That doesn’t seem right. Over 50 million people play D&D, and this survey says 19% of D&D players identify as Gen X. You have more than 9 and a half million Gen Z people in your household??
That is actually a very suspect number in itself. IF (and that's a big IF) there were even 25 million players, and we each had gotten a ticket to the D&D movie at $10 a piece (I know, that's actually on the low end today, let's say they all went to matinee's), the D&D movie would have busted $250 million easily, and that's not even including any other individual that saw it due to advertising, going with friends, or just interested in it.
As it is, probably less than 50% of the audience were D&D players, and with the totals, and the low estimate ($10 a ticket) that means there would be less than 10 million active D&D players more than likely if we look at the BEST picture ratio.
The survey's ARE Public Relations and hype. That's what they are there for overall.
That doesn't mean they are WRONG...they actually are pretty accurate...from a certain point of view.
That said, let's say that 25 million of those played prior to 3e and were part of the original crowd of players.
In 2020 Millenials overtook Boomers as the largest population group in the United States. Of the Gen-X and Boomer population we also know that by 2000 there were less than 1 million active D&D players (or that's the numbers were have heard and assumed were still playing AD&D prior to 3e's release).
If we look at that overall and double it, even if there are 10 million active D&D players today (I know, I know, it doesn't match up to the hyped up numbers, but once again, that's from a certain point of view. 25 Mil AD&D + 5 mil 3e + 4 mil 4e + 16 mil 5e ever played =....) that would give around a 20% number of Boomers and Gen-X playing which is still pretty high comparatively to the survey, but it doesn't take much to have those numbers drop (remember, less than a million in 2000, doesn't take much to have those numbers drop). At a million players, that gives us around 10%.
Extrapolating, it's not hard to say these numbers, even if hype and somewhat flawed in how they were gotten, actually could be a pretty good representation of the percentages of who is playing.
IMO.