State of Indie RPGs and RPGs in general, 2011

[jhkimrpg]

Now that Gen Con Indy is over, I was thinking about the state of indie RPGs and of the RPG hobby in general. Besides the Indie RPG Awards, I was inspired by two threads: Steve Dempsey started thread on the Story Games forums about the state of indie RPGs, and on theRPGsite, "Bloody Stupid Johnson" made a thread on Gen Con Event Breakdowns.

RPG

Comments

[anonymous]

[ext_535197]

John,

You should probably ask someone at Evil Hat before you go off publicly speculating who is and isn't an owner. You're rather off there. And Fred Hicks is a pretty easily accessible guy for asking such questions.

- Ryan

[jhkimrpg]

Agh! My apologies - I totally mis-phrased that comment. I intended it to be a question rather than a statement, and I'm editing it now to correct the false impression it gives.

Games on Demand Numbers

[ext_745955]

If you're interested in a breakdown of what got played at Games on Demand, you can see your rough counts here:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsU3ZXcanG8GdHFrTjhzT2xDOE1haVBBMkwyZnZTZnc&hl=en_US

[anonymous]

Summary of Games on Demand (from Steve's link): 431 people played across 82 individual sessions.

[eyebeams]

The significance of the Google search trend was fairly debunked by noting downward trends of "chess" and "Microsoft" and other terms.

Actually, no. My reference to those trends was in the context of a specific discussion about recruitment, and I was careful to approach this with multiple searches with specific segmentation.

I think that if any group is doing the heavy lifting with regards to getting gamers into seats at this point, it would be the OSR, primarily through re-recruitment through the very large group of casual and lapsed hobbyists. It's a pity you chose to conflate all editions of D&D except for Pathfinder, because that actively hinders insight into the single largest general segment of players. The destruction of a unitary Dungeons and Dragons is probably the single biggest development in the hobby.

[jhkimrpg]

Fair enough. I added the D&D edition breakdown.

As for the Google searches... Your original claim was "Your interest is dying" - i.e. that the decline of searches on "D&D" constituted proof of declining interest among gamers. I don't think it constitutes any such proof. It seems quite possible that the majority of searches then and now are from people with no interest in joining a game, but rather are simply curious about the topic the same way that I might be curious about Afghanistan or ancient Rome. If so, the search frequency measures how much D&D is in the news and general public consciousness. While D&D being in the news may help recruitment, they aren't the same thing.

[eyebeams]

Any retroclones folded in any of these categories

[jhkimrpg]

If you want to argue that the percentage of search volume devoted to real interest is going up, you need to show your work beyond Gen Con attendance or referring to a comparison that, as I said, isn't a refutation at all.

I'm not claiming proof of rising real interest. I'm claiming that there's no proof either way. If only 10% of the people searching are genuinely interested in playing D&D, then I can't tell anything about whether this subset is rising or falling from the total.

A rise of searches on "Afghanistan" could indicate a rise in people who want to move there, but it doesn't necessarily. What it shows is people curious about the topic. Likewise, a decline on searches for "D&D" could indicate a decline in people who want to play, but again, it doesn't necessarily. What it shows is less people curious about the topic.