It is worth noting, of course, that the "size of the market" figures that have been cited are also raw numbers, and so they also don't reflect inflation - if the RPG market was doing $30M in 1999 and is doing $30M in 2016, that's not actually all that healthy a sign.
There's no hard figures but 20+ million or so in the 00s (Dancey also had an opinion that D&D could be, potentially, I think it was, a 27 million product line, and that might get conflated with similar guestimates of the size of the market as a whole).
Inflation's been slow for decades, but it adds up. Today's industry clearly reflects a rebound from the lows of D&D's 2-year absence from the market.
There is no evidence that a slow release schedule is what brought the figure back up. What would that figure be like had the 4th edition CB never came out, or the rules themselves were different.
It could be more about timing - in 2013, D&D had missed the OSR bandwagon, failed to establish a $50-100million level of revenue with an on-line subscription model that faded into vaporware, and withdrawn from the market entirely, today it's possibly getting pulled along by the resurgence in boardbames' popularity.
It could be someones laundering money through game stores.
:shrug: It could be anything.
But it correlates to D&D being offered in a very traditional form.
Yes, it makes no sense since the D&D brand itself didn't really change much
Yes. 4e had Encounters, which was pretty much the same as AL
As someone who participated in both, they sure seem difference, but, yeah, from a distance, prettymuch the same. The details differed, sometimes the changes along the way would seem significant or upsetting or exciting, but, yeah, prettymuch the same. Organized play, either way. Perhaps the biggest difference was that Encounters was very much focused on brand-new players, while AL is focused more on long-time & returning players.
PF is most assuredly a competitor. IIRC, PF actually had MORE players than D&D 4e had at the time.
PF was making about the same money (in stores, according to IcV2 - ie, not counting on-line sales or DDI subs) on it's very rapid release schedule as D&D was on a rapidly declining one. It was presumably selling more individual products to a smaller, more loyal market.
5e is outselling PF by quite a bit, on even fewer products released per year, so clearly PF has fallen that much farther behind D&D in popularity. PF, as a faithful 3.x clone, is really like 16 years into an overall run, so it's amazing it's still got so much momentum.
Both games, in their own ways, are really impressive performers.
For RPGs.
