Marketing agency Dashing Media runs a site for geeks called FandomSpot, which covers the same sort of thing as Geek Native. The difference? They’ve got money to spend and have wisely run a survey to benchmark the impact of the D&D OGL crisis. Geek Native has cool readers like you, so we win, but let us look at the survey data.
47% of D&D players have sworn they’ll never spend money on D&D again. The wording is important because D&D and 5e are different. We don’t know whether these (nearly) 1:2 of people would use third-party 5e content, games and supplements from the very publishers hit by the proposed changes to the OGL, but we have other stats from FandomSpot.
The survey looked at 4,000 tabletop RPGers worldwide, so it’s chunky. And there is a potentially scary thing for Wizards of the Coast and their corporate overlords, Hasbro.
12%, that’s more than one in ten, of our 4,000 RPGers have they would stop using D&D entirely, including putting away the D&D stuff they already have bought.
Where are some of these ex-D&Ders going? 53% said they’re going elsewhere to competitors like Pathfinder and Kobold Press, mentioned often. FandomSpot’s survey also surfaced as Powered by the Apocalypse games as a strong alternative.
There have been significant changes to the plans for D&D in the last hours, likely before FandomSpot’s survey responders knew about it. Wizards of the Coast have abandoned most of their changes but will give the D&D mechanics to a Creative Commons license.
Is that enough?
FandomSpot’s survey asked those gamers who said they’d never play a WotC-created system again what they would do if WotC did work with third-party publishers through a new license. 78% said they would still refuse and use a competitor’s product instead.
So, we have our benchmark.
We can see whether those 12% and 78% stats hold up and whether there’s any movement on the 47% who said they wouldn’t buy any D&D again. Amazon says the RPG team from Wizards’ next release is Keys from the Golden Vault. We’ll have to see how well that adventure book sells.
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