For the upcoming Gen Con I thought I'd take a look at what sort of games are running as a possible indicator of the popularity of some of the editions. I've downloaded the event schedule and screwed around with pivot tables for a bit to get counts of possible attendees for some of the events.

D&D is (as you'd expect) the leading RPG apparent. There's alot of 4E in particular occurring, most of which is from RPGA events.
By total numbers of games (grouping both the D&D and AD&D) I found:

4th Ed.    - 232 games (188 of these are RPGA)
3.5     - 77 games
2nd ed. - 17 games
1st ed. - 110 games

Additionally, there are 251 Pathfinder games.
(Note that some of these counts may be slightly off due to weirdly named variants etc.)

Just counting groups of course doesn't quite give the full picture since some of the games running may have 60 or 80 (or more attendees).

Going on total numbers of "maximum players" for games I got totals as follows:

4E     -8,325   (7,742 from RPGA events).
3.5    -1,291
2E     -60
1E     -793
Pathfinder -3,658


In total, the D&D component of the Con is only 729 events of 2122 total, but (including Pathfinder) accounts for 14,758 out of 32,665 possible slots.

By total possible participants the next few top games are:

Legend of the Five Rings     -30 games, 1008 possible participants
indie RPGs             -20 games, 960 possible participants
HERO games (various)         -104 games, 769 possible participants
Shadowrun                    -97 games, 718 possible participants
Call of Cthulhu             -98 games, 657 possible participants
Star Wars                    -71 games, 442 possible participants
Savage Worlds             -71 games, 442 possible participants

If anyone is curious I can give counts of Their Favourite Game, if its not here.

GURPS? White Wolf? erm...Rolemaster?

GURPS - grouping a couple of things (including GURPS Lite, GURPS Discworld) I can see 18 groups, 121 max. attendees.

Can't see any Rolemaster, sorry.

For White Wolf......I can see 1 group of Mage: the Awakening (6 players), 2 for Requiem (20 players),  5 for Changeling (50 players)...however...there's also a separate LARP category that I didn't include in figures above. In that there are:

Vampire - the Masquerade (4 events, 900 players)
World of Darkness (6 events, 750 players)
Vampire - the Requiem (2 events, 600 players)
Changeling - the Lost (2 events, 300 players)
Old World of Darkness (3 events, 165 players)

EDIT: total of 291 LARP events, 7772 total participants;  top LARP would be NERO with 111 groups, 1602 players.

1e is making a pretty strong showing for not being "officially" supported like PF or 4e.

What's going on with some of those LARPs? The Requiem ones have a potential player total of 300 each? How on earth will they manage that many people at one time, much less make them part of something convention-worthy?

And what's NERO? Never heard of it before now.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;471062Savage Worlds             -71 games, 442 possible participants
.

Worth noting Pinnacle run something called Savage Saturday Nights which has been a non-ticketed who ever turns up can play event. Last year they ran about 10 games some of which were kind of mini-skirmish type events with lots of players. But close to 250 people turned up (not sure how many got games)
I think this year they might make it ticketed so as to distribute the seats more fairly and to get confirmed rooms booked up.

Wow: go AD&D, hey?

Quote from: GeekEclectic;471079What's going on with some of those LARPs? The Requiem ones have a potential player total of 300 each? How on earth will they manage that many people at one time, much less make them part of something convention-worthy?

And what's NERO? Never heard of it before now.

NERO is some sort of FRP Larp group - there was a documentary on a chapter of them awhile back called "Monster Camp". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Camp

Drilling down further into the LARPS Requiem looks like its a single 300 person event ('Meeting of the Great Minds') thats run twice with different ticket numbers.
Masquerade is two events, 'Sabbat: Before the Storm' and 'Camarilla & Anarchs: Luke Bulwarks in a Storm' - again, each of these is run twice at different times (= different Game ID numbers), but the counts in each timeslot look accurate.

Quote from: jibbajibba;471081Worth noting Pinnacle run something called Savage Saturday Nights which has been a non-ticketed who ever turns up can play event. Last year they ran about 10 games some of which were kind of mini-skirmish type events with lots of players. But close to 250 people turned up (not sure how many got games)
I think this year they might make it ticketed so as to distribute the seats more fairly and to get confirmed rooms booked up.

Thanks JJ. Yep, a chunk of the total (154 players) is from 'Savage Saturday Nights'. While they don't have tickets, these sessions do have a maximum number of players showing, so they've been included already.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;471093NERO is some sort of FRP Larp group - there was a documentary on a chapter of them awhile back called "Monster Camp". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Camp.

I watched the movie via Netflix and enjoyed it. However my math isn't good enough to be able to keep track of my hitpoints in realtime as I got hit by people calling "out 3 normal"/"7 poison"/or whatever damage their weapons do as they swing as me with foam boffer weapons.

When I used to play in a WW based Larp (we used more of the tt rules then the live action ones from WW) there were about one staff for every ten or so players. For large amounts of time you are just dealing with other players and may not even need a gm/storyteller.  I'm going to guess that with that many players they are likely to have 15-30 staff at a min.

The AD&D 1e numbers are impressive indeed.

I'm also fairly surprised at the HERO love.

The OSR has a booth this year. That might have helped bump up some of the 1e numbers as well (it certainly couldn't have hurt).

Alright checking into more numbers.

1E: alot of this seems to be due to 'Tower of Gygax'. Seems to be very short sessions, usually 1 or 2 hrs: 85 sessions with total participants of 738. Then there's a few 'Tower of Gygax presents' as well (another 6 sessions, 48 participants - longer 6hr games). Plus a few others - about 10 one-off individual games -  and something described as a 'hybrid 1E' game.

Other stuff making a showing as regards D&D :
I can see 2 games for B/X, 1 'Tales of the Wilderlands' White Box, 2 for 'Basic', and 16 games (172 players) for something called 'Fellowship of the White Star' that I don't recognize, plus 2 for 'Swords & Wizardry'.

Quote from: Peregrin;4710781e is making a pretty strong showing for not being "officially" supported like PF or 4e.

That's because 1e is the best edition of the game. "Everybody" knows that.*

[Let Ze Edition Warz Begin!]

* by which I mean in internet parlance that "I" do.

Interesting set of data.

I'm definitely not feeling so freakish for running an AD&D game the last year or so, pretty sure I'll wrap it up with Vault of the Drow.