numbers in the DDI group are not accurately go up and down

Between those two possibilities, you're going with a). The number of DDI subscribers has only grown, despite the edition being dead with the last release being almost a year ago.
Despite the massive unhappiness in the fall of 2010 when the second annual payments were due and there were yet no replacement tools and everyone was upset about Essentials.
Every single month there was still more people currently subscribed to DDI than the month prior.

Or... the groups aren't registering people leaving the group properly.

I think I'll go with minor technical glitch.

The edition is only "dead" by your estimation. You hear about people who bellyache on the boards, but again my personal anecdotal experience is that people I know have slowly but surely played 4e and signed up for DDI. I don't know if that number has gone up all the time or not, but with a sample of basically a dozen people its hard to say. The point being MOST PEOPLE are just players, they really don't care about DDNs and other stuff that much, 4e is D&D for them, and DDI is convenient so they use it. Likewise I didn't see some vast rebellion around here when they switched to the online CB. My players mostly had the offline one and kept using it, or not, as convenient for them. I've heard various complaints about deficiencies in the SL version, it is a slow and somewhat buggy pig really, but it does work and is actually pretty good most of the time in a decent machine.

Overall I think 4e just slowly gains market share over earlier editions. There was a lot of blowback online, etc, but frankly I've never seen much of a sign that 4e was all that unpopular or that people weren't still getting it.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

As others have noted, it appears to be almost perfectly accurate. You can list the members of the group, 10 to a page. The number of pages lines up almost perfectly with the reported number of DDI group members divided by 10.

Yeah, I hadn't seen that post, lol. Seems I remember we all went through this whole process once long ago here on EnWorld and came to all the same conclusions, that there ARE at least 81,000 DDI users that are active now, and possibly many more that never signed up on the community. That really is pretty interesting. DDI HAS to have been profitable for WotC. I mean 81k users is like $560,000 a month. That's no joke. Even with clusters of servers, bandwidth, tech guys, etc there's a lot left over. Obviously production costs of material, upkeep of software products, and general maintenance of DDI itself it would be hard to believe the thing could be a failure. Just perhaps not the kind of success that gets its product line management big promotions.

 

[MerricB]

The one question I have is if you let your subscription lapse and you DON'T visit the community site, whether the group membership properly expires or not. Has this been checked? (It doesn't add you until you have a community membership, but does it unsubscribe you the same way?)