tl;dr: continues the stable trend since 2023 - 5e still 2/3 of campaigns, very little sign of change anywhere. So on the one hand, this is a 'nothing to report' report - on the other, the stability is the point.
Another year with scarce data on what people are playing in general (come back Orr Reports, bring light to your people...) - we turn to another years data from Obsidian Portal to try and read the tea-leaves of what is going on in the general gaming sphere. I have been tracking these now for a few years and things seem to have hit a stable state relatively speaking.
This data was collected by loading the Campaigns page on Obsidian Portal and noting the campaigns per system for each year available (back to 2008) using the Wayback Machine. Happily the format never changed to greatly and it is possible to get a roughly mid-year capture for every year. I can only use the categorisation that Obsidian Portal uses, though some dispute where those lines are drawn, particularly for early D&D editions - so keep that in mind.
The raw numbers show overall Obsidian Portal having as many new campaigns in 2025 as 2024; no market conquering growth but let us say it has maintained its presence.
Things are broadly stable year on year but do show a bit of a lift in non-D&D games. Taking these figures at face value we see a ~3% shift towards non-D&D games, pretty interesting for they year of the big new-edition-that-wasn't-a-new-edition. That 3% came straight out of 5e, the fraction playing the other editions stayed flat year-on-year.
The bump in non-D&D can be mostly accounted for by an extra 1% going to each of Savage Worlds, GURPS and Starfinder RPG - old warhorses finding a new campaign. Given that neither Daggerheart nor Draw Steel appears and Shadowdark is present only in the most token sense (2 campaigns) this makes me sceptical of how representative this all is. Are we looking at a static community and its gaming habits? Even if it is just the same people, are none of them inclined to try the new hotness?
Checking in on our edition popularity evolution, the trends continue - 5e looks like it has definitely plateaued; 2/3 of the games played is what it can get to.
Looking at our top-14 non-D&D games things similarly trend in line with last year - flat or a slight fade down for most of these, Savage Worlds, GURPS and Starfinder RPG showing a kick since last year, Traveller, World of Darkness and Call of Cthulhu holding to their upward grind. Dataset is relatively small, take this with a grain of salt but overall it looks like the next tier behind D&D is not changing rapidly either.
Looking into what games did appear and get played in 2025 we have Otherscape and Shadow of the Weird Wizard (4 campaigns each) and Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, Lyonesse,
Shadowdark RPG, Shadowrun 2E, Sigil & Shadow, Subversion, Tricube Tales & Tactics, Warhammer: the Old World with 2 campaigns each.
Digging into this I also noticed some games who did appear in 2024 but had no campaigns now getting played in 2025 - Pirate Borg (6 campaigns) and Swords of the Serpentine (4 campaigns) being the big ones followed by 2 campaigns each for City of Mist, Dishonored Roleplaying Game, Truth & Justice and Vast Grimm.
All told that makes ~ 40 odd campaigns on new systems in 2025 out of ~6500 total played; hardly a vast rush for novelty.
All in all it says that 2025 has thus far not been a year to seismically alter peoples playing tastes - people found their games and continue to play them. Perhaps all the folk playing the new stuff are on the VTTs or using Obsidian or something else for their campaign management - certainly a possibility. But in this particular corner of the TTRPG online sphere, things sail along with very little sign of change.
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