I ran across an interesting article this week about the hobby game market. Although it is something that those that work in the industry may be familiar with, it may be new to other people that aren’t familiar with publications that discuss the industry as a whole. ICv2 is a site that covers information about the business of pop culture products, particularly: Anime and Manga, Graphic Novels and Comics, Games (including roleplaying games), Movie/TV Licensed Products, and Toys.

ICv2 recently released two articles that related directly to the roleplaying industry. The first article entitled, “Hobby Game Market Strengthens”, talks about how the hobby game market improved in the second quarter of 2009. It states that board games, collectible card games, and certain miniature lines are doing fairly with retailers and distributors. However, it also reported that the downside in the hobby game market was that the roleplaying game category is down overall. It specifically mentions that the gap between Dungeons and Dragons and all other roleplaying games seems to be widening. It doesn’t go into detail on whether this is because D&D 4e is such an incredible success, or if it is because other roleplaying games are having difficulty in the current economic situation.

The second article entitled, “Top Q2 2009 RPGs”, gives a chart of the top five roleplaying games by sales in the second quarter of 2009. It listed the following games as the top five sellers for Q2:

1. Dungeons and Dragons – Wizards of the Coast
2. Warhammer 40k: Dark Heresy – Fantasy Flight Games
3. World of Darkness – White Wolf Publishing
4. Song of Ice and Fire – Green Ronin Publishing
5. Shadowrun – Catalyst Game Labs

Unfortunately, the articles do not go into the exact method they used to determine how they selected the top five sellers for that time period. Was it total product volume for the entire game line? Or, was it total dollar amount for the entire game line? Or, was it something else?

I’ve seen many readers and bloggers in the RPG blogosphere talk about the fact that it is sometimes difficult to get exact information on the industry, because it is a smaller industry when compared to other similar ones. I wanted to present this information for no other reason than to provide a recent and reliable source of information about the RPG industry that some may not be aware of. ICv2 offers full market reports, size estimates, bestseller lists, and reviews as well. So it can be a solid source of information for those looking to acquire that kind of data.