Game popularity

Interesting video from Professor Dungeon Master.

First off; the caveats. Ranking of number of games at Gen Con is a dubious proxy for popularity at home tables in general. It's a proxy, but is it a good, close one? I don't know. That said, it's still an interesting thing in its own right anyway. A few comments that I thought were interesting:

First, I was immediately struck by the fact that a lot of Free League games hit the top 20, albeit at the lower levels. These guys are for real. I'm hearing more and more about their games, of course, and everyone raves about their production quality—although perspectives seem to be mixed on the quality of the actual game mechanics and stuff like that. I think that they are more coffee table books; people buy them to read them and look at the art, and because they look good on their shelf or on their table, but people rarely play them. I'd guess. With some possible exceptions, like their fantasy games, maybe. Of course, they probably are very eager to dip their toes into playing at conventions, which explains their positioning here. I'm not 100% sure that the Borg games really qualify; they're published by Free League, but not designed by them. 

Second, the difference between the 20th and the 1st is ridiculous. When the 20th place game has events in the 20s and the 1st place game has events over 1,000, then honestly, 20 is probably too many places. We're already in the long tail.

Third, Tales of the Valiant. I'm sure that they were hoping to be to 5th edition what Pathfinder 1e was to 3e and 4e, but it looks like they didn't manage it for whatever reason. Sounds like last year they were pretty popular, but they lost a lot of audience in the meantime. I wonder if the problem is that the game isn't great, or more that it just isn't necessary? Plus, the "OGL scandal" was a big deal on YouTube and to the perennially online, and of course to third party publishers... but did anyone else ever care? Like at all? Did most people even know about it? There's a bubble around online discussions, and people don't really care about what people are doing with stuff like the OGL, for the most part.

Although I do think that there were a lot of popular 3pp, or at least popular enough. I don't want to suggest that it was nothing, but it wasn't the catastrophe that people online pretended like it was. Ergo, the perceived need for Tales of the Valiant was a case of perception bias, and the demand for something like it was over-estimated by Kobold Press. At least, that's my opinion, uninformed though it clearly is.

Fourth, Call of Cthulhu is going really strong. Holy cow. I think that's the kind of game that gets played more at conventions and other one shots than in ongoing campaigns at home, so it probably punches a little above its weight, but that's still impressive.

Fifth, I think it's curious that he claims that ShadowDark is more popular than the rest of the OSR put together even though many people exclude it from the OSR. I've had opinions on the OSR and what is and isn't the OSR, of course, but if you think of the OSR primarily as "a scene" then ShadowDark absolutely is part of the scene, and probably overshadows at this point the scene. After all, I believe that you can use your B/X, AD&D or other old school modules and products with ShadowDark without much if any conversion needed. ShadowDark is at least OSR adjacent, and it treads the same territory as the OSR, and because it actually utilizes the past 40 or so years of game design improvements to do the same thing in a very familiar way, but better... well it's not surprising that it's kind of settled as the most popular iteration of that "scene" now. "The OSR is dead" has been claimed many times before, but I kind of wonder now if it isn't kinda sorta true, if ShadowDark, and even Mork Borg are many times more popular (by Professor DM's metric) than anything else in the scene, and both attract the same players basically for the same reasons, and they've really kind of abandoned the old D&D game play for an actual newer, improved iteration of the rules that is better than the old ones ever were. You could make the case that in the long run, 3e, 4e and even 5e weren't necessarily improvements on the old school D&D rules; hence the strong pull to go back to older rules and retro-clones. But now, ShadowDark actually treads the same territory and actually does so in an improved way? It's like it killed the OSR and is now standing in its place.

To back up this interpretation, Professor DungeonMaster himself not too long ago announced that his own game Deathbringer, which he's been talking about being in development for some time, and is expected to come out sometime in 2026, is now going to be a ShadowDark game. It can be used with ShadowDark, but can also be used instead of ShadowDark; basically it'll be like the comparison between Savage Worlds + Fantasy Supplement vs Savage Worlds Pathfinder. Completely stand-alone, but also completely compatible with ShadowDark. That may well be boosting the signal. I think Deathbringer will be fairly popular too, and especially so if ShadowDarkers can use it without conversion. More and more I'm seeing OSR products and even producers who used to make 5e products, explicitly targeting their products to ShadowDark. 

I've noticed that even on reddit, ShadowDark seems to be talked about a lot on the OSR subreddit. As much as any other game, if not more. I think he's on to something that the OSR has... kinda...been overtaken by ShadowDark. It just does the same niche of gaming better. 

Finally, where is Green Ronin? The AGE system? Mutants & Masterminds, etc? I'm not a huge fan of their systems from what I know of them, but I thought they were a relatively big player in the market, with big licenses and all that. Clearly not, if even the Alien RPG is outperforming them in terms of official events. I don't know what to think of their "fall from grace" if that's indeed what has happened to them. I also think its curious that they have not embraced 5e much at all, other than adapting a handful of their most popular past products to 5e (Book of Fiends, for example) but they otherwise seem to have spent more time embracing Pathfinder, even writing a full Adventure Path set in Freeport there; the existence of which prompted my Freeport Trawl. 

Seems like there would be a market for Freeport or Freeport-like products, but all of them are very aged and work with systems that are mostly out of print and outdated. Yet Pirate Borg was a hugely popular game at Gen Con. I dunno. Maybe they're just tired, or are terrible marketers, or have had to go get day jobs and their company isn't a big deal anymore. Seems like they're missing an opportunity here.