Recently Wizards of the Coast has been in the news as Hasbro laid off 1,100 people, including numerous Wizards employees. In addition to the typical bad rap a company gets from firing that many people right before Christmas the Hasbro layoffs, especially those which affected Wizards, have made a lot of people ask questions. Wizards is a bright spot on Hasbro’s balance sheet, especially in light of the recent sale of the eOne film and TV business which highlighted the weakness of the company’s entertainment division. Despite their performance, Hasbro opted to lay off people responsible for some of their greatest successes, including most of the team responsible for working with Larian on the hit video game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Although I can’t comment on the wisdom of Hasbro’s particular headcount decisions, I can say that when RPGs meet money, good things don’t usually happen. Indeed, Hasbro’s reported tabletop gaming revenue in one quarter of 2023 was $290 million, or 50% larger than the entire tabletop RPG industry for the whole year of 2022. By that math, Magic: the Gathering alone is roughly six times larger than every TTRPG combined on a revenue basis. Ouch.

To further put this into context, I wanted to compare TTRPGs to another hobby. Things can get a little tribal when comparing RPGs to other hobby games, but a lot of the same points of comparison still apply when looking out to another one of my favorite hobbies: bicycling. The bicycle industry has many elements of a stronger, more sustainable industry than RPGs when it comes to the industry players and customers. At the same time, it’s dealing with a lot of similar trends to RPGs, trends like emerging technology, customer diversification, and a tail of niche players who are just as vital to the hobby as the biggest companies.

Customer Base

Roleplaying games and bicycles are both hobby industries, at least in the United States. For RPGs that goes without saying; other applications for games, like education, are essentially de minimis when it comes to looking at what games are sold and why. For cycling it’s important to note that it’s a hobby industry in the United States but not necessarily elsewhere. In China, where four times as many bicycles are sold as in the US, bicycles are as much transportation as they are for fun. German road traffic standards (Straßenverkehrs-Zulassungs-Ordnung, or StvZO) include bicycles, standardizing things like lighting which in the US are completely unregulated. The fact that the US is so far on the hobby side of the hobby/transportation split reduces the number of bicycles sold here, but also tends to increase the purchase price of said bicycles.

While comparable numbers for world RPG sales don’t exactly exist, what few data points we have point to the US being the largest RPG market in the world, both in terms of consumers and creators. While the market is growing strongly, it still hasn’t broken $200 million, at least as of 2022 (according to ICv2). Meanwhile, the US bicycle market around the same time, depending on who you ask, is around $7 billion (estimates from several sources ranged from $5 to 9 billion). This makes the cycling market roughly two to three times as large as all hobby games combined.

One of the reasons the cycling industry is so much larger is that it is essentially two (or more) hobbies in one. Mountain biking and road cycling are nearly different industries; while the same companies manufacture the bicycles and components, the items sold to each hobby from the bikes to the safety gear and on down to clothing and nutrition supplements tend to be completely different. Roleplaying has little of this stratification; the only secondary hobby to the RPG is likely LARP, which from a monetary perspective is largely nonexistent compared to the cash flows of Wizards of the Coast, Paizo, and Asmodee.

As is implied by the above point, cycling can never be a one-time purchase. While there are of course many people who buy multiple bikes, even owning one bicycle commits you to repeat purchases, from maintenance items like lubricants and cleaning supplies to consumables like tires and chains to all sorts of secondary accessories, not to mention visits to a shop for maintenance if you can’t do it yourself. And, in this day and age of carbon fiber, bicycles have a design life in the range of ten to twenty years, so even if you only have one you’ll probably need to replace it (even if you aren’t seduced by the industry’s cycle of planned obsolescence, as noted below). Tabletop roleplaying games simply don’t have the same range of required repeat purchases, much to the chagrin of Wizards of the Coast. For a game to continue making money over a ten year design life it will need additional supplements and other material. Gamers do buy multiple games, in fact this has been the norm for most of the hobby’s life. That said, the industry leaders got there, for better or for worse, by focusing on a narrow library; Wizards of the Coast sells one RPG and Paizo sells two.

Industry Composition

Speaking of Wizards and Paizo. The RPG industry is immensely concentrated; one company generates a majority of RPG sales through one product line, and that’s pretty wild all things considered. Meanwhile, cyclists bemoan consolidation, but that’s because cycling in the US has a ‘Big Four’: Trek, Specialized, Giant, and Cannondale. Once you consider that Cannondale is owned by a large corporation, Pon Holdings, which also owns brands like Cervelo and Santa Cruz, it does paint a picture of an industry captive to its largest players. On the other hand, Bicycle Retailer reported that nearly half of all bike shops in the US don’t carry any of these brands. Ultimately cycling is significantly more stratified than roleplaying games, and that does a lot to let smaller businesses, both in parts and bike production as well as retail, have opportunities to flourish.

It is not easier to become a one-person bike business than to become a one-person RPG business. To even start you need experience, mechanical ability, and at least a little instinctive knowledge about how to design a bike that does what you want. To become an RPG designer, you need to have run a lot of games, be a decent writer, and maybe have purchased some layout software (not sure that’s required). The difference in needed skills, not to mention the risk and expense associated with building a bike from scratch, mean there’s a huge difference in the number of people who build themselves a bicycle (really build, with a brazing torch or carbon fiber mold) and the number who will design their own RPG. The math should be revealing itself right now: Bicycles are harder to design on your own, and more people exist who will buy them. RPGs are easier to design on your own, and fewer people exist who will buy them. It’s much, much harder to get to the starting line of the low-volume bicycle game, but if you do you will have a higher chance of success than someone who designs their own RPG. This is also true at all levels of the two hobbies, not just at the creative end. There are ten times more cycling jobs posted in my area than RPG jobs. Sadly, there are a disproportionate number of RPG jobs here because Hasbro is headquartered in Providence, Rhode Island (if I had further narrowed the search geographically I would have gotten half as many cycling jobs and zero TTRPG jobs).

The cycling industry is broken up more at the top, but has a much shorter tail at the bottom. This has led to a number of different approaches to designing and selling the humble bicycle, and many more of them have seen success compared to RPGs. Of course, a bigger market means more people get to play. Quality Bicycle Parts, a distributor that owns the iconic Surly and Salsa bicycle brands, is dwarfed by the big four but yet still has revenue equal to the entire TTRPG market.

Marketing

Actual Plays are one of the biggest marketing coups of TTRPG history, second only to the introduction of D&D in mainstream toy stores back in the early 80s. Bicycling, especially in the US, is driven by sport. The Union Cycliste Internationale, or UCI, sanctions nine disciplines of mainline cycling sport, in addition to para-cycling and cycling e-sports. This includes familiar events like traditional road cycling and cross-country mountain bike races, but also indoor track cycling, BMX, and cyclocross, the original reason to ride a drop-bar bike through the mud. In all of these cases, manufacturers compete in events for prestige and product development, and then turn around and sell bikes with race tech to well-heeled cyclists for tens of thousands of dollars. Even better (for the bike brands), as bike tech continues to advance the same people willing to spend $15,000 on a bicycle will be willing to do it again two years later for one that has another gear, or weighs 200 grams less, or performs 2% better in wind tunnel testing. Of course, many of us who want to ride our bikes for fun find a lot of this tech to be a bit much. When you get down to it, no one needs electronic shifting, or carbon fiber wheels, or carbon fiber anything, really. And, lest the ‘retro-grouches’ think they are free thinkers, there are plenty of (admittedly smaller) companies willing to market to us based on the image of old-school heritage, versatility, or, in the case of some component manufacturers, the ability to buy compatible parts for a bike you already own and like without having to keep up with the Joneses and buy the latest 13-speed monstrosity.

The divide between new and old or tech and analog is alive and well in RPGs, although it takes on a different form. The OSR and other old-school movements are more about how games used to be played, though they tend to celebrate the intent rather than actually emulate the rules. The technology question is a more subtle one; while more and more tools have become available to play RPGs online or otherwise digitally, they have yet to become required or even a cultural norm. That’s the insidious thing about how technology marches onward in cycling; the companies get to make decisions for you. Major component manufacturers like SRAM and Shimano are switching more and more of their lines to electronic shifting, leaving fewer alternatives in the mainstream. Some technologies which the old guard swear by, like rim brakes, are out of product portfolios entirely already. For the tinkerers and grouches among us there are still options; companies like Dia-Compe and Nitto continue to make old-style components while others like Microshift continue making mechanical components at similar build quality (and lower price points) to the Shimanos and SRAMs of the world. This is the flipside of how easy it is to make an RPG and how difficult it is to make a bicycle; it takes much less effort to keep old-school dreams alive in the RPG realm than in bicycles. Lucky for me, though, there are certainly people doing it.

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In the cycling hobby, I’m a tinkerer. I build up my own bikes and therefore get to build exactly what I want, the market be damned. The Surly I ride most of the time is, like most bikes under the Surly brand, a bicycle equivalent of GURPS, designed to be adaptable and customizable moreso than good at a specific thing. Just like how I could never settle on one game or even one genre of RPG, I can’t settle on one bicycling discipline either, switching between a hardtail mountain bike, carbon fiber road bike, and even a single speed when the need or mood arises. While cycling is significantly more diverse than roleplaying games, I still end up in a small niche, preferring to bike most of the time to get around and avoid driving instead of for fitness or competition, as bikes are often marketed. This is changing, though. There is a bit of technology which is utterly rewriting the bicycle world: the e-bike. E-bikes are easier than unassisted bikes, cleaner, smaller, and safer than cars, and in the last few years they’ve hit a price point where they’re highly accessible to the average person. While I can get frustrated when a novice on an e-bike zips by me too close and too fast, at a broad level e-bikes are changing the game for bicycle adoption and acceptance.

It is in fact the e-bike that made me think about D&D Fifth Edition, and what it has done recently for roleplaying. While the analogy has softened my view towards 5e, it’s incomplete. E-bikes are drastically changing the bicycle landscape; 5e did not do that to RPGs. Hasbro’s performance and Hasbro’s layoffs show that unlike the e-bike, 5e is merely a quantitative uptick in the landscape, not a qualitative gamechanger. When we see the next iteration of D&D, whether a completely new edition or (as it seems most likely) an iterative revision, we will see that D&D remains beholden to its corporate parent more than anything else. I do not know if there is an analogous step change coming to RPGs like it is to cycling. As someone who wants to see the hobby grow, I hope there is. At the very least, it’s another thing to ponder the next time I’m riding my bike.

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