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Board Game Breakfast Segment #6: How Many Gamers Are There? (Extended)
Hello, Dice Tower viewers. Chaz Marler from the Pair Of Dice Paradise board game podcast here welcoming you to part six in my no longer numbered series on running a gaming group. Today’s topic: How Many Gamers Are There? (Spoiler: I dunno.)
A wise man once asked, “who are the people in your neighborhood? The people that you meet each day?” It’s a question I found myself asking when I started my gaming group, because I had no idea of how many members to expect. But, alas, my Google searches for this data proved fruitless, and I went in with no clue how many gamers may be out there in my city, looking for other gamers. I guess, in order to put such an estimate together, you’d need to have some strange combination of a love of board games, access to a media outlet and questionable time management skills. Hey, that’s me! The complete package.
So, I set out to find a way to predict how big a gaming group could be. Now, before I go further, a disclaimer. My research was completely unscientific. But, here’s what I did: I started with a list of randomly-selected US cities, with populations ranging from 30,000 to 800,000 people. Then, I searched meetup.com for board game groups in each one. It was a reeeally fun weekend. Based on the size of the largest board game meetup group in each area, I calculated each city’s estimated gamer population.
Surprisingly, there actually seemed to be a pattern.
In my results, gamers made up, on average, 0.16% of the people in your neighborhood. That means, if you multiply your city’s population by .0016, you may get a rough estimate of the number of potential gamers. At least, an estimate of how many gamers are likely to join a board game group on meetup.com.
It should be noted that other factors affected the estimated gamer population too, such as the age of the meetup group, the frequency of events, and the city’s population density.
Does the 0.16% range match what you see in your home town? I’d be interested in seeing how the size of your group compares. In the meantime, I’m going to go relax with a game that uses NO MATH. Ooh, I hear Power Grid is good.
A wise man once asked, “who are the people in your neighborhood? The people that you meet each day?” It’s a question I found myself asking when I started my gaming group, because I had no idea of how many members to expect. But, alas, my Google searches for this data proved fruitless, and I went in with no clue how many gamers may be out there in my city, looking for other gamers. I guess, in order to put such an estimate together, you’d need to have some strange combination of a love of board games, access to a media outlet and questionable time management skills. Hey, that’s me! The complete package.
So, I set out to find a way to predict how big a gaming group could be. Now, before I go further, a disclaimer. My research was completely unscientific. But, here’s what I did: I started with a list of randomly-selected US cities, with populations ranging from 30,000 to 800,000 people. Then, I searched meetup.com for board game groups in each one. It was a reeeally fun weekend. Based on the size of the largest board game meetup group in each area, I calculated each city’s estimated gamer population.
Surprisingly, there actually seemed to be a pattern.
In my results, gamers made up, on average, 0.16% of the people in your neighborhood. That means, if you multiply your city’s population by .0016, you may get a rough estimate of the number of potential gamers. At least, an estimate of how many gamers are likely to join a board game group on meetup.com.
It should be noted that other factors affected the estimated gamer population too, such as the age of the meetup group, the frequency of events, and the city’s population density.
Does the 0.16% range match what you see in your home town? I’d be interested in seeing how the size of your group compares. In the meantime, I’m going to go relax with a game that uses NO MATH. Ooh, I hear Power Grid is good.
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