Print-on-demand for players in Europe

Looking at the news that Brexit is going to cause delays and cost increases for getting UK printed books from DriveThruRPG, I wondered how likely it is that the companies will be motivated to fix this. Maybe if there are more gamers in the EU than in the UK they might?

As we know from almost all surveys, the majority of TTRPG gamers are in North America, with the next largest chunk in Europe.

Fewer surveys and sites give enough granularity to see what specific countries players are from but there are some and they all seem to say mostly the same thing. First, the caveats that the EU number is probably underestimated as many of these data sources cut after a top 15 or top 20 and so the smaller EU countries cannot be broken out of the 'Europe, Other' bucket. Countries such as Portugal, Belgium, Austria, Luxmbourg, Croatia and Romania where I regularly see readers of this blog pop in are in the 'Europe, Other'. Second, these are often anglo-phone sources suggesting that representation will be reduced from non-anglophone countries (to some unknown degree).

What it does show is that despite the UK being the largest European population of TTRPG players by a good way, there are still apparently more TTRPG gamers in the EU even for this data that should inflate the UK share of numbers. This suggests that even for purely English language products, there should be more customers within the EU than in the UK alone. Hopefully we will therefore see new EU based printers and distributors sorted out in fairly short order.

Alternatively, with pressure on the US postal system due to the election reduced, maybe it will be easier just to get things direct from the US? As I go through my Lulu.com receipts to check what country in the EU these were printed I find they all originating from the US. I had assumed that they were slow from waiting in a print queue but no, it looks like they came trans-atlantic.

Others have said, and I agree, that POD is one of the best things to have happened for RPGs in the past while. It has been one of the pillars supporting the explosion of variety we have experienced. I hope that this new cost and friction introduced to regional POD services gets dealt with. Soon.

Sources:

Name	Year	Size	Type
ENWorld	2019	2410221	Visitors
Meetup.com TTRPG groups	2020	1080321	User numbers
Twitter D&D Demographic Survey	2020	4021	Survey
Elderbrain	2020	2044	Survey
D&D Research Wizards Update #1	2020	1006	Survey
r/DnD Demographics	2017	100	Survey