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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Erik Mona" data-source="post: 5013707" data-attributes="member: 2174">I'll leave it to Ryan to explain that number, but were I to guess I'd say it was based on the extensive survey data WotC collected circa 1998 or so, in preparation for the new edition. At that time they likely determined the average length of a customer's association with the brand, and extrapolated the 5 million number from some combination of that percentage and the total number of D&D rules sets sold to date, possibly also with a "bump" from what in the magazine business is called "pass along" readership, which is to say some representation of players who play regularly, but who are not regular buying customers.To put it another way, I'm certain that the survey asked questions about how many players were in each person's group, and what percentage owned the Player's Handbook, etc.I noticed that WotC is now quoting 6 million, and have no clue where the additional 1 million gamers came from (except perhaps an extrapolation based on the time that has passed since the original survey).I seem to remember that the number is meant to represent all editions, so that's one reason why it's a lot higher than the unit sales on any particular edition.Put simply, I don't have a tremendous amount of faith in that number, since it's obvious that no one surveyed everyone in the world and it's thus an extrapolation, or "best guess" based on other data. I have no concrete reason to think it's lower than that, but I must admit to feeling some frustration during my tenure at both the RPGA and Dragon magazine, because even when we felt like our numbers were really high, they never amounted to more than a small percentage of the "total" number of worldwide D&D players quoted by marketing. But then, by that metric, even the enormously successful third and fourth edition core rules sales combined only reached a fraction of this worldwide player base, so I would guess that selling any one product to a significant cohort of this extrapolated number would have a very high Difficulty Class regardless of the product in question. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />--Erik</blockquote>

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