I doubt they would ever sell D&D altogether, but they might license off the rights to produce the game to another company. They did this with several Avalon Hill games- Advanced Squad Leader and Panzerblitz being the most important.
So your claim is that (1) You met random individuals who play D&D in random places, (2) you got their contact information, (3) none of them are gaming with each other, and (4) you collected a list of their email addresses, and are presumably still in contact with them?
Really? How was this sample obtained? It's stretching credibility with each post.
So, what is your experience in marketing & surveying? I'll wait for you to answer this inexplicably, unanswered question...
Zero in marketing, but plenty in experimental methodology.
And, more to the point, I don't need direct marketing experience to call your survey methodology invalid.
Are you able to respond to questions without resorting to your own claimed authority on the subject? Remember, this is the internet - for all I know, you're a high-school student in your mom's basement.
No. His servey is limited to "a list of current players from groups that didn't know each other I've met over 15 years. Pretty random in location, age and other demographics..."
This right here is a confounding variable, unless maybe there's a missing comma after "groups" (At which point my questions only multiply...)
D&D is an inherently self-selected group-based activity. (Much like with football, you can't "play football" without several others also playing.) If your survey includes, say, 10 groups with 6 members each, the individuals in those groups will tend to co-vary in their gaming preferences. They are self-selected because, presumably, they all want to play the game the group is playing.
In plain English, if I survey 10 randomly selected Vampire: The Masquerade groups and 10 randomly selected 3e groups, I will get significantly different answers for each game, even though the sample size is the same and each gaming group was, itself, randomly selected from all groups that play that game.
