How big is the RPG market?
Yesterday the latest ICv2 reports came out – this time in pie chart form. These numbers confirm what any honest RPGer already knew: the hobby is a niche within a niche.
Numbers like these struggle to speak for themselves, as an inevitable tide of reactionary logic swells up. In the RPG community’s case, opinions tend to skew towards the defensive side. It’s worth running through some of these thoughts.
“Who cares?”
In many respects this is the most legitimate opinion of them all. If you have a great group, then nothing else has to matter. If on the other hand it seems curious that a game once dominant in its sector has since become the demographic equivalent of Eskimos, the market question is worth pondering. In any case the market question affects anyone from the moment that they lose that “great group.”
“We can’t draw conclusions from [x].”
When it comes to these kinds of conversations, I find that there are two types of skeptics present.
Skeptics
The first kind are genuinely curious to see what the numbers are like, and thus they are only criticizing the existing methodologies because they want to see more accurate results in the future. Obviously this is fine.
“Skeptics”
The second group however are wearing the skeptic hat for a different reason. They don’t want to come to terms with what the big picture is saying, so they deny it via the details. This process kills two birds with one stone. They 1) get to make perfectly legitimate criticisms about the particular flaws of [x], while 2) they also get to deflect the broader question: is [x] is more useful than it is useless. A much sought after side effect of this approach also seems to be 3) giving the impression to everyone else that you are a wise and careful thinker.
How do you tell one from another? There are no hard rules, but there is something that I use called the margin of error test. If a person claims that a study is too flawed to draw any conclusions, I ask them in turn exactly wrong they think the numbers are off. Are they off by 5%? 15%? 70%? The answer they give (or lack thereof) will speak most clearly to what they really think.
In this case, let’s pretend that the ICv2 is terribly off – like 100% off. Which is to say let’s pretend that the ICv2 is capturing literally only half of all RPG sales that are occurring. Where does that put the market share of RPGs then? From 2.9% to 5.8%? How many magnitudes larger would we have to go to not be concerned? It hardly matters where we place the goal post in any case because what this notion assumes is that only RPGs suffer from the ICv2’s deficits – quaint. Once you remove this assumption, the argument more or less collapses.
Is there room for improvement in the ICv2 reports? Where isn’t there room for improvement? The point however is that this question is separate from the question of whether the reports remain useful. A skeptic avoids collapsing these two questions together. A “skeptic” wants both questions to collapse.
“These numbers make sense because RPGs are hard to monetize.”
By their nature, RPGs are hard to monetize. Any video game exec would balk at the notion that one player could buy and freely share a product that 4+ other players could latch onto for free with. No DRM, no subscriptions, no $60 games with $40 season passes, how are you going to make your money? That’s one way of looking at it.
The more common sense way of looking at it however is to wonder why is this so bad? Market wisdom dictates that cheaper products with customer friendly practices out-compete over their more expensive, more cumbersome counterparts. How can Netflix make any money with $8 subscriptions, big budget productions, and a leeching culture worthy of memes? Well they do just fine apparently. In fact, the revenue that Netflix alone brings in is more than twice the size (2.64 billion) of the entire hobby games industry.
Personally I see more opportunity than disadvantage.
“These numbers make sense because RPGs are time consuming.”
Can RPGs be Netflix? Of course not. One barrier (if not the biggest barrier) is the time and people investment. Market wisdom also dictates that the product that you can enjoy anywhere anytime will out compete the product where you have to coordinate and mesh five different people’s schedules together into a 4+ hour time block. Once again however this is more an indication to me of what is possible. What if an RPG was 2 hours long instead of four hours? What if it didn’t have to be played by the same people every week? What if didn’t take multiple sessions to clear a single dungeon?
Truly it seems that the extent to which you solved the time problem would be exactly the extent to which RPGs can enter the mainstream. It couldn’t be entirely solvable of course. A movie or video game will always be faster. But what is so baffling to me is how little attention this dimension gets. It seems like the sole condition that, if alleviated, could cause the RPG market to explode, and yet when a D&D 5e AMA comes around, the headlining story-question is about the initiative order. What?
Conclusion
Before closing, it’s only fair to mention the trajectory of the numbers. The RPG industry is not only growing, it’s booming. The market has doubled in size since 2013, alongside the rest of the hobby industry. Although I would want more information. How much of that growth is 5e siphoning? How many of the non-celebrity kickstarters are performing well? Just how healthy is the industry really? A pie chart of exclusively the RPG market would be invaluable. But lest I inadvertently fall into the aforementioned “skeptic” category, I want to make this clear: are RPGs dying? Of course not.
Citing the 2.8% figure isn’t a case for the apocalypse, it’s case for being forthright. Let’s be honest about where the hobby is at. Once we do that, we can then be imaginative about where it could go.
Tabletop Syndrome 