By Melanie Allen | Wealth of Geeks
In the last 50 years, more than 50 million people gathered around tables — physical and virtual — with friends and enemies to uncover treasures, slay dragons, and save the day.
Dungeons & Dragons celebrates its 50th birthday in 2024. Over the years, it’s thrust tabletop gaming into our cultural consciousness, morphing from a game played secretly by so-called geeks and losers into a household name.
Dungeons & Dragons Rising Popularity
In 2019, Hasbro’s tabletop gaming division, Wizards of the Coast, reported more than 50 million people had played Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) at some point. The game’s waning popularity had a huge resurgence in 2020, as people confined to their homes sought ways to spend their time and connect with others.
Google search trends show the game’s steady rise in popularity starting in 2017, with another surge in 2022.
Pandemic lockdowns also drove new D&D developments, as online platforms like Roll20, Foundry, and Owlbear connected RPG players across cities, countries, and even beyond international borders.
Popular digital video game service Steam sees an average of 230 D&D players hourly, according to gaming tracker Steamcharts.
Dungeons & Dragons Becomes a Pop Culture Hit
Since its inception in 1974, Dungeons & Dragons has evolved into an empire, spawning four movies and two television series, as well as a variety of expansion packs, action figures, and collectibles.
The game frequently appears in movies, songs, and television, from Emmy Award winners like The Big Bang Theory to cult classics like Community. Its robust world-building tools inspire writers to create their own stories, like the Dragonlance series.
Some entertainers bring their own games to life via streaming. Actress Felicia Day and her role-playing friends created the highly successful web series The Guild around their gaming. The show’s popularity drove growing female interest in D&D. Women now comprise 40% of questers.
In 2015, a group of voice actors followed suit, developing Critical Role, an online web series dedicated to Dungeons & Dragons playthroughs. The series boasts 1.35 million followers on Twitch and 2.2 million YouTube subscribers.
Dungeons & Dragons’ contributions to the pop culture landscape surround us, changing how we talk about fiction.
How D&D Changed the Way We Relate To Fictional Characters
Even people who have never played the game apply its ideas to their favorite movies and characters. Dungeons & Dragons’ in-game lexicon, specifically its character alignment archetypes, became the go-to way for fans to describe heroes and villains.
Dungeons & Dragons’ nine alignments define characters’ moral goodness and ethical positions, helping players understand the ambiguity between good and evil in fictional and real worlds. The language adds nuance and dimensionality to players’ characters — they can be morally good while rejecting the rule of law or evil while twisting laws for personal gain.
The alignments cover two axes: the good versus evil scale, which measures morality, and the lawful versus chaotic scale, which defines character ethics. Good characters always do the right thing, while evil characters embody selfishness. Lawful characters celebrate law and order, while chaotic characters prefer the freedom of anarchy. Each scale also features a neutral alignment, highlighting how many characters don’t fit neatly into a good or evil box.
Superman embodies lawful good: the quintessential boy scout always does the right thing regardless of cost and truly believes in the virtues of law and order. The Joker represents chaotic evil, leaving a trail of destruction in his wake as he gleefully dismantles the structures society relies on for survival.
Players use these terms to describe their favorite characters, from the flawless champions to the vilest villains and loveable rouges with hearts of gold.
The Future of D&D
While Hasbro reported recent quarterly losses, its online gaming segment, which includes Wizards of the Coast, grew 9%. The brand’s popular Magic: The Gathering offerings drove growth, but earnings show tabletop gaming beats traditional consumer products in the toy space.
Dungeons & Dragons may soon bring higher revenues to Hasbro, as Wizards of the Coast recently announced new rule books for all three core products: The Dungeon Master’s Guide, The Player’s Handbook, and The Monster Manual.
These new and improved guides, expected between September 2024 and February 2025, could reignite interest in the game and increase Hasbro’s 2024 earnings.
Though sales have increased since the pandemic, the game isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Dungeons & Dragons is a pop culture staple that, while synonymous with tabletop gaming, has also become a top online gaming category. It’s time to pick up the die, roll for perception, and see what all the excitement is about.
This article was produced by Media Decision and syndicated by Wealth of Geeks.
