Does anyone have any further ideas on ways to estimate the AD&D market?grodog on ENWorld wrote:I think you're both way low: the AD&D MM, PHB, and DMG were each printed and reprinted in the millions through the height of D&D's heyday. Based on WotC's 1999 pre-3e marketing survey--which speaks to 1e/2e D&D player demographics---6% of the overall US population have ever played rpgs, while 3% play monthly. Those percetages are after at least two major rpg market crashes and the emergance of PC games as key competitors, neither of which which were factors for TSR or D&D until well-after 1986; I think those figures would be higher if TSR had performed market research back in the day.PapersAndPaychecks on ENWorld wrote:I think Henry's figures might be a bit low -- perhaps the numbers he gives could be doubled or tripled. (This is based on the distribution figures for my 1e .pdf's which are hosted on Dragonsfoot.)Henry on ENWorld wrote:Nobody has a friggin' clue. Best estimates come from sales figures of various companies willing to share, but no one has done a statistically successful poll because, frankly, there's no monetary gain in doing so. All we have are figures like Kenzer's from three years ago saying their Hackmaster PHB sold about 25,000 copies at the time and their DMG sold 15,000 copies, and so forth.
The pool of INTERNET ACTIVE AD&D players is possibly a little easier to find; Just based on message boards, I'm guessing about 1,500 to 5,000 or so. If each one accounts for a group of 2 to 6 players, you're looking at somewhere between 3,000 to 30,000 total players that internet groups account for. Of those, the ones who buy products online are pretty devoted; in other words, if there's something out, they'll scoop it up.
Note this also does not include the current player base, which has no hard figures released, and this does not cover those who play AD&D less than once per month but more than zero times per year; I myself even fall into that category. I'm mainly talking those who play at least once a month. Note finally this is all total anecdotal speculation based on the number of boards I've visited and in some cases just gazed at.
The US population in 1980 was 226,545,805 so 6% of that figure is 13,592,748 people who ever played AD&D in its heyday (the percentage was likely higher), and 6,796,374 people who played at least monthly (again, likely higher too).
The question becomes how many players are still playing pre-3.x D&D after 1999, when the national survey was conducted? The US population in 2000 was 281,421,906, so there should have been 16,885,314 folks who'd ever played rpgs around (using the 6% figure sans caveats), and 8,442,657 active monthly+ gamers. While TSR's market share had fallen during those darkest years just before WotC bought them, they still commanded around 60% of the market, so there should have been 5,065,594 folks who had ever played D&D around, and 2,532,797 or so active gamers playing D&D at least monthly.
How many of those 2.5 million active players never converted to 3.x, or converted and switched back? That's much harder to guesstimate, and will have to wait for a night when I have a little more time on my hands than is left in this evening
I haven't gone back to pull out the publisher circulation statements for Dragon yet, but they're about the only other way that I can think, offhand to get a good sense of the market, other than print run figures, which we don't have a lot of info on (see the Acaeum @ http://www.acaeum.com/library/printrun.html):
