Category Archives: Market Research

The Platform Wars The current streaming landscape is dominated by a few major players, but with interesting nuances in who uses them. According to a recent Researchscape survey of 1,023 U.S. adults, YouTube Music leads overall usage at 38%, followed closely by Spotify at 36%, while Amazon Music rounds out the top three at 30%. However, raw usage numbers tell only part of the story. When it comes to paid subscriptions, the picture shifts dramatically. SiriusXM, despite having lower overall usage (15%), boasts an impressive 99% paid subscription rate among […]

We asked U.S. adults if they’d ever engaged in game design: 31% had, though this was often just adding house rules (15% of all adults). The most widely created new games were, with multiple responses permitted, board games (10%), card games (also 10%), RPGs (6%), video games (5%), mobile games (also 5%), interactive fiction (2%), and gamebooks (also 2%). Younger generations are more likely to create games than older generations: 22% of Gen Z have made their own house rules, compared to just 8% of Baby Boomers; 16% of Gen […]

April is National Poetry Month, but few Americans name any contemporary poets when asked what poets they can think of and who their favorite poet is. In fact, it’s a Dead Poets Society for the Top 35 poets, all of whom are deceased. Four out of ten Americans name Edgar Allan Poe, making him the most famous poet by far. In fact, 29% of respondents named him first, and 18% said he was their favorite poet. A distant second is the Bard. William Shakespeare was named by two out of […]

From 2016 to 2020, I belonged to a board game group which typically played a new game every week. Meanwhile, my parents still play Scrabble every day, sometimes twice a day. Two very different extremes. My parents are in good company. In a newsmaker survey of 1,059 U.S. adults, 54% of adults would prefer to play a board game that they had played before, while just 16% would prefer to play a board game new to them (20% have no preference, and 10% don’t play board games). While the 16% who prefer […]

Back in June, Ariel Edwards-Levy shared a 1940 Gallup poll, presumably conducted face-to-face, about what games Americans played in the past year. I thought it would be fun to re-run that question and see how things have changed. Here’s the most played of these games today, sorted in descending order by 2023 results. And here’s those same findings sorted by the biggest change (absolute value). The average of these games was played by 25% of Americans in 1940, and by 28% in 2023. Key changes— As we’ve written elsewhere, mobile […]

About one out of four Americans (24%) have ever read any gamebooks (“such as Choose Your Own Adventure, Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf, or solitaire RPG adventures such as the Tunnels & Trolls series”), up from 20% in 2019. Here are the most common themes people mentioned when describing their experiences— Slightly more Americans (28%) have ever “played any text adventures or interactive fiction games on a computer, tablet or smartphone, such as Choice of Games, Infocom, or Twine games.” This is also up from 20% in 2019. Reading of gamebooks […]

Axis & Allies, Diplomacy, Robo Rally, and Squad Leader will be moving from Avalon Hill to Renegade Game Studios, which will also be developing “new versions of Risk themed around fan-favorite Hasbro brands G.I. JOE, Transformers, and Power Rangers.” In addition, “fans will also see new printings of staples for the line as well as the return of some long out-of-print editions.” In a survey of U.S. adults who have ever played board games, four times as many had played Risk as had played Axis & Allies (42% to 11%). […]

Researchscape conducted a newsmaker survey of 1,074 U.S. adults to develop an overview of game-playing. The survey was fielded from April 22 to 24, 2022. The responses were weighted to be representative of the overall U.S. population by the following variables: state and region, gender, age, race and ethnicity, household income, ideology, and registered voter status. Videogames have long had niche appeal, but mobile games have democratized the reach of computer games. In fact, mobile games are now played by as many people as card games: 88% of U.S. adults […]

In my recent survey, I funneled respondents into one of four areas, based on the role-playing games (RPGs) they played: Dungeon World – These respondents got detailed questions about a revised edition of DW. Other PbtA (Powered by the Apocalypse) games – They were asked two open-ended questions about their likes and dislikes (the subject of this post). Other TTRPGs (drawn from the Top 10 list at Obsidian Portal) – Likes and dislikes about RPGs in general. No TTRPGs – They were skipped to the demographic questions. Key attractions of […]