D&D General io9: 2023 Should Have Been D&D's Best Year, Until It Wasn't

[EzekielRaiden]

I mean, they have supplied a hard number.

They have supplied a number. Its hardness is precisely what is in dispute. 60 million sounds like a blowhard overconfident estimate designed to inflate the numbers as much as humanly possible, e.g. every DM runs for ~3 groups of ~5 people each and all of them are completely distinct, so if they've sold 4 million DMGs then there must be 60 million players. That would be a hard number, and would show the patently ridiculous assumptions involved in producing the unsourced number they cited.

Which would further explain why the estimates vary so widely. If you instead assume that there are maybe ~3M actual DMs, and they run for an average of four genuinely distinct players each, then you get the still quite high but much more reasonable 12M, which is far closer to the previous estimates of how many people are playing (I have previously seen "8 to 20 million" thrown around.) I say "genuinely distinct" because most people I know who play are players in more than one game, and nearly everyone who runs is also a player in someone else's game.

Companies have a vested interest in choosing statistics and assumptions which inflate their numbers. It makes them look better, can lead to investor confidence (or at least avoid freakouts), and implies growth and positivity regardless of whether that implication bears out. World of Warcraft used to tout total subscribers...until Cataclysm saw those numbers start to drop, and they conspicuously switched to "Monthly Active User" counts....and then they stopped giving even those for WoW, and aggregated it with other Activision-Blizzard products...and then there was nowhere else to turn when even those numbers started falling.

So, until they put their money (or, rather, sales) where their mouth is, nah bro, this ain't a hard number. It is, at best, corpspeak, and at worst actively fudging the numbers and assuming the most ridiculously rosy things possible. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

 

[mamba]

So if some eccentric billionaire makes a culture war 5E clone on the CC, WotC doesn't need to work hard to keep their distance.

I am not sure distance was their concern however, rather than the impact on sales

 

[Parmandur]

I am not sure distance was their concern however, rather than the impact on sales

I am going by what Kyle Brinks actually said, given that it makes sense.

 

[mamba]

I am going by what Kyle Brinks actually said, given that it makes sense.

did he say they were not concerned about sales? If they were afraid of the likes of Disney releasing a TTRPG based on the OGL, I doubt it was about anything but volume with them.

That does not mean they did not also want some distance from some ‘seedy’ book by a small 3pp. I just don’t think that was their main concern

He also said that with the release under CC they are now essentially defenseless and have to rely on their customers sticking by them when / if such a scenario arises. That runs counter to the ‘the CC created the desired distance, so they got what they wanted’ narrative

 

[Parmandur]

did he say they were not concerned about sales? If they were afraid of the likes of Disney releasing a TTRPG based on the OGL, I doubt it was about anything but volume with them.

That does not mean they did not also want some distance from some ‘seedy’ book by a small 3pp. I just don’t think that was their main concern

He also said that with the release under CC they are now essentially defenseless and have to rely on their customers sticking by them when / if such a scenario arises. That runs counter to the ‘the CC created the desired distance, so they got what they wanted’ narrative

He said they were terrified of seedy D&D stuff from a megaciro like Meta or Microsoft.

And shifting any responsibility for the game to users of Creayive Commobs is precisely the plausible deniability they seem to want.

 

[mamba]

He said they were terrified of seedy D&D stuff from a megaciro like Meta or Microsoft.

hm, I remember this as two separate cases, being associated with seedy stuff from small publishers, and facing stiff competition from a large corp entering the field.

I am not seeing Disney, MS, or Meta releasing the seedy material

 

[Parmandur]

hm, I remember this as two separate cases, being associated with seedy stuff from small publishers, and facing stiff competition from a large corp entering the field.

I am not seeing Disney, MS, or Meta releasing the seedy material

looks at "X" significantly could happen easily enough.

 

[mamba]

looks at "X" significantly could happen easily enough.

ha, with Elon everything is possible, he can run X into the ground while also ruining TTRPGs

 

[Scribe]

I am not seeing Disney, MS, or Meta releasing the seedy material

I feel there is some revisionist history going on somewhere. That was never the concern.

 

[Zardnaar]

I am going by what Kyle Brinks actually said, given that it makes sense.

It doesn't make that much sense tbh.

We know 5E is biggest selling D&D ever but if the 60 million number is accurate they've got around 10 times as many players some previous editions that generated 40% of 5E numbers approx (inflation adjusted).

The other number floating around was 50 million players ever in previous statements.

Hence why 60 million doesn't make much sense.

It's why I suspect they haven't released hard numbers except for cherry picked ones and book scan (which are great numbers btw).