How many gamers?

[Onix]

I while back I was wondering how many role players are out there so I asked at a couple forums and the answer was invariably "It's impossible to know." While there may be some truth to that, I finally got a hard number. WOTC did some marketing research a while back and came up with the number 6 million. That number could be more or less at this point, but it gives an idea of how large the pool is.

What does this do for us? Why does it matter? Well it gives us an idea of how large the field is. If there are only 100 thousand gamers, then the market is extremely small and it would seem like all GMs out there have their own blog and probably their own game they're working on. (Ok maybe there aren't 20,000 games out there but it seems that way.) With 6 million, thats about 1-2 million gaming groups out there you can get your game in front of. Say there are 2 million groups out there. At my current rate of downloads (200/mo), it would take 1,250 years to get all the GMs out there to at least look at my games. (Better get to work!)

[Rob Lang]

Hobbyist stats are really difficult to gauge but I do like your thinking. I think that there are lots of groups out there who play twice weekly and still play a butched D&D 1-2ed. I know one group who are playing a D&D mix of ALL 4 versions. They're not online or part of any community but they do buy books.

It's those quiet, under the radar, gamers that are difficult to record. What's more, I know there are large RPG communities that don't speak English so will not necessarily be picked up by Wizards. For example, here's the stats from my blog from when it started to now:


Biggy here: https://picasaweb.google.com/1072570210 ... 9740054418

More than half from the USA (by far the biggest market) but look at all the others!

[Onix]

I've been getting a lot of hits from China recently. I wonder if that's a good thing or a bad thing. They don't download much which makes me fearful they have another purpose in mind.