Mike Shea

So another factor that could be a success that you could actually look at is start playing games.

So I would mix this also with like, are they playing at conventions?

But if you want to look and be like, hey, how successful is this RPG?

One element you could do is go over to start playing games and say, are there people playing this game over there?

If they are playing that game over there, how many games are they playing?

Again, not a perfect ratio.

I was having a discussion with some friends of mine and they were arguing two sides of something of like, well, that game is successful and far more successful than this other game because look how many more games there are and start playing games.

And then I brought up another game and said, well, that one has even more.

They say, yeah, but that might be only because that's the only place where you can actually play the game because nobody wants to play it anywhere else.

And I was like, how do you make both those things true?

So it's not a perfect, none of these are perfect measures, right?

But I think they give you a loose gauge again, enough for RPG punditry talk, right?

Enough for a conversation to say, well, you say that no one likes this game, but I see that there are 70 open games and start playing games.

That tells me it's probably more popular than you might think.

Or it would tell me that it's successful enough that people are actually paying somebody else to run that game.

And a lot of GMs are offering to run that game.

Because that feels, start playing games really feels like it's a good supply and demand curve, right?

Because you have GMs that want to be paid to run games.

So they're going to run games for people that are willing to pay for them.

And if people are willing to pay for them, then that probably means it's a successful game.