#161: Analyzing DriveThru's Mithril Products
#161: Analyzing DriveThru's Mithril Products
I. Dear Reader
People seemed to like last week’s post so I thought I’d expand the charts to include Mithril-winning products. Mithril is the second highest medal you can win behind Adamantine. A product at the Mithril level has sold more than 2000 copies (but less than 5000 because otherwise it would be Adamantine). There are 451 products with Mithril status according to DTRPG. That is a shockingly small number in the grand scheme of things.
Here’s the same chart as last time. Each product is classified into a category and this chart shows which categories have the most products with Mithril and Adamantine status. If you’re wondering why there are so many more Trad products than the others, I think the answer is basically Storyteller / Onyx Path Publishing. They are easily the biggest label in the Trad category with so many different games as well as a whole bunch of splatbooks. Also, a lot of D&D products aren’t on DTRPG and are on DM’s Guild so it makes the category seem smaller than it is.
Again, the OSR and the storygame folks have similar numbers. The Misc category is very big now because it includes products which are system-agnostic advice and products which are just random tables (d100 treasures, etc).
And since pricing is the only other hard data point I have, here are three charts on pricing. The first one is just the average price of every item in the category and the other two try to identify which are the most common price points for four different categories.
Seems like for most categories, the most common price point (for the PDF, I believe) is 20$. A lot of Trad games seem to be at 25$ and the OSR sells a lot at 10$. IP is again the biggest just because it has very few products in it (around 5).
I have some experience with data journalism. I did all of this stuff in excel but if I had more time, I would’ve done it programmatically using R and made something shiny and interactive. Anyway, here’s the data if you want to do something with it.
I think to get more out of this, there would have to be more manual data addition. I would love to know how big these products are, whether they’re indie or corporate, etc but I’d have to manually classify or enter new data for each item and that is way too much effort. So from next week, we’ll get back to more wordsy, less numbersy content.
Yours datafully again,
Thomas
II. Media of the Week
The Dice Exploder podcast is back with their Season 2. It’s as good as ever and their latest episode features game designer Tan Shao Han talking about Stress in Brinkwood, where you play robin hood-style vigilantes killing vampire dukes.
I’m going to be on there in a future episode of this podcast talking about Band of Blades so stay tuned for that.
Geek Gamers has a nice look at the contents of Hull Breach, an anthology setting for Mothership.
This GDC talk is a nice intro to jubensha, the larp/murder mystery hobby that is a billion dollar industry in China.
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III. Links of the Week
On Gnomestew, Tomas Gimenez Rioja reviews Forgery by Banana Chan, which smashes together a horror RPG, choose your own adventure, and colouring book.
On Cozy Cauldron, a review of the short point-crawl festival/forest adventure, Tannic by Amanda P.
On Seed of Worlds, a review of City of Crescent, an Istanbul-inspired setting from Historica Arcanum.
On Bloody Disgusting, a review of you’re in space and everything is fucked by nevyn holmes, which doesn’t really need a tagline.
On the Age of Ravens blog, another excellent round-up of cool mechanics. This week, we’ve got Approaches from Fate, Icons from 13th Age, Secondary Characters from Star Trek Adventures, Death moves from Legacy 2e, and Sleeves from Eclipse Phase.
This is a nice non-antagonistic post about the difficulties of picking up the OSR playstyle from Pondering Song Games.
IV. Small Ads
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