But Who Would Get Pie, If Pie There Were?
And now that we've done all that skull sweat for the market as a whole, we once more ignore 93 to 96 percent of it, and concentrate on the RPG market, such as it is. Normally, we can at least assume that the top five companies in the C&GR RPG sales derby are roughly identical to the top five companies in actual RPG sales, but that presumption gets harder and harder to justify outside the perennial Big Two. This is likely a result of the drastically shrunken market - the statistical variation in C&GR surveys is now probably greater, in some cases, than the actual results. In other words, if we have a 5% margin of error in the survey (a laughably small assumption), we can no longer trust any market share numbers below 5%, because they are now damped out in statistical noise. With that said, Wizards of the Coast is incontrovertibly the number one in the segment, as always; C&GR chalks up 53% of the core hobby RPG market to the home of Dungeons & Dragons, (up from last year's reported 43%) which still chugs along despite a 35% drop in C&GR-reported sales numbers. White Wolf is still number two with 19% of the market (down a touch from last year's 22%), although their sales curve is, if anything, even worse than D&D -- C&GR reports monthly World of Darkness sales down 61% over 2004!
All else is noise. C&GR puts FanPro at number three, with 3.66% of the market (around what they ascribed to it last year); with no ShadowRun 4th releases except the core book, ICv2 says the game "died a dog's death" in 2005 and leaves it out of contention. ICv2 gives third place to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and fourth to Green Ronin releases in general; C&GR lists Green Ronin as fifth, and gives them 2.5% of the market. However, the C&GR survey lists WFRP as a "Black Industries" product, not a Green Ronin one - if you combine them, I feel secure in giving Green Ronin a unified third place crown, and something in the neighborhood of 3.5% of the market. (I think FanPro is closer to fifth or sixth.) Fourth place in C&GR terms is Steve Jackson Games, with less than 3% of the market (down from their GURPS Fourth Edition-driven third place, 5% market share ranking in 2004); likely looking at the relatively thin releases for GURPS, the game gets only as high as seventh place in the ICv2 rankings. ICv2 charts Mongoose at fifth and Margaret Weis Productions' Serenity RPG at sixth place; C&GR lists a more believable Palladium at sixth and a little over two percent of the market. (ICv2 lists Rifts at tenth place.) For my money, it's not likely that there's much daylight between Steve Jackson, Palladium, Mongoose, and FanPro in the generic "fourth place" slot around 2%, and I'd toss Hero, Troll Lord, Privateer, Goodman Games, Margaret Weis, and AEG down around the "fifth place slot" and 1% or so each. With AEG seemingly out of the running in RPGs for a while, I'd say Green Ronin is probably the new third place holder as long as they can keep riding the Black Library, unless Steve Jackson or Palladium come roaring back.
(Inte lika bra som en ren världsbok, men mycket bättre än regelböcker. Och så är ju Jorges så mysig.)
