D&D And Cthulhu Top The RPG Charts
The numbers are in, and to nobody’s surprise, Dungeons & Dragons is still #1, but Call of Cthulhu has surged to 2nd place among RPGs.
We all know that when it comes to RPGs, Dungeons & Dragons is the most popular one out there–but today we have an opportunity to see just how big it is, compared to other games. Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds, both very popular virtual tabletop platforms with millions of users between them, have released their numbers, giving us a kind of ‘temperature of the community’ at large.
That is to say, they’ve shown us what games folks are playing, and can give us a rough idea of how many people are playing each game. It’s not a perfect example, because it only measures the games that are available on these platforms, and there’s no way to measure what people are playing at home, but it’s still a fairly large sample size that gives you a measure of the wind.
And though the winds are always blowing D&Dward, it seems that Call of Cthulhu is locking in a fairly solid 2nd place these days.
First up, the Orr Group Industry Report from Roll20. This is the quarterly analysis of Roll20’s more than 8 million users, playing a total of 110 million games between them. The numbers show how much gaming has moved online in the time of Covid–according to the Orr Group report, more than 390 million hours were played on Roll20 alone in 2020. And while it’s a bittersweet milestone to hit, as Roll20 acknowledges the circumstances that led to this rapid growth, Roll20 has really been carving out space, not just for the big names, but to promote some of the up and coming Indie games that are doing some innovative work in the RPG space.
Which is why it’s exciting to see so much growth overall for the hobby. Let’s take a look at the numbers:
As you can see, D&D 5E remains the biggest and baddest RPG in the room. With more than half of Roll20’s 110 million games, and almost 60% of all accounts engaged with D&D. That’s a massive lead on the rest of the industry. D&D takes up more than the rest of the top contenders on the list put together. And that’s not even including D&D 3.5.
But Call of Cthulhu has carved out a fairly significant niche for itself, accounting for more than 10% of campaigns, spread out among only 6% of the account, showing a dedicated gaming base. We recently learned that Call of Cthulhu is the most popular RPG in Japan, so perhaps we’ll see these numbers growing more and more over the years.
Other notable growth has been seen in Cyberpunk Red/2020, as well as the Year Zero Engine (which powers Tales from the Loop and the Alien RPG), as well as a surprising growth in some of the larger indie games like Agon and Scum and Villainy. It’ll be neat to see how the numbers from this year move after experiments like Roll20’s Indie RPG showcase.
Now let’s look over at Fantasy Grounds, where D&D’s reign is even more supreme.
There, as you see, D&D 5th Edition accounts for more than 70% of all games played through 2020 Q4. That’s so much that the next three are Pathfinder and Pathfinder 2, followed by Other, which is all the rest of the games there.
Just to reinforce though how much D&D dominates, Fantasy Grounds ran the top systems excluding D&D 5th Edition, and the top three games?
You guessed it, more D&D. 2nd Edition, 3.5 Edition, and 4th Edition, surprisingly, followed once again by Call of Cthulhu.
What does this all mean? Well, while the rest of the industry is growing strong, and while there are still plenty of new games out there (seriously, check out Itch.io some time for some of the most creative RPGs you’ll find), there’s a long, long way to go before anything can peek it’s head out from D&D’s shadow.
Happy Adventuring!
