D&D 5E (2024) Is There A New Sheriff in Town?

[mamba]

I have logic. Eventually the market becomes saturated. Everyone knows about D&D now. People are either players, or will never become players because they don’t enjoy that kind of thing.

this assumes there is a fixed set of people, which is clearly not true

The red line cannot keep going up forever, but buisiness believes it can.

you did not say that D&D cannot grow forever, you said sales stopped growing already

 

[Paul Farquhar]

This is something to be expected because Brownian Motion isn't a topic that comes up with any regular frequency in a person's day to day life.

It comes up often enough for me, since I teach it every year. But even when it was first discovered it wasn’t a huge mystery, since the idea of atoms was already becoming known within the scientific community. It was just nice to get some evidence.

It’s a good example of how it’s possible to infer the presence of something without directly observing it.

 

[Morrus]

I have logic. Eventually the market becomes saturated. Everyone knows about D&D now. People are either players, or will never become players because they don’t enjoy that kind of thing. The red line cannot keep going up forever, but buisiness believes it can.

That's not what you said, though, is it?

 

[Gorgon Zee]

Looking at google search trends recently, we have shadowdark and cosmere scoring <10, daggerheart coming in at just below 30 and D&D at 90. I cannot add in pathfinder as there's a lot of non-rpg related search for that.

In terms of general interest as measured by search terms, Daggerheart is currently really hot, and by "really hot" we mean 30% as hot as vanilla D&D.

 

[Imaro]

Looking at google search trends recently, we have shadowdark and cosmere scoring <10, daggerheart coming in at just below 30 and D&D at 90. I cannot add in pathfinder as there's a lot of non-rpg related search for that.

In terms of general interest as measured by search terms, Daggerheart is currently really hot, and by "really hot" we mean 30% as hot as vanilla D&D.

You should try DnD & 5e...

 

[Sacrosanct]

Looking at google search trends recently, we have shadowdark and cosmere scoring <10, daggerheart coming in at just below 30 and D&D at 90. I cannot add in pathfinder as there's a lot of non-rpg related search for that.

In terms of general interest as measured by search terms, Daggerheart is currently really hot, and by "really hot" we mean 30% as hot as vanilla D&D.

That just captures the moment, right? I think a better metric is to look at the games event list at conventions and see what's filling up and being played.

 

[Imaro]

That just captures the moment, right? I think a better metric is to look at the games event list at conventions and see what's filling up and being played.

Wouldn't that in turn be influenced by factors like conventions being the place more people would use to try a new game? Which is to say I'm not sure why it would be a better measure of interest...

Also I believe Google search h trends can be adjusted to capture different timeframes.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Wouldn't that in turn be influenced by factors like conventions being the place more people would use to try a new game?

Do they? D&D and PF are still pretty popular at conventions. Not a lot of "new" games. But SD is definitely up there, maybe even more popular than PF, depending on the convention. I'll have to go run some data now....

So not extensive data, but Origins just happened, and I looked up how many events. This probably isn't 100% accurate as it relies on people putting in the correct name of their system, but probably gives a good idea.

D&D 1644
Cthuhlu 606
PF 357
SD 295
AD&D 84
star wars 82
Mork borg 67
Free league 57
star trek 37
Modiphius 35
Pirate Borg 35
DCC 32
Savage Worlds 27
Quantum Black 24
Paranoia 20

Also, the type of convention matters. You'll see more old school games at Gary Con for example.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

That just captures the moment, right? I think a better metric is to look at the games event list at conventions and see what's filling up and being played.

The graph shows activity over time, but was actually pretty stable for the last few months.

In the past I have used Gen Con catalogs to measure popularity, weighting events by number of people that could attend (PFS and 5E events often have a lot of tables running). It's not bad for established games, but for newer games it tends to measure the number of people running for a specific company, which isn't as useful.

 

[Corinnguard]

Meet the new sheriff in town.