Some recent revelations and ongoing events have spurned me to prepare a survey to learn more about the playerbase. Newer players are especially invited to participate.
The results are posted below.
over 90% of the playerbase being from the US, only a third having a ship
Did FBG published these numbers?
It’s something that they very occasionally mention on the official Discord server. The first two quotes are from Hannnah and the others are from Bruno.
Yeah the vast, vast majority of our players are in the US across all of our games
[The Fallen London companion tea] is expensive, but as all of our other merch has shipped out of the UK and 90%+ of our players are in the US, we felt they were due a turn!
I think PoSI is more like 40-ish percent of the playerbase but I haven’t looked at those numbers as recently.
Only about a third of active players have a ship.
1 Like
You ought to rename the survey. This is a survey about how you interact with Fallen London, both in the game and out of it. “Demographics” usually means things like age, sex, race, income bracket. I almost didn’t take the survey because that stuff is boring; I can imagine many players of this game in particular might hesitate to divulge such descriptions of themselves.
I find that number rather mind-boggling and tried to make sense of it.
According to this list, there are ca. 419 million native English speakers in the world, 258 million of which are Americans. That’s ca. 61 %.
It makes sense that most people who play this game would be native English speakers, which in turn means that most of those would be Americans. Still, 90 % seems like a large overshoot that I can’t quite explain.
Another funny thing is that most of the FL players I’ve interacted with over the years (on forums, IRC, in-game, etc.) were Europeans like me, most of them speaking English as a second language like me. Totally subjective experience, of course, but still. Can’t wrap my head around those 90 %.
(It does explain rather well though why the game servers are usually at their slowest during US mid-day/early evening hours.)
2 Likes
Yeah, it’s definitely more a “Playing habits” survey, not much of a demographic survey.
I’ll admit, I’m curious. Why the survey? It is just to get some more data because data is interesting, or do you have a specific reason or plan that this data would be helpful to have for?
I’ve closed the survey and opened the responses to the public. They can also be viewed in spreadsheet form, particularly to see the entirety of the free-form responses.
1 Like
In hindsight, naming it something like the General Fallen London Survey might have been more accurate, but I would’ve been more keen on renaming it before it was published and hundreds of people had submitted their responses.
Being a long-standing player and contributor to the wiki, I’ve been interested in any scraps of info regarding the playerbase at large, and with the wiki being down, I had some free hours to spare.
3 Likes
I’ve been wondering what the source for the data is. Self-reported, based on currency, based on IP address? There are reasons any of those could be inaccurate, but I have some suspicions about IP address in particular. Like, if a significant chunk of players connect via VPN then their IP address would appear to be from Arlington, Virginia where us-east-3 is located.
I don’t recall if you’ve seen this, but this spreadsheet, featuring visits to the wiki from Google search by country, isn’t really in accordance with that figure either.