Online privacy, security and internet freedom company VPNOverview has kindly provided Geek Native with insight on D&D Beyond and some trend data on aggregated ‘D&D apps’.
We’re doing the split out of necessity. We can be specific with D&D Beyond only to a point because in the world of apps there needs to be a tremendous amount of traffic for it to be significant and measurable to a third-party analysis tool.
D&D Beyond has an Android app and an iOS one.
The data we can be specific on suggests D&D Beyond has had 607k downloads in the past six months. VPNOverview reports 226.89K daily users in the same period.
Hopefully, we can enter that as a benchmark now and re-check the figures in 6 months. It’ll get fascinating when One D&D rolls out and WotC’s digital push grows, so comparing this figure with a snapshot in February 2024 will be telling!
If we expand our analysis to look at a category I’m going to call ‘Trust-us-this-is-strongly-D&D-flavoured’ in Android, we see a strong trend. The catch? It didn’t start with the OGL backlash. It started before.
| Month | Change in Downloads |
|---|---|
| October | Baseline |
| November | Down 26.30% |
| December | Down 27.54% |
| January | Down 12.23% |
As you can tell, I’m being both cautious about how we present the data and how accurate any third-party tool is. That’s not because I think the data here is bull, but because I know Geek Native has a very data-savvy audience (you), and there’s a tight space between transparency of process and data sensitivity.
We also know from the Hasbro earnings call yesterday that together D&D Beyond, Hasbro Pulse and Magic Secret Lair grew 15%. D&D Beyond users have grown 20% since Wizards bought it from Fandom.
However, Hasbro boss and former D&D supremo said ‘some subscription cancellations’ when challenged by the Bank of America. Cocks also said;
We’re in contact with the people who canceled. And, you know, in general, what we’re finding is a lot of them are very open to restarting their subscriptions.”
Geek Native has not been able to find anyone who did cancel and who has been subsequently contacted by Wizards of the Coast. If you’ve had a message, I’d love to see it.
Apps people most want off their phones
In related, more whimsical news, VPNOverview have also been able to reveal which apps Americans most want rid of, and they’re not games.
People want off social media, at least in the States. It was a surprise to me to see Instagram at the head of the hall of shame. There’s more people searching for ways to delete Spotify than Tiktok which is also weird, I think.
The first gaming app to make the list is Discord, which ranks in position 12. Twitch is 14th, PlayStation i 15 and then Xbox in 19. Grindr, though, is in 20th, so perhaps people are hooking up and no longer need to spend so much time on social media or their gaming consoles.
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