Some intriguing indications of how many TTRPG players there are in a handful of surveys that cover the general population:
- Researchscape 2022 Survey and 2019 Survey looking at who among the general US population has played TTRPGs
- Front part of "Die große Pen-&-Paper-Rollenspiel-Umfrage 2022" doing similar for Germany
Two interesting points pop out:
- what fraction of respondants have ever played TTRPGs and/or play them now
- frequency of play among those who do play TTRPGs
For the recent Researchscape US survey - 36% of general population respondants have played TTRPGs at some point, 25% are playing at least once a year. The 2019 survey found 23% had played TTRPGs at some point; suggesting a more than 50% increase in the share of population who had played TTRPGs in the past 3 years.
Comparing this to the German survey where the first half of the "Pen-&-Paper-Rollenspielbefragung 2022" has responses from a 500 person "census representative" online panel. Here 38% have played a TTRPG at some point, 15% play TTRPGs currently. A further 11% knows what TTRPGs are but have not played them.
Here we see two points suggesting a quarter to a third of the general population has at some point chucked a d20 or other dice about while role-playing. I find that a surprisingly high number, I could have been convinced it was half that or less. Certainly, it looks like maybe a quarter to a sixth are current players which suggests there are a lot of folk out there who played once and do not anymore.
Digging into how frequently respondents say they play - in the US survey of those who play at least once a year we read that 28% play weekly (or more often), 28% get in a monthly game, 44% play once a year. In the German sample, 25% play weekly or more frequently, 36% play monthly and 39% play less than once a month. These look similar in both cases - with a over half of those who play getting in at least a monthly game but a significant chunk playing a few times a year only.
If we assume these are broadly representative, what does this imply about number of TTRPG players in general? Taking Worldometer population numbers of 331 million in the US, 83 million in Germany then this suggests there are approx 83 million Americans playing TTRPGs at least once a year, 20 million of them having a weekly TTRPG game. For Germany those numbers would be 12 million gamers, 3 million of them playing weekly.
One thing this gives us is a hint at the answer to 'how many quiet gamers are there out there' - those who do not participate online, comment on forums or generally add to the chatter around what is happening in gaming. The second is how many women out there are gaming but do not participate in the online TTRPG spaces.
Answering those in reverse order, because we can go a better job in the second one. In the German survey - 'yes I play TTRPGs' was 18% for men, 11% for women. If everyone participated in online discourse, surveys, etc. to reflect that ratio of who is gaming, we should be seeing only 62% men in the response demographics. Instead it is regularly north of 90% in many online spaces. The second half of the German survey itself had 81% men responding. We have seen this trend elsewhere in many sources; the signs are that much more women play compared to the relatively few participating in online forums and surveys.
Returning to our first question and trying to take a stab at it using D&D as the better known of TTRPGs. M.T. Black tried to sweep up the many estimates of how many D&D players there are, starting from a WotC statement in 2020 of "over 40 million fans around the world" andextrapolating that with sales growth rate to ~ 48 million in 2021. Let us take 50 million players now (mid 2022) as a low end and a second year of 20% growth to give us a high end of 58 million. From many sources we see the US appears to be 2/3 - 3/4 of D&D players, so let us say in 2022 that 50-58 million global players should be represented by approx 33-43 million US players.
The Researchscape report had 39% of players saying D&D was their last game - so conservatively assuming D&D players only play D&D, then of the 83 million US players we get 32 million D&D players in the US. If instead we assume that the share of D&D looks closer to the breakdown seen on Roll20 (approx 75% D&D players) then we would have 62 million players. These ranges (33-43 and 32-62) show an overlap that suggests we are roughly in the right ballpark - so far, so good.
Checking for Germany - here we get sketchier as all our geography data comes from English language polls - but those suggest that ~2% of global players are in Germany - that should be ~ 1 million of the 50-58 million estimated global D&D players which is way off our estimated 12 million German TTRPG players. Could it be that there are other systems (Das Schwarze Auge, etc) that dominate in Germany? Could it be that there is a thriving scene that just does not interact with English language surveys? Yes to both of those. And it certainly highlights the potential blind spots in our online communities for those beyond language barriers or just not participating in certain sites.
For the US data - 28% of the respondents say they play weekly or more, compared to an average of 50% for respondents to online surveys on Reddit, forums, twitter etc. This again supports the indications we have from character creation tools that those discussing games are a different bunch to those out there playing them - though the online discussion folk may include some of the more intense players.
In any case, intriguing results - it is great to see these surveys starting with general population and zooming in. Would love to see more - a French or Spanish equivalent, perhaps. If anyone is aware of such surveys, please let me know!
Sources:
2022 Survey by Researchscape (N = 1074)
Die große Pen-&-Paper-Rollenspiel-Umfrage 2022 (N = 500 for part 1)
2019 Survey by Researchscape (N = 942)
No comments:
Post a Comment