Most Popluar / Successful RPGs

[EccentricCircle]

I was recently having a discussion with a friend about which games we'd played recently, and which seemed to be the most popular in the groups we frequent.

We noted that there seem to be a few RPG systems (Generally D&D, Star Wars, and Call of Cthulhu) which always seem to be pitched and run at the clubs we have been involved in over the years. Clubs and gaming groups then tend to have their own favourites, which get run more often than not, and then others which crop up infrequently.

We speculated that it might be interesting to do a wider survey and see if the same patterns crop up at most clubs, or just the small sample of British groups we've had personal experience with.

In pondering this further i'm sure that I've seen some sort of "state of the RPG" industry report, which indicated something along these lines. I can't recall whether this was a list of which games were selling best, or a survey into what was being played. I also can't remember what organisation was behind it. Now google is failing me to figure out what this was.

So, does anyone know of a definitive-ish list into which games are the most "successful" (by whatever metric...).

Failing that: Are you involved with an RPG club, if so what games have been pitched in the last six months, and which ran? Also what country are you based in, as I suspect their might be regional differences.

[Mordar]

I think it will be an interesting project. There are soooo many things to consider, such as Popularity as relates to:

• Longevity
• Theme/Genre
• Revenue versus Participants
• Club/Store Play versus Home Play
• Generic versus Specific

Just a few comments:

Longevity: Call of C'thulhu is a big name, but never seemed to be big in sales...yet is now on its 7th edition. In an area-under-the-curve sense, CoC sales probably performs very well compared to a peak sales/play assessment (while D&D performs well on both metrics)

Theme: What role does Fantasy vs. Scifi vs. Supers vs. etc play in the assessment? Does Fantasy dominate to the degree that we might think?

Revenue/participants: While some games might be big in the "everyone buys 20 books to play" others might be more in line with "1 book for players, 1 book for GMs"...so the revenue for one is much higher per participant. How does that factor into things? And is it accurate that the games with 30 books have 30 books because they are more successful/popular...or are they more successful because printing more books makes more money (if you have the capital).

Club/Store vs Home Play: Some games are much less suited to the public or drop in nature of club/store play...so how can that be assessed? Some player demographicss may be far more prevalent in home games than club/store games as well...how do they skew the metrics?

Generic/Specific: Games like Savage Worlds, Rifts and GURPS had/have broad appeal due in some part to the wide array of genres that could be played using a single consolidated or generic system. IN effect the can piggyback on the popularity of other settings/rule sets without requiring learning the specifics of that ruleset. Is it fair to compare GURPS as a whole to say Villains and Vigilantes? Or should only the GURPS Supers material be compared to V&V?

I would love to see a well done project/paper/report on the topic...

- M

[erikun]

Designers & Dragons is a pretty good four-part book series going over the major RPG publishers, ranging roughly from 1970 to 2010. It's highly U.S.-centric, so it probably won't cover some major European RPGs (of which there are some very popular ones) or ones you'd find in Japan, but it does a good job of covering nearly all the major publishers and a lot of the important RPGs that have been released.

As for a list off-the-cuff, I'd say that D&D and now Pathfinder/Paizo are probably the biggest ones. Shadowrun has always had a fairly major following, enough that it's almost always mentioned as an option once a group starts expanding outside D&D. Fate in various forms as been around for awhile and has a lot of momentum currently with Fate Core. Star Wars regularly crops up but that seems mostly due to the highly recognizable IP attached to it; the systems tend to vary wildly and different "editions" aren't really related to one another.

World of Darkness/Vampire and GURPS are two old major ones which I don't really see much of anymore these days. There was also stuff like Tri-Stat, Big Eyes Small Mouth, True20, and a lot of other "generic" systems from the early 2000s which I don't really see anything about anymore. (I wonder if Mutants & Masterminds is still popular.) There are older ones like Traveller or Runequest which were apparently large, but only rarely show up. You have new systems like Savage Worlds which seem like they're getting a bunch of material but I don't ever see anybody looking to play or excited to pick up Savage Worlds.

[Mechalich]

As for a list off-the-cuff, I'd say that D&D and now Pathfinder/Paizo are probably the biggest ones. Shadowrun has always had a fairly major following, enough that it's almost always mentioned as an option once a group starts expanding outside D&D. Fate in various forms as been around for awhile and has a lot of momentum currently with Fate Core. Star Wars regularly crops up but that seems mostly due to the highly recognizable IP attached to it; the systems tend to vary wildly and different "editions" aren't really related to one another.

World of Darkness/Vampire and GURPS are two old major ones which I don't really see much of anymore these days. There was also stuff like Tri-Stat, Big Eyes Small Mouth, True20, and a lot of other "generic" systems from the early 2000s which I don't really see anything about anymore. (I wonder if Mutants & Masterminds is still popular.) There are older ones like Traveller or Runequest which were apparently large, but only rarely show up. You have new systems like Savage Worlds which seem like they're getting a bunch of material but I don't ever see anybody looking to play or excited to pick up Savage Worlds.

D&D was the biggest player in the market from it's inception until the TSR went bankrupt in the late 1990s, at which point it was briefly overtaken by WW - representing the collective oWoD games. D&D retook the lead when WotC bought the IP and published 3e. WW retained a great deal of subsidiary market share anyway through the mid-2000s when then foolishly destroyed the oWoD and launched the almost immediately failing nWoD which led to their bankruptcy and sale shortly thereafter and prolonged existence as a zombie company under Onyx Path's dubious umbrella before the recent purchase by Paradox Games. Everyone else has always been a comparative bit player in the TTRPG market - which is why Star Wars remains a consistently high-selling game purely on the strength of its associated IP. D&D lost significant popularity due to the abject failure of 4e which allowed Paizo to produce Pathfinder and steal a whole bunch of market share that had previously belonged to D&D. D&D has regained some measure of strength with the production of 5e but it is impossible to know how much because the current team at WotC is not being honest about sales numbers.

Being a small player doesn't mean you can't have a long-running market. RPG books are not expensive to produce and with the advent of kickstarter and modern electronic publishing tools can be made on a shoestring with exactly zero initial investment. Chaosium has long run the production of Call of Cthulhu in this fashion (which it has an advantage in doing because all the IP is in the public domain). There are also a number of games that are sustained by their connection to IPs in a gaming related area, such as various Warhammer 40K RPGs and L5R. Heck, even GURPS is functionally subsidized by the money Steve Jackson Games makes producing party games like Munchkin.

In general, TTRPGs were at their strongest in the early 2000s. The production of 3.5 concurrent with the big Time of Judgment oWoD closeout might well be the high water mark. The hobby has weakened subsequently due to a variety of factors such as the increased viability of MMORPGs (WoW came out in 2004), a vast profusion and expansion of the boardgame/cardgame market, and other factors.