RPG Sales Data Needed, and Arbitrarily Let's Say "Urgently"

Neurosis · Post by **Neurosis** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 6:01 pm

Hey guys!

How big is the Tabletop RPG market in dollars?

How are those dollars split between the various game lines/publishers?

What would a pie chart look like for the RPG industry's market share? How would that pie be split up between WotC, Paizo, Catalyst, Onyx Path, HERO Games, Margaret Weis Productions, and so on and so forth as though I listed every single big, medium, small ,and indie publisher large enough to register as even 1%...because that's what I want.

This data...MUST...exist...on the internet, right? The internet is huge. The internet is all-knowing. But Google has utterly failed to find me this pie chart. So help me find it! Or share your own expertise/educated guesses.

codeGlaze · Post by **codeGlaze** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 6:12 pm

In several past posts it has been stated that the TTRPG market is infamously opaque on sales data.

Neurosis · Post by **Neurosis** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 6:13 pm

Well...fuck them! haha, I want to know! Fuck them and their infamous opacity!

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 6:17 pm

Did your twelve-year old little brother get into your account or something?

Neurosis · Post by **Neurosis** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 6:23 pm

Ummm...nope. And kudos to the twelve year old who can get from "opaque" to opacity, also!

I'm just burning with curiosity. Someone in an internet argument referred to "company XX" as a "key industry leader" and that SEEMS incredibly wrong and asenine, but I'm frustrated because I have absolutely NO hard data with which to refute it.

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 6:25 pm

Schwarzkopf wrote:Ummm...nope. And kudos to the twelve year old who can get from "opaque" to opacity, also!

I'm just burning with curiosity. Someone in an internet argument referred to "company XX" as a "key industry leader" and that SEEMS incredibly wrong and asenine, but I'm frustrated because I have absolutely NO hard data with which to refute it.

Do they have data that confirms it? It's their claim they must back that shit up.

Laertes · Post by **Laertes** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 7:17 pm

I can't speak for the RPG industry as a whole, but the publishing industry generally doesn't release the number of units printed and sold in each print run. That sort of thing is something that you have to sign NDAs and confidentiality agreements before they'll tell you.

Antariuk · Post by **Antariuk** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 7:48 pm

Laertes wrote:I can't speak for the RPG industry as a whole, but the publishing industry generally doesn't release the number of units printed and sold in each print run. That sort of thing is something that you have to sign NDAs and confidentiality agreements before they'll tell you.

Well, doesn't it beg the question why that is? I mean, is the RPG market such an unforgiving cuthroat place that, as a publisher, you simply can't afford to pop up in your competitor's "companies we should crush with a marketing campaign" because your numbers indicate a very small customer base?

I am not in a hurry or anything like Schwarzkopf but I can't deny a growing curiosity about this phenomenon myself.

Laertes · Post by **Laertes** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 7:56 pm

From the little I know (and I am not speaking from any particular knowledge here) I'd guess it's less a case of "what do we gain from holding back information?" and more a case of "what do we stand to gain from releasing the figures?" The default assumption is that everyone who needs to know the numbers is already part of your company or will be explicitly told by them, and anyone else doesn't need to know. That's the culture that publishing - and most other industries - work under, and I can see how they wouldn't consider RPGs any different. I mean, from a business point of view an RPG isn't that different from a science textbook: the writer you hired is a specialist in a different field, but it's a similar high-production values, small-print-run sort of niche. The attitudes that inform the general industry would inform that part of it.

nikita · Post by **nikita** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 8:14 pm

I believe that most RPG publishers are not certain enough of their manhood that they dare to give out actual sales data, especially sales volume.

It would show true pettiness of business side of this hobby and thus reduce their importance to nothingness.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 8:15 pm

Most businesses reflexively hate transparency, but publishers in particular (no matter the medium or market) above and beyond. Firstly, their entire business model is to act as a dating service between all the people involved in creating, marketing, and selling a product. They have to sell everyone involved on the value of that service, and the ability to determine the value yourself using publicly available data would make it harder for them to rip people off as much as they do. Secondly, there's almost certainly a non-trivial amount of Hollywood accounting and equivalently shitty schemes going on behind closed doors for which they'd just get fucking sued if people could comb through all their numbers.

Basically: if people only ever hear the numbers from you, you can spin them however the fuck you want, and that is an advantage in every contract negotiation you ever sit down at. Transparency is just another one of those things that helps people wriggle out of the vice grip you have on their balls, and publishers make a lot of money off of vice gripping people's balls.

Dogbert · Post by **Dogbert** » Tue Aug 05, 2014 5:41 am

Transparency in the hobby pretty much ended (unironically) with White Wolf's Gehena. Before White Wolf ran themselves into the ground, they proudly bragged about their sales numbers every year. Ironically, last piece of data from a publisher I remember was WotC acknowledging d&d's playerbase shrunk down to 1/6th in two years when 4E happened.

silva · Post by **silva** » Tue Aug 05, 2014 5:52 am

I remember Steve Jackson Games showing their sales numbers one year and Munchkin was their leading product by huge margin.

mlangsdorf · Post by **mlangsdorf** » Tue Aug 05, 2014 2:26 pm

Actually, SJGames has been putting out Stakeholder reports with limited sales data for the last decade:
http://www.sjgames.com/general/stakeholders/

The level of detail is "total sales in 2013 were $11 million, of which 75% came from Munchkin." Which may be less than you were looking for.

Heaven's Thunder Hammer · Tue Aug 05, 2014 4:08 pm

There is some kind of top 5 publisher quarterly report that comes out... but it is only for one distributor I think.

zeruslord · Post by **zeruslord** » Tue Aug 05, 2014 6:55 pm

It's important to remember that most RPG sales happen early in a game or edition's lifecycle, with occasional exceptions if an overlooked game gets noticed. SJGames has a ton of mindshare because their board games are culturally significant, but they haven't put out a new RPG edition in years. GURPS is the quintessential generic system, but you aren't buying GURPS books these days unless you really want the second book of future equipment. Their other RPGs (In Nomine, Toon, Transhuman Space) are niche and old enough that most of the sales they will ever get already happened, but have similarly disproportionate mindshare. Munchkin, on the other hand, is a broad franchise with relatively wide appeal - it is THE RPG partygame, and they can keep pumping out new sets until they run out of genres. Now, it's lovely that Steve Jackson decided to tell everyone how much he makes, but realistically his share of the RPG market is on the same level as James Raggi, not Paizo or WotC. That might change for a year or two if they put out a new edition of GURPS or In Nomine or Toon.

Some other notes: I don't see a 2013 report, but the 2012 one provides a list of the top 40 products, and Trophy Buck, Illuminati and Zombie Dice are all way ahead of the GURPS core rulebooks, and Revolution! is ahead of any GURPS book but the character creation book, so GURPS sales from SJGames were probably under 750k for the year. Now, that's mixed between distributor, direct-to-store, and Warehouse23 sales, they do ebooks, and some of their GURPS supplements are PDF pamphlets, but it's not that many copies.

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Tue Aug 05, 2014 8:43 pm

ICv2 has sporadic insights into the RPG market:

http://www.icv2.com/articles/markets/28124.html

zeruslord · Post by **zeruslord** » Wed Aug 06, 2014 1:36 am

Schwartzkopf: mind naming the actual company in question? I don't expect to find super-helpful figures, but there's a pretty short list of games and companies that actually sold anything in the last five to ten years.

Looking at the ICv2 stuff with some google-fu, since 4E launched, Paizo is the 800 pound gorilla, 4e did better than anything but Pathfinder until about when they stopped making new books, Fantasy Flight has milked the Star Wars and 40k licenses effectively, Privateer Press has been consistently top-5 with Iron Kingdoms, Fate Core moved well, Green Ronin did well with the releases of Mutants and Masterminds and some of their licensed stuff. Catalyst and White Wolf were doing pretty well until they went under, but today there's no way you'd call either of them an industry leader unless Shadowrun 5e sold very well indeed.

Code: Select all

site&#58;icv2.com top 5 rpgs

turns up pretty much all the ICv2 posts, with not too much garbage in the way.

Heisenberg · Post by **Heisenberg** » Thu Aug 07, 2014 6:50 pm

Catalyst and White Wolf were doing pretty well until they went under, but today there's no way you'd call either of them an industry leader unless Shadowrun 5e sold very well indeed.

Edit: I misread this. But Catalyst was in the top 5 this spring...does that mean that SR5 is selling well?

erik · Post by **erik** » Fri Aug 08, 2014 3:01 am

Wow. How long as it been since D&D was not a top 5 RPG seller for a quarter?
- (nevermind, it is answered there. never in the 12 years since they started compiling these stats, ouch)

I wonder how much D&D RPG really is worth to WotC if the RPG market amounts to only $15M/yr and they don't even have 20% of that market. Possibly not even 10%.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Fri Aug 08, 2014 3:06 am

It's been, what, two years since they put out new material? It's not particularly surprising it isn't selling well.

Blicero · Post by **Blicero** » Sat Aug 09, 2014 10:40 pm

It's interesting that Numenera is selling well enough to rank. I got the impression that, once the book came out, the game sank below the radar pretty quickly.