[Tegyrius]

Originally Posted by Rainbow Six

According to the Kickstarter website Free League got 8,073 backers.

Not bad for what is basically a non-OSR appeal to nostalgia.

According to GDW's own production figures:

1e boxed set: 97,518 copies
2e core rulebook: 32,180 copies
2e boxed set: 5,240 copies
2.2 core rulebook: 7,757 copies

Don't quote me on this, but I want to say the print run for 2013 was 2,500 copies. PDF sales at the time 93GS closed up shop were Gold on DriveThruRPG, which put them between 501 and 1,000 copies; in the subsequent years, they've gone to Platinum, which I think is between 1,001 and 2,000 copies.

Bear in mind that those 8,073 backers are effectively pre-sales, a concept which didn't exist in the 1e/2e days - that's exclusive of the print run destined for the retail channel. We also don't know how many of those backers bought multiple copies as group purchases, gifts, or retail sales starters.

Originally Posted by Raellus

13 "ignore it completely" responses out of 42 poll responses is significant, but it's only a third of the responders here. You could also look at this as 2/3 of the responders here do plan to make some use of v4. The Discord is an echo chamber, so it's not representative of the wider T2k fanbase. Using the Discord subset to prove v4 will be a flop is like using the Free League forum membership to prove it will be a smash.

Regardless, as Rainbow Six pointed out, 13 out of over 8,000 KS backers is insignificant, statistically, so I don't know how accurate your predictive "analysis" is going to be.

Combining a statistically-insignificant sample with sampling bias is not a research method that would be defensible in my workplace. YMMV.

Some years ago, I rendered some advice to your correspondent. It seems an appropriate time to reiterate part of it:

Originally Posted by Tegyrius

It is an unfortunate geek tendency for individual fans or small local (or online) groups to project their own personal enthusiasm for a property onto the overall global population of potential customers, then make sweeping (and erroneous) generalizations about the commercial viability of their personal visions for said property. In some cases, this failed understanding goes so far as to drive catastrophically bad business decisions.

Intensity does not necessarily correlate to scale. In other words, being louder doesn't make anyone righter.

- C.