The Roll20 Team
It’s time for another round of The Orr Group Industry Report! We’ve studied the data to figure out what people have been playing over the last three months, and offer some guesses at why. Here’s a brief overview:
This quarter marks our biggest yet Player sample size, by far! At the risk of tooting our own horns, we think this is because we’ve improved the profile creation process for players, prompting them more efficiently to report what they want to play. We’re thrilled about this because we REALLY WANT TO KNOW. We like you guys.
Once again, 5th Edition is widening the gap as the most popular D&D option. 4th Edition activity decreased slightly, but the biggest change is that 3.5 Edition players seem to be migrating to 5E. This is a continuation of a shift we noticed in Q3, so it will be interesting to see if the trend continues in 2016, especially after this week’s release of the SRD.
Here’s the full set of numbers from the last quarter of 2015:
Stars Without Number continues to climb the charts, hopping over _FATE _since Q3. We were also interested to see that, despite the big news that Paradox Interactive bought White Wolf from CCP in November, this hasn’t affected World of Darkness game activity on Roll20. Also, the latest season of _Yogsquest _by popular steamers Yogscast caused activity to double since Q3.
We added some new titles to the report this quarter, which were pulled from the Other Games umbrella section when we noticed an increase in character sheet usage during Q3. The recent release of the Fantasy AGE ruleset saw a nice pop of players, and Fallout 4’s popularity led to more people playing the _Fallout _RPG.
We also recently implemented Transifex to improve the accessibility of games and character sheets for non-English users. We were thrilled to see that, as a result, there’s been an increase in foreign-language games. We noticed in Q3 that players were using character sheets for two particular games,_ Le Donjon de Naheulbeuk_ and_ Das Schwarze Auge_, so we added them to the report as well. This is an ongoing process and we’ll keep looking for ways to bring games to international players.
A Quick Note About The Orr Group Industry Report:
We pull our data from two locations within Roll20 member profiles. Player numbers are drawn from the “Enjoys Playing” and “Seeks Group For” sections, while Game numbers come from the “My Campaigns” section. Our percentages can total more than 100%, particularly Player numbers, since each player will list their interest in multiple games. The report is meant to be a representative sample, and the game listings are curated by Roll20 staff. For more details about how our report works, you can always look back at our in-depth explanation.
