Roll20's Latest Report Shows Growth Everywhere!

Roll20 has released its latest usage stats. These are from Quarter 1 2020, and while there isn't much change in the relative ranks of different games since 2019, they report that nearly everything has doubled during these pandemic times when a lot of gaming has shifted online to virtual tabletops like this.

Since Q4 2019, D&D has climbed back up (from a previous drop) from 47.54% to 50.4% of campaigns. Call of Cthulhu has dropped from 15.35% to 12.15%. Pathfinder has dropped from 4.97% to 4.49% (but Pathfinder 2E has climbed from 1.13% to 1.23%), and Warhammer has dropped from 1.48% to 1.3%. World of Darkness and Star Wars both also show drops. Note these are relative shares, not absolute figures -- in most cases the actual number of games has increased. Notably, Call of Cthulhu remains the second most popular game on Roll20 by a large margin.

The first chart below shows the campaigns run for each system, and the second shows the players. Roll20 says that only games with at least one hour of playtime are counted in these results.

Those with the biggest growth are HeroQuest (4000%!), Old School Essentiants, Blades in the Dark, and L5R.

Here's the full chart. One of these days I'll put all this data (and the Fantasy Grounds data) on a combined chart like the one I do for ICv2 stats.

 

[Sunsword]

It would be interesting to see the breakdown of Pathfinder 1e vs 2e.

 

[Morrus]

It would be interesting to see the breakdown of Pathfinder 1e vs 2e.

4.49% vs 1.23%.

 

[Hurin70]

Thanks for all the stats -- very helpful!

I find it interesting that Rolemaster is doing better on Roll20 than Fantasy Grounds during the pandemic, given that support for Rolemaster is considerably better on Fantasy Grounds (which has a character sheet and tables) than on Roll20 (which IIRC only has a character sheet for the RMSS edition of the rules).

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Notably, almost every game system, even popular ones, combine all the editions.

For example, Cthulhu, Warhammer (which includes 40k and FRPG), the WoD games, Star Wars, etc.

But "D&D games" are broken out into:
D&D 5e (1st)
Pathfinder (3rd) - Ordinal rankings omit "uncategorized."
D&D 3.5e (4th)
Pathfinder 2 (6th)
AD&D (20th)
D&D 4e (22nd)

etc.

In addition, this shows how statistics with small numbers can be, on occasion, misleading.

HeroQuest has 4066% growth! Which is great!

But that puts them 76th on the ordinal list of named systems, with .03% of campaigns; after Paranoia, Runequest, and Godbound, and in the company of some RPGs whose names, I assume, have been made up in order to confuse me.

 

[Jester David]

Always happy to see a spike in play for Star Trek Adventures. Like the system and the world. A personal fave.

(Which does also coincide with the launch of the Clear Skies streamed game on QueueTimes.)

 

[DaveMage]

Amazing to me that 3.5 is still very much in the picture. Really shows how much a mistake 4E was.

 

[Superchunk77]

Amazing to me that 3.5 is still very much in the picture. Really shows how much a mistake 4E was.

I've been debating running a 3.5 campaign again. Such a great system and it's flaws are easily mitigated.

 

[Parmandur]

Amazing to me that 3.5 is still very much in the picture. Really shows how much a mistake 4E was.

AD&D has more of a VTT following than 4E... pretty astonishing.

 

[Retreater]

I've enjoyed the few games of 4e I've played on VTT. It probably is better there than in person.
I wish PF2 had a greater presence. I don't think it's getting its due. Personally I think the pandemic is really hurting it, as it's not getting time to be promoted and played in person at events and hobby shops. It didn't really have traction going into this and not a ton of support on VTT in general.