And you have those numbers from? 2023 is last year and X4, X5 is upper limit what I posted. Its in the ballpark though
WotC manipulated the numbers. 50-80 was lifetime players since 1974.
I pointed out the fallacy of numbers, but people ignored that and felt those numbers were current players...and people drank that idea like soup.
It's preposterous that the number could be anything other than how many have played D&D over it's lifetime (from it's start to now)..otherwise...
For example, for those of you alive during the Nintendo years...How popular was the nintendo? How about the Super Nintendo? WotC was literally claiming D&D was more popular than that!
They were claiming it was more popular than the Xbox at one point with their numbers if you took it as current players.
Let's put it this way. A little over 87 million Playstation 3s were sold over it's lifetime. If there are 80 million current D&D players, with the PS3 having sold that number over 6-8 years...D&D is at least 2x to 3x more popular than the Playstation if there are 80 million current players (vs. numbers of PS3 sold over 8 years meaning it never had anything close to 80 million PS3s out at any one point).
80 million is literally equal to almost 1/4 of all Americans (US). That includes, men, women, children...all of them. (or for those in the UK, they are literally saying that D&D has more players then the entire population of the UK).
More people play D&D currently than watched a game on average during Baseball's World Series in the US.
Do you see a trend here.
And there will be people on these forums that will type it out with a straight face...that yes...that D&D is bigger and more popular than any of those (Playstation, Nintendo, Baseball...etc).
I would say their lives may revolve around D&D (and that's fine), but for those who don't have their lives entirely engrossed in this hobby...I think those numbers stretch it quite a bit.
I could belive lifetime numbers of all those who have played D&D over 50 years, I could even believe that this is how many accounts are on Beyond (though, there are those with multiple accounts)....but when I look at the popularity of other popular items and then ask myself...is D&D really as popular as they are....
I come to very different conclusions on the popularity of D&D (no doubt, it is extremely popular and I'd even hazard that it's more popular than it was during the height of the TSR days...but more popular than some of the items I listed...I just can't suspend reality that far yet without better evidence than WotC is just feeding that number out there).
www.bbc.com
www.geeknative.com
