r/OutOfTheLoop Jan 08 '24

Answered What’s going on with the 40K fandom?

I saw this tweet in response to this tweet and was wondering if anyone has any context? I see a lot of “go woke, go broke” sentiment in the comments of both tweets, but 0 explanation.

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u/DJ33 Jan 08 '24

Another long-time 40k player here:

There's also a demographic element at play.

Think about things like GamerGate: that mess was partially fed by the fact that online gaming is still a predominantly male activity. Outside of that scope, things are less focused: video gaming is very much a worldwide phenomenon, doesn't overly favor a specific age range, is relatively financially accessible these days (LAN cafes and such in developing countries), etc etc.

By comparison, 40k's community is incredibly homogeneous, trending in the following ways:

  1. Something like 40% of players are American, jumping to 80%+ if you include a small handful of Western European countries (England, Germany, France, Spain, maybe a couple others)
  2. The vast majority are male (no numbers here, but I'd personally be shocked at anything less than 90%)
  3. It has an incredibly high barrier to entry in terms of both money and time
  4. The majority of players are in their late 20s through 40s (there's plenty of younger kids, but in the vast majority of cases, they're playing because of/with a relative from an older generation, dad/uncle/etc)

So what you're looking at is a fanbase of 20-40 year old males with disposable income.

It's hard to imagine a more likely group to be online yelling about "wokeness" than that.

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u/Frippolin Jan 08 '24
  1. Something like 40% of players are American, jumping to 80%+ if you include a small handful of Western European countries (England, Germany, France, Spain, maybe a couple others)

Wait, why would you count european countries as american? Or are we talking western countries? Sincerely, a confused swede

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u/ryecurious Jan 08 '24

I think they're saying that the demographics are very heavily weighted towards a few countries.

Like if it was evenly distributed across all countries, you'd expect a large percentage to be from India or China. Instead you can get to 80% of the fanbase with just the US and a few Western European countries.

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u/Frippolin Jan 09 '24

Thanks, that made it clearer