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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 3473212" data-attributes="member: 22424">The thing is, that 1% data point is pretty important to the debate - if it's accurate then I'd agree that Dragon's readership probably is irrelevant in the scheme of things. But if it's wrong...Now, reason has been given to suggest that the player base of 5,000,000 is overstated. (And, if it's taken from a stat sheet used to encourage advertising, that alone should be enough to throw it into doubt - given that it's an estimate and not a concrete and verifiable data point, you would naturally shoot high.) The question is, is it overstated, and if so by how much?If it is off by a factor of 10, suddenly that 1% turns into 10%, and that probably is significant.And, yes, I think it is relevant to consider how much of the player base is actually part of the customer base. If the average WotC product sells tens of thousands of copies, that suggests that the customer base itself isn't much higher than that 10% (although that's hard to quantify, since not everyone buys the same books, so it could well be double, triple, or more than that). And then there genuinely is the overlap between the two groups to consider.Anecdotally, of the six people in my group I own lots of books, one other owns the three core rulebooks and the Spell Compendium, and a third has a Player's Handbook. The others manage without. Now, of course, statistically that has no bearing whatsoever... but do Wizards actually have concrete data on how many active customers they have, as opposed to active players?That's a large part of the fun of statistics - they can be used to 'prove' any point you want, and conversely can be taken, mangled, and rearranged to disprove the exact same point. My gut feeling is that Wizards have made a big mistake in doing as they have... but time will tell. And, it's not as if I will mind being wrong about this one, given the alternative.</blockquote>

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