Author Topic: How Many Roleplayers?  (Read 2299 times)

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Offline egdcltd

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How Many Roleplayers?
« on: June 30, 2016, 04:09:21 AM »
I was wondering if anyone knew of any, moderately accurate, figures about just how many people play RPGs. Plus, how many play each system (which, added together, would be larger than the first number, as most play more than one system). Especially if the systems are reasonably broken down; D&D would definitely be the largest if you include every edition, plus the retroclones and OGL derivations. I think the latter should be considered separately, so White Box and Labyrinth Lord, for example, would have separate figures.
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Offline Peter R

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Re: How Many Roleplayers?
« Reply #1 on: June 30, 2016, 04:33:26 AM »
I have tried to find those sorts of figures in the past and there is no nice clean list. The way I solved the problem for my needs was I found the most popular forums for the systems I was most interested and compared the number of registered users. That gave me a rough proportional representation. You can then multiply up by the number of regsitered users and the number of guests on the forum to get a figure for the audience size.

That is all very arbitary but it was the best number I could come up with.

The actual question is very vague. What is a a roleplayer? Many people were roleplayers, would be again if they had anyone to play with and may own rulebooks are are they actually roleplayers? Do you count people who do not play pen and paper rpgs? If you are looking at these figures as a market research exercise then products for d100 games players would not interest world of warcraft players but they are still playing an rpg.
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Offline egdcltd

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Re: How Many Roleplayers?
« Reply #2 on: June 30, 2016, 06:53:45 AM »
I'd say pen & paper rather that computer gamers. People who are either actively playing or actively buying. Or both. I'm sure Wizards and Paizo have some figures; doubt they'd be willing to share them though - beyond saying "We have x number of players of our games."

I think I read recently that OneBookShelf had something like half a million people visiting each month. Unfortunately, I can't remember where I read that.
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Offline jdale

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Re: How Many Roleplayers?
« Reply #3 on: June 30, 2016, 09:01:11 AM »
I'm not aware of any recent numbers. There is this famous and useful survey: https://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/wotcdemo.html  But the data is from 1999. We have to expect things have shifted since then, although what direction is unclear. Given the cost of doing such a study, it was very generous of them to make public as much information as they did. Probably other studies have been done and not publicized.
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Offline egdcltd

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Re: How Many Roleplayers?
« Reply #4 on: June 30, 2016, 09:07:03 AM »
Yes, that's quite a good one, but yes, it's now a bit dated - it's pre-Pathfinder, and I'm sure that system is way up there now. I would assume that they (and others) have done other market studies since - it's to their benefit after all - but I bet many haven't been published publicly.

One current stat (even if it's not known precisely what it signifies) for games other than Pathfinder and current D&D that I think is useful is what "metal" status the core books have on the OneBookShelf sites.
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Offline Peter R

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Re: How Many Roleplayers?
« Reply #5 on: June 30, 2016, 11:30:30 AM »
To be honest I don't think anyone knows the onebookshelf or rpgnow sites better than you do.

On Amazon they rank products in the product details which gives you a relative popularity of each product.

If you can tie hard figures from the metal ratings to the relative popularity from Amazon you could build a sort of index of popularity.
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Offline egdcltd

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Re: How Many Roleplayers?
« Reply #6 on: July 01, 2016, 03:14:57 AM »
I don't know if anyone outside of OneBookShelf has actual sales figures for the metal ratings. They are awarded on a per site basis, and the only figures publishers have access to are total sales across all sites. Unless OneBookShelf inform publishers as to how many sales have been made when a metal rating is reached, you would have to activate sales emails for products, keep them all and then calculate it manually.
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Offline NicholasHMCaldwell

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Re: How Many Roleplayers?
« Reply #7 on: July 01, 2016, 06:34:33 AM »
I don't know if anyone outside of OneBookShelf has actual sales figures for the metal ratings. They are awarded on a per site basis, and the only figures publishers have access to are total sales across all sites. Unless OneBookShelf inform publishers as to how many sales have been made when a metal rating is reached, you would have to activate sales emails for products, keep them all and then calculate it manually.

OBS have never informed me of any metal rating awards or changes. I do know what the ratings equate to in terms of sales because OBS did explain it to publishers years ago. (Or at least what was the case way back then.)

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Offline egdcltd

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Re: How Many Roleplayers?
« Reply #8 on: July 01, 2016, 09:53:31 AM »
Aren't publishers informed when a product goes metal on one of the sites? I always assumed they were.
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Offline NicholasHMCaldwell

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Re: How Many Roleplayers?
« Reply #9 on: July 01, 2016, 02:13:54 PM »
Aren't publishers informed when a product goes metal on one of the sites? I always assumed they were.

Not to my knowledge.

Best wishes,
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Offline egdcltd

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Re: How Many Roleplayers?
« Reply #10 on: July 03, 2016, 08:10:11 AM »
Good grief, Colin must be checking the sites even more than me then. He notices when GCP products get a new metal usually before I do.
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Offline NicholasHMCaldwell

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Re: How Many Roleplayers?
« Reply #11 on: July 03, 2016, 12:09:16 PM »
Keeping an eye on the metal rankings is one of Colin's jobs.

I expect that Shadow World Player Guide will be next to upgrade from Electrum to Gold.

Best wishes,
Nicholas
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Director, Iron Crown Enterprises Ltd
Publisher of Rolemaster, Spacemaster, Shadow World, Cyradon, HARP & HARP SF, and Cyberspace, with products available from www.drivethrurpg.com
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Offline egdcltd

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Re: How Many Roleplayers?
« Reply #12 on: July 04, 2016, 08:05:01 AM »
I've just noticed that you can get sales stats from just one OBS site. So any publisher with a metal product, if they know when it went metal, should have a good idea as to how many sales it had.

I wonder, if you were to run a poll on roleplayers, what places would you post it to get maximum coverage (albeit not maximum response)? And do the free polling sites have limits to the number of responses allowed?
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Offline NicholasHMCaldwell

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Re: How Many Roleplayers?
« Reply #13 on: July 04, 2016, 08:27:15 AM »
I've just noticed that you can get sales stats from just one OBS site. So any publisher with a metal product, if they know when it went metal, should have a good idea as to how many sales it had.

I had not noticed that option. Very helpful.

Best wishes,
Nicholas
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Director, Iron Crown Enterprises Ltd
Publisher of Rolemaster, Spacemaster, Shadow World, Cyradon, HARP & HARP SF, and Cyberspace, with products available from www.drivethrurpg.com
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Offline Merkir

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Re: How Many Roleplayers?
« Reply #14 on: July 05, 2016, 10:27:50 PM »

While this doesn't answer the OP, it's at least some information from roll20 users:

http://blog.roll20.net/post/137560897420/the-orr-group-industry-report-q4-2015


Offline egdcltd

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Re: How Many Roleplayers?
« Reply #15 on: July 06, 2016, 03:55:17 AM »
That's an interesting list, especially the one for the final quarter of 2015. I suppose you could extrapolate the total numbers by using those with the total number of roleplayers, but I have a feeling that the list is skewed a bit towards D&D & Pathfinder and that there may be higher percentages of players for some of the other games listed from a different sample. I also think there are some comparatively popular games missing.
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Offline jdale

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Re: How Many Roleplayers?
« Reply #16 on: July 06, 2016, 02:11:20 PM »
I imagine that list is also biased towards systems that are fully supported in Roll20 vs systems that are not. Rolemaster players, for example, might be more drawn to Fantasy Grounds which does have RM support.

There was also a notable number of players of unspecified "other games" in that list.
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Offline egdcltd

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Re: How Many Roleplayers?
« Reply #17 on: July 07, 2016, 09:55:23 AM »
I wonder if Fantasy Grounds has done anything similar? I did notice that Stars Without Number was surprisingly popular, all things considered. Admittedly, most of the supplements have achieved high levels of sales (I checked).
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Offline ob1knorrb

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Re: How Many Roleplayers?
« Reply #18 on: July 14, 2016, 05:21:17 PM »
Would looking at the number of members various Facebook groups have been useful at all?  I'm not sure if you can see the number of members a group has if you haven't joined it.  I'm also not sure if it would be easy to tell which groups were "Official" company groups
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Offline egdcltd

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Re: How Many Roleplayers?
« Reply #19 on: July 15, 2016, 04:56:23 AM »
I think it might give a general idea, even if the groups aren't official (and I don't know whether you can see numbers without joining a group either; I simply don't use Facebook much). I would assume that the largest groups are probably the official ones, but some systems/settings may not have official support anyway.
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