D&D Accounts For More Than 60 Percent Of Roll20 Games
D&D is bigger than ever, according to the latest data gathered from Roll20’s, D&D accounts for more than 60% of their users–these insights and more inside.
Roll20 is one of the most popular online Virtual Tabletop platforms, boasting more than 100 million total hours of play over the last Quarter. And, according to the latest report from the Orr Group, most of that gameplay has been Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. But, D&D isn’t the only standout game, and in the report, you can get a good sense of who’s playing what. Especially with more people than ever playing RPGs online.
More than five million users are on Roll20 now (and the number will likely keep growing over the next few years), and according to the numbers, around three million of them are playing D&D 5th Edition. Let’s take a look at how it all shakes out.
Here we can see that more than 50% of all games are D&D 5th Edition. When we talk about how D&D is the giant of the industry, this is it. If you look at the systems here, D&D 5E and D&D 3.5 (and depending on your perspective, Pathfinder as well), most of Roll20 is… uh… rolling d20s. D&D 5th Edition alone accounts for more than the rest of the top ten games on the system put together. With room for everything else left lumped in. It’s a massive difference. Just look at this breakdown of Accounts playing a given game system:
Almost 60% of Roll20’s userbase are playing D&D. Just taking 5th Edition, that’s almost three million users, compared to the next biggest single game, Call of Cthulhu, which has only 361,000 users. D&D has eight times as many users–which doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re only playing D&D. Odds are good there’s a heavy amount of crossover here. But it goes to show just how much of a behemoth the game is.
But in the shadow of the colossus, there’s a ton of movement happening. Pathfinder is still proving to be wildly more popular than Pathfinder 2nd Edition, boasting about 3 times as many players. Games Powered by the Apocalypse are doing particularly well, with Monster of the Week garnering enough of an audience to have its own category. The fact that it’s distinct is a testament to the power of a popular AP show.
Evil Hat is on record talking about how fast the game started selling after The Adventure Zone took the system up. And Critical Role, which featured one of the most popular Call of Cthulhu playthroughs online, can doubtless be seen reflected in CoC’s growth. And taking all PbtA games into account, including Monster of the Week, Dungeon World, and Apocalypse World, they outperform Starfindder. If you include Blades in the Dark (which is the PbtA hack that launched its own genre), the PbtA umbrella outstrips even Warhammer and World of Darkness.
But what’s particularly exciting is how fast sci-fi and space games are growing.
Tomenta, a Portuguese fantasy RPG, saw significant growth at 26.32%. inSANe, a Japanese language multi-setting horror RPG, saw a spike, too, with an increase at 17.51%. LANCER, the tactical mecha RPG, continues to put in impressive numbers, with a growth of 14.06%. LANCER enjoyed similar growth last quarter, too, and we expect to see it continue to climb up the charts.
You can find a full list of all games over at Roll20’s blog, if you want to see how your favorite system stacks up.
What games have you been playing online in the last few months?
