"Market research?" Topic

Does anyone know if there has been any market research done regarding the numbers of wargamers all genres and periods world wide?
I've tried google and done a search here but haven't turned up anything.
Any help is appreciated.
Thanx

Does anyone know if there has been any market research done regarding the numbers of wargamers all genres and periods world wide?

That would be impossible since there is no method of contacting or identifying all wargamers.

You can count me in!

Margard wrote:

That would be impossible since there is no method of contacting or identifying all wargamers.

Even defining what a "wargamer" is could prove to be a problem.

Yes, but I forget the numbers involved. There are some recognised multipliers for extrapolating from shop footfall, magazine sales and club membership figures to probable total numbers (but nothing that would pass the TMP scorn test I'm afraid)

Phil

42 is the answer

Does anyone know if there has been any market research done regarding the numbers of wargamers all genres and periods world wide?

You might find something somewhere under hobby or pastime survey data. It would have to be research done with a fairly narrow focus. Perhaps something sponsored by a hobby industry trade association? Even there, though, I doubt we're a big or well recognized enough niche to warrant a line item of our own. Compared to, say, model railroads ,or plastic models, or R/C planes, or even board games, we're hardly noticable (GW notwithstanding).

Doug

your answer: Not enough to justify market research!

True market research would just dash the hopes of dreams of every garage casting company in the world…..

You can do a sampling of the general population, say 1000 males chosen at random, and then ask them if they're war gamers. Pollsters do this sort of statistical sampling al the time. You might get one person, and thus be able to guesstimate that 0.1% of the male population is wargamers, etc.

Well, Battlefront have admitted that they printed 26 tonnes of their new V3 mini rule book. Each book weighs nearly 500g so my calculations suggest that 50-60,000 copies of the rules. That is apparently one for every copy of the V2 hardback book.

Osprey some time back made an announcement that they had sold over 250,000 books from the Field of Glory range (that is rules plus supplements).

There is no doubt some crossover between the two but it is not massive so just looking at FoW plus FoG you have possibly 80,000 people. There are plenty of wargamers who do not own either game, the question is how many.

If I had to make an educated guess I might say that worldwide there are between 250,000 and 500,000 historical wargamers and I have no idea how many fantasy gamers there are in addition. There is not a lot of crossover between Fantasy and Historical AFAIK.

42 is the answer

No no…you forgot one choked on Pizza last week when he rolled two snake eyes.

41 is the correct answer.

Watch your sampling frame A Special Loathing for Cherubs. That projection on a population is only on to those that may have been selected for the sample.

And sexist as well. Though smaller there are female wargamers.

This is very true. Female wargamers do tend to be smaller.

ROFL Shredder!
Regardingg the 1000. There are plenty of Psych grads that would paper that as a statistically significant result.

Bill the cat got it right. There aren't enough gamers in the world to justify the cost of the search. Someone has to pay for these things (unless it's very unscientific like counting up subscriptions to game-zines. No one does it because there's no money in it.

I've heard various figures bandied about in the past from 10,000 to 1,000,000 but I suspect its far less than 10,000.

Back when you could believe the attendence figures for the HMGS shows, (you can't now-- it's been established they see dead people) that was about 3,000. That's in the heaviest demographic in the world. After that who knows? Even if you assume a 1 to 3 ratio, that's only about 12,000 gamers world wide. I suspect it's a little more than that, but not much.

Enough to sustain several hundred GW stores worldwide, including 3 in my fairly small city of 1.3 million. I'm guessing that means several thousand in this city alone.