Fraction of total games played by system reports?

[HywelPhillips]

Hi Doug and Gang,

For a while various VTTs posted stats on what fraction of games played used various different TTRPG systems. I used to find this very interesting not just in terms of tracking the impact of new systems or assessing JUST how much of a behemoth 5E was, but also in terms of understanding the financial challenges of bringing smaller systems onto VTT platforms.

Everyone seems to have stopped posting these for some reason. Is it commercially sensitive or covered by NDA or was it just a lot of work and everyone's too busy?

I don't even know if it is possible to track usage on FGU this way, but I'd be very interested to know what the numbers look like now, start of 2024, compared with say end of 2022. Has the OGL debacle ACTUALLY led to a diversification in play? Anecdotally my two regular groups have switched from 5E to SWADE, partially because of the OGL fiasco, partially from 5E fatigue, partially because the latest WOTC 5E releases have not appealed to us at all. I'd love to know if that's part of an actual pattern. Are the OSR games pickup up support? Is everyone going to Pathfinder 2E?

Data! As a scientist, you gotta love data!

:)

Cheers, Hywel Phillips

[anstett]

I do wonder what metric to use though?

Number of hours played - how do you measure that? I have FG up 24/7 for my players to log in during the week between live sessions. Would that be 1 session? Or 150+ hours? For which ruleset would count?

Or downloads on the store and forge? Number of downloads? Or number of purchases? or purchases per available by ruleset? Ruleset X only has 3 modules available but all three are purchased by everyone using the set, Ruleset D has 200 modules available and only 20% of them are ever purchased? Or just forum posts on a ruleset?

I think that (at least I hope) that Smiteworks has that data and looks over it to see what rulesets to support etc.

I do not expect that they would share anything but very broad brush strokes.

"Other than 5th Edition D&D these are the popular items."

[Zacchaeus]

This is the last one published https://www.fantasygrounds.com/reports/2020Q4/

[Morenu]

I would love to see more of these

[Nylanfs]

Yay! We want graphporn! :)

Note: I also find the EVE economic reports fascinating. :)

[HywelPhillips]

Thank Zaccheus, those are the ones I was thinking of.

Would love to see some more recent ones!

Censor them by % rather than absolute number of sessions if there's a comparison you don't want out there of the pandemic peak with current levels :) Interesting though that would be. For me personally moving my gaming online during the pandemic has been a permanent shift, allowing me two games per week in addition to the roleplaying in person once a month I was managing before the pandemic. For sure a lot of groups will have shifted online then shifted back again, I wonder how many people got converted and have stayed? But I understand that's commercially sensitive.

Cheers, Hywel