Returning to teenage new-joiners

Listening to some of the chatter around the OGL fuss and attempted tea-leaf readings about what could be the thinking behind it, one theory I heard was that WotC is attempting to move back to an era where they were getting people into the game much younger. The big vision apparently is to sweep people up in a Fortnite-like model with a million micro-transactions for fancy hats and other stuff - selling many small things to everyone around a digital tabletop instead of the current model of selling chunkier books to the DM's alone (more or less) - which seems to align with the "$30/month" DnDBeyond leak. Or as another friend of the blog pointed out - do the Games Workshop model of get people in as a teen, sell them an army or two for a few hundred euro then let them age out and replace them. So does this seem feasible?

Dan Muñoz (@Nat1Fun) ran a poll on twitter asking "How old were you when you first played a TTRPG?" and got 3000+ responses that showed over half of them joined before they were 18.

Comparing this to some other polls over the past few years and it looks broadly in line - people are joining before their mid-20's, and mostly pre-adulthood, so let us say that this is no fluke result.

From looking at this topic in the past we saw "Age of D&D new joiners jumped ~5 yrs since 2015" shifting from mid-teens with all previous editions to post-teen from 2010 onwards. We confirmed that in multiple surveys of the community as documented in "Cometh the elders: confirming the 'age up' of new joiners" so I think we can have high confidence that this is an effect seen. It is coherent with people coming in recently from seeing adult gamers in streams like Critical Role, Dimension 20 and so on. However one can also read that data and say "for the majority of the lifetime of D&D, new joiners have been mid-teens" and see the current conditions as an anomaly - or you could say there is *even more* potential to sell D&D to teens given that it historically has done well in that group.

Certainly it appears that the new era has activated a lot more age groups to join but one can keep a straight face and say "we're going to target that teen-gamer microtransaction money with our new OneD&D VTT". There have been lots of teens joining in the past, most of us did join as teens - myself included. If I had the chance then to bypass the hassle of rounding up a group of friends when I didn't have my own transport and just play online, I can see how I would have gone for that.

I have no idea if that could work, but then the magic of huge marketing campaigns is a whole thing of its own. Certainly if I was stuck in a suit and shoved in front of a bunch of WotC major share-holders to explain such a plan, I think I could make a case why it could work.

A big out-standing question is 'can it work at $30/month' but I think once we are having that conversation, WotC will be happy as getting anything at all our of players on a regular basis will be a big step up from where we stand today. I am going to have a dig through other numbers to try and get a sense of what that 'market-will-bear' number might be, but I suspect this plan would be a go for the management at WotC even if the number is ~$6/month to start. Something better than nothing after all...