Market Activity and Community Participation in Tabletop Gaming
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Research Paper 01: Market Activity and Community Participation in Tabletop Gaming
Research focus: Commercial performance, consumer engagement, and sustainable participation across tabletop gaming markets.
Prepared by: ASCEND Forge, ASCEND Pro Systems
Research status: Preliminary comparative research and analytical framework development.
Research principle: Distinguish verified research findings, industry-reported data, economic interpretation, and hypotheses requiring further investigation.
Executive Summary
The tabletop gaming industry operates across several overlapping markets. A game can be a source of entertainment, a collectible hobby, a social activity, a creative outlet, and, in some circumstances, an investment opportunity. These different motivations can support one another, but they do not necessarily produce the same outcomes for a game’s long-term sustainability.
A trading card game (TCG) may experience strong product sales, increasing secondary-market prices, and considerable online attention without these indicators establishing how many people regularly play the game. Conversely, a game with a smaller commercial footprint may support a committed community that continues playing, teaching newcomers, organizing events, and creating new content.
This paper investigates the relationship between commercial activity and active community participation across trading card games, board games, and tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs). It reviews academic research into collectible card markets, examines participation data reported by established publishers, and considers how similar questions apply across different tabletop formats.
Existing research offers several ways to investigate this relationship. A 2026 Pokémon card sales study found that rare and holographic cards contributed disproportionately to revenue within its sample. A 2026 Princeton University thesis analyzed 4.77 million observations across 138 Pokémon TCG sets, examining factors associated with secondary-market prices. A separate 2026 study examined Magic: The Gathering cards as alternative investment assets, while earlier economic modeling explored the relationships between card playability, consumer purchasing, secondary-market exchange, and publisher decisions.
Industry reports provide another perspective. Hasbro has reported participation figures for Magic: The Gathering organized play, while Games Workshop and Wizards of the Coast have described initiatives intended to introduce customers to Warhammer and Dungeons & Dragons.
These sources illuminate different aspects of tabletop gaming, but they do not measure the same outcomes. Sales, card prices, audience reach, event attendance, and recurring play must therefore be evaluated as distinct indicators.
The principal contribution of this paper is the proposed Market-to-Play Participation Model, which organizes the investigation into four dimensions:
Commercial activity.
Customer motivation.
Active participation.
Long-term sustainability.
The framework is preliminary and requires empirical testing. It does not establish that speculation harms a game’s community, nor does it assume that every commercially successful game must maintain a large organized-play scene.
Instead, it provides a foundation for evaluating how different forms of demand and engagement interact, and how publishers can better understand the long-term prospects of their games.
1. Research Purpose and Objectives
1.1 Research purpose
This paper examines how commercial performance and community participation can be measured independently and considered together when evaluating tabletop games.
It draws on academic studies, economic models, and industry-reported participation data to establish a foundation for evaluating the long-term sustainability of tabletop gaming markets.
Rather than assuming that sales, market value, and community engagement are interchangeable measures, the paper considers what each can reveal, where each is limited, and how they might be examined together.
1.2 Research objective
The primary objective is to establish a comparative framework for understanding how tabletop games attract customers, develop active communities, and sustain participation over time.
The study aims to:
Identify relevant indicators of commercial activity and community participation.
Examine the strengths and limitations of existing research.
Consider how different customer motivations influence engagement.
Review examples of publisher-reported participation and community initiatives.
Propose a framework for future comparative research.
1.3 Principal research question
How can commercial performance and community participation be measured independently, and what can their relationship reveal about the long-term sustainability of tabletop games?
Supporting questions include:
What can sales, resale prices, and market activity tell us about customer demand, and what can they not tell us about participation?
How do different consumer motivations influence the relationship between product ownership and active engagement?
What methods do established publishers use to measure participation, retention, and community development?
Which indicators could help researchers distinguish commercial growth from sustained engagement?
How might these relationships differ between trading card games, board games, and tabletop roleplaying games?
1.4 Research scope
The paper considers three broad tabletop markets.
Trading card games: Product sales, individual-card pricing, collectible demand, secondary markets, and organized play.
Board games: Product ownership, crowdfunding, premium editions, repeated gameplay, and community formation.
Tabletop roleplaying games: Rulebook ownership, audience reach, introductory participation, and recurring sessions.
Pokémon, Magic: The Gathering, Warhammer, and Dungeons & Dragons are used as examples where relevant evidence is available. They are illustrative cases rather than a representative sample of every company or market segment.
2. Background: The Difference Between Selling a Game and Sustaining a Game
The commercial success of a tabletop game is often discussed through visible indicators: sales, crowdfunding totals, product availability, resale prices, social-media followers, tournament attendance, and the size of its online community.
These indicators can be useful, but they measure different things. Product sales indicate that customers are purchasing something. Secondary-market transactions demonstrate that products are changing hands. Online attention indicates visibility or interest. Event attendance provides evidence of participation, although attendance at a single event does not establish long-term retention. None of these measures, by itself, fully explains whether a game has developed a sustainable community.
This becomes particularly relevant in collectible games, where a product can have value beyond its immediate use. A card might be desirable because it is competitively useful, visually appealing, rare, associated with a popular character, connected to nostalgia, or believed to have future resale potential. A single purchase can reflect several motivations at once.
Consequently, commercial activity around a game may expand for reasons that are only partly related to its play experience. The same game can attract competitive players, casual players, collectors, resellers, investors, content creators, and customers who simply enjoy opening products.
These audiences are not mutually exclusive, and their presence is not inherently problematic. Multiple motivations can help support a healthy market. The research challenge is determining how these different forms of engagement interact and whether commercial activity translates into sustained participation.
For this paper, the distinction is defined as follows:
Commercial performance concerns sales, revenue, purchasing behavior, product demand, pricing, resale activity, and the financial sustainability of the business.
Community participation concerns people’s engagement with the activity itself, including playing, attending events, participating in groups, introducing newcomers, and returning over time.
Long-term sustainability concerns whether the commercial and participation systems can continue functioning under changing market conditions, customer preferences, and competitive pressures.
These dimensions may reinforce one another. A larger player community can increase demand for products, while accessible products and a healthy distribution network can help players enter the game. However, neither outcome guarantees the other.
A financially successful product may not have a correspondingly large active community, just as a popular game may struggle to produce a sustainable business model. Understanding the relationship between these dimensions is the central purpose of this investigation.
3. What Existing Research Reveals About Commercial Activity
3.1 Pokémon TCG: Sales, rarity, and revenue concentration
In March 2026, Johannes Heck and colleagues published Sales characteristics of Pokémon trading cards: A prospective one-year field study in PLOS ONE.[1]
The researchers offered a convenience sample of 300 Pokémon cards on eBay in Germany between May 2024 and May 2025. Of those cards, 220 sold during the study period, generating €923.60 in total revenue. The median sale price was €1.95. Rare cards accounted for 19.1% of the cards sold but contributed 58.8% of the revenue; holographic cards also contributed disproportionately. These findings demonstrate that the number of items sold and the revenue generated by those items can tell different stories.
A relatively small subset of products may account for a substantial proportion of total revenue. Consequently, a market’s commercial performance can be influenced heavily by the distribution of prices and the characteristics of the products being sold.
For this study, that distinction matters because total revenue cannot be treated as a direct measure of the number of active players.
The study does not establish whether buyers purchased cards primarily for gameplay, collecting, resale, or investment. Its sample was also limited to selected cards offered by one seller within one national eBay market.
The appropriate conclusion is therefore narrow but useful: card-level sales and revenue patterns can be highly uneven, and revenue alone does not establish the size or motivation of the playing community.
3.2 Pokémon TCG: Scarcity, sentiment, and price formation
Thomas Danz’s 2026 Princeton University senior thesis, Gotta Catch ’Em All: How Scarcity, Sentiment, and Secondary Markets Influence Pokémon TCG Financial Dynamics, examines 4.77 million observations across 138 sets from April 2023 through March 2026.[2]
Using a hedonic pricing framework, the thesis investigates the relationship between prices and characteristics such as rarity, Pokémon identity, card age, and scarcity.
Its findings indicate that scarcity alone does not explain price premiums.
Characteristics associated with particular Pokémon and the structure of the market also matter. The thesis also distinguishes between sealed products and individual ungraded cards.
This is important because collectible prices cannot always be explained by a simple relationship between supply and demand. Demand-side characteristics, including the identity and appeal of particular items, can influence prices alongside scarcity.
For publishers, the implication is that rarity alone should not be assumed to create durable demand. High secondary-market prices should not automatically be interpreted as evidence of a healthy playing community.
The thesis provides a substantial dataset for studying market pricing, but it does not directly measure active-player ratios or establish that speculation causes changes in participation.
3.3 Magic: The Gathering as an investment asset
In 2026, Alessandro Pompei and Fabio Nonino published Trading card games as an alternative asset: portfolio diversification and risk-return analysis in the Journal of Asset Management.[3]
The researchers constructed an equally weighted index of 117 high-value Magic: The Gathering cards using monthly returns from October 2010 through March 2025. They examined the index’s relationship with traditional financial assets, as well as its returns, volatility, and potential contribution to portfolio diversification.
The study treats collectible cards as assets that can combine financial characteristics with cultural and emotional significance.
This is relevant because it demonstrates that some TCG products can be analyzed through financial concepts used to evaluate other investment assets.
However, the study focuses on the financial performance of a selected group of high-value cards. It does not establish the percentage of the overall Magic community that invests in cards, nor does it measure whether investment demand supports or undermines organized play.
Its findings should not be interpreted as a guarantee that collectible cards will appreciate or provide dependable investment returns. Secondary markets can involve limited liquidity, transaction costs, authenticity concerns, and substantial differences between individual items.
The broader finding is that a collectible game can develop a market with financial dynamics distinct from the experience of playing the game.
3.4 Magic: The Gathering and the economics of playability
Enrico Mattia Salonia’s 2017 paper, Magic the Gathering: Economic Analysis of the Market of a Collectible Card Game, provides a theoretical approach to the relationship between publishers, players, and secondary markets.[4]
The model examines three connected stages: the publisher produces and prices booster packs, players decide whether to purchase them, and cards are subsequently exchanged through the secondary market.
Within the model, cards acquire value through their usefulness in gameplay, which influences purchasing decisions and, in turn, publisher production and pricing decisions.
Although the paper is a theoretical economic model rather than an empirical study of actual player demographics, it provides a conceptual connection between gameplay and commercial demand.
It also illustrates why a secondary market should not automatically be treated as separate from a game’s design. Card usefulness, product availability, consumer demand, and publisher decisions can influence one another.
For a collectible game, the question is not simply whether individual cards have financial value. It is how that value interacts with accessibility, competitive environments, product structure, and continuing appeal to players.
3.5 What these studies establish, and what they do not
Taken together, these studies provide complementary perspectives: observed card sales, large-scale price analysis, investment performance, and theoretical market behavior.
They demonstrate that collectible tabletop products can have complex economic characteristics. They do not establish a universal relationship between speculation and participation.
In particular, the reviewed studies do not establish:
The actual proportion of TCG customers who primarily speculate, play, or collect.
Whether rising secondary-market prices consistently increase or decrease active participation.
Whether falling prices reliably cause players to leave a game.
Whether a particular distribution of players, collectors, and investors is necessary for a game’s success.
These questions require evidence that connects market data with customer behavior and participation over time.
4. What Established Publishers Measure Beyond Sales
Academic research is only one part of the picture. Established publishers also provide examples of how commercial activity and participation can be measured separately.
These examples are industry-reported evidence, not independent proof that a particular community strategy causes long-term success.
4.1 Magic: The Gathering: Organized play as a measurable outcome
Hasbro reported that more than one million unique players participated in Magic: The Gathering organized play through the end of 2025, representing a 22% year-over-year increase. It also reported more than 10,000 active Wizards Play Network stores worldwide.[5]
These figures show that the publisher tracks participation and the organized retail network alongside its wider commercial activity. They do not establish how frequently each player participates, how many players remain active over several years, or how much of the market’s purchasing activity is speculative.
Nevertheless, they demonstrate the practical value of measuring a game’s participation infrastructure rather than relying exclusively on product sales. A store network can provide venues for new players, recurring events, product access, and social interaction. The presence of such a network does not guarantee retention, but it creates opportunities for participation that can be measured and evaluated.
For an independent publisher, this raises a practical question: what mechanisms exist to convert an initial purchase into a second game, a recurring group, or an ongoing community?
4.2 Warhammer: Participation through a broader hobby ecosystem
Games Workshop provides a useful comparison outside the TCG market.
Its annual reporting has described initiatives intended to introduce new customers to the Warhammer hobby, including school programs, partnerships, stores, and resources that help newcomers engage with the activity. Its 2018–19 annual report, for example, described Warhammer Alliance as a way to introduce young hobbyists to the game through schools.[6]
Warhammer illustrates a difference between collecting a product and participating in a hobby. Customers may purchase miniatures, build collections, paint models, play tabletop battles, participate in clubs, or engage in several of these activities.
Not every customer must participate in every aspect for the business to function. However, the broader hobby provides multiple ways for customers to engage beyond purchasing miniatures.
This offers a useful design consideration for publishers: a game can create different entry points for different audiences while still providing pathways into active participation.
The lesson is not that every game should replicate Games Workshop’s business model. Its scale, intellectual property, manufacturing capabilities, and distribution network differ substantially from those of a small independent publisher. Rather, the example demonstrates the value of considering the wider experience surrounding a product.
4.3 Dungeons & Dragons: Audience reach and participation
In its December 2024 community update, Wizards of the Coast reported that Dungeons & Dragons welcomed 25,000 fans to play events at conventions and other gatherings during the year. Of these, 10,000 were reported as new players experiencing the game at those events for the first time.[7]
The same update reported more than 3.6 million characters created using the 2024 core rules and millions of users engaging with D&D Beyond. These are different forms of engagement. Creating a character, using a digital tool, attending an event, and participating in a regular campaign are not equivalent activities.
The figures therefore illustrate both the value and the limitations of participation metrics. They help describe how people interact with the game, but they do not independently establish how many maintain regular sessions over time.
For TTRPG publishers, the challenge is especially important because participation usually requires more than owning a rulebook. Players need a group, a suitable time, a game master or facilitator, and a way to organize recurring sessions.
A large audience can create opportunities for participation, but publishers still need to understand how that audience converts into actual play.
4.4 What these examples have in common
Across these businesses, a consistent principle emerges: product ownership and community participation are related but distinct.
The companies operate in different markets and have different resources. Their reported figures should not be compared as though they measure the same population or use identical definitions.
Nevertheless, their practices suggest that publishers can benefit from measuring multiple stages of engagement, including discovery, first participation, repeat participation, and ongoing community involvement.
The available evidence does not prove that these practices eliminate speculative risk. It does show that participation is a meaningful dimension of a game business that deserves its own measurements.
5. Extending the Investigation Beyond Trading Card Games
The distinction between purchasing and participation can also be relevant to board games and TTRPGs. However, the mechanisms differ, and the evidence should not be treated as interchangeable.
5.1 Board games: Crowdfunding, limited editions, and ownership
Board games may attract demand through crowdfunding campaigns, exclusive editions, premium components, limited print runs, and aftermarket resale.
A successful crowdfunding campaign establishes that a project attracted sufficient financial support to meet its funding conditions. It does not, by itself, establish that backers will play the game regularly, that local communities will develop, or that a publisher can sustain future releases.
Likewise, an expensive limited edition may be commercially successful even when the underlying game has a comparatively small active player base.
These possibilities do not mean that crowdfunding or premium editions are harmful. Crowdfunding can help independent creators finance production, while special editions can serve collectors and committed fans.
The research question is whether a project’s commercial indicators are being mistaken for evidence of lasting engagement.
A more complete assessment would consider delivery, customer satisfaction, repeat play, community formation, and demand for subsequent products.
5.2 TTRPGs: Audience, ownership, and recurring sessions
TTRPGs introduce a different challenge because a player’s participation is often social and recurring.
A customer may buy a rulebook but never find a group. Another may follow actual-play videos without playing. Someone else may play regularly using a single book, a free ruleset, or shared digital resources.
These customers all contribute to the wider audience in different ways, but they do not represent the same level of active participation.
For a TTRPG publisher, the number of books sold or characters created may be useful indicators of interest. However, they should not be treated as direct measures of recurring campaigns or player retention.
The same principle applies to digital communities: followers, members, content views, and event registrations can indicate reach, but they do not necessarily establish sustained play.
5.3 A common principle across tabletop markets
Across TCGs, board games, and TTRPGs, the useful distinction is between interest in the product and sustained engagement with the activity.
This distinction does not diminish the value of collectors, casual customers, or spectators. Instead, it prevents publishers from using one measure of success as a substitute for all the others.
Each market should first be examined on its own terms. Only then should researchers determine whether common patterns can be identified across them.
6. A Proposed Framework: The Market-to-Play Participation Model
Based on the research reviewed here, ASCEND Forge proposes a four-part framework for future investigation.
This is an analytical framework developed for this paper. It is not an established academic formula, and it has not yet been empirically validated.
Stage One: Commercial activity
The first stage measures what is happening in the market.
Relevant indicators include:
Product revenue and units sold.
Repeat purchases.
Secondary-market transaction volumes.
Resale prices and price volatility.
Revenue concentration among particular products.
Differences between primary-market and secondary-market activity.
Where data are available, researchers should distinguish between purchases from publishers or retailers and secondary-market transactions between subsequent owners.
This distinction matters because the same product can be counted in multiple transactions without representing an equivalent number of new customers or active players.
Stage Two: Customer motivation
The second stage examines why people purchase and retain products.
Relevant motivations include gameplay, collecting, artwork, nostalgia, social connection, investment, and anticipated resale gains. These motivations should be measured independently rather than forcing each customer into a single category.
A survey could ask participants to rate the importance of each motivation, describe their recent purchasing behavior, and indicate whether they have sold cards or other game products for financial reasons.
Self-reported motivations have limitations. Participants may not fully understand their own decisions, and stated intentions do not always match actual behavior. Where possible, surveys should be compared with observed purchasing and participation data.
Stage Three: Active participation
The third stage measures whether people actually engage with the game.
Possible indicators include:
The number of unique participants within a defined period.
The proportion of first-time participants who return.
Repeat attendance at organized events.
The number of active local play groups.
New-player conversion and retention.
Participation at three, six, and twelve months.
The appropriate definitions will differ between games. For a TCG, participation might include playing at home or attending organized events. For a board game, it might include repeated sessions within a household or gaming group. For a TTRPG, it might include participation in recurring sessions.
Researchers should specify the time period and definition of an active participant before collecting data. Event attendance alone will not capture all casual or informal play.
Stage Four: Long-term sustainability
The final stage examines how commercial activity and participation change over time.
Researchers could compare periods of rising prices, stable prices, falling prices, product releases, and changes in distribution or organized play.
The central questions would be whether active participation remains stable when speculative interest declines, whether new players continue to join, and whether commercial demand remains resilient without exceptional resale-price growth.
The aim would be to identify relationships, not assume causation. For example, a fall in card prices could coincide with declining participation because of a broader change in consumer interest. Alternatively, a reprint or product rotation could reduce prices while active play remains strong. A valid analysis would need to consider these competing explanations.
6.1 Proposed research measures
Measure | Proposed definition | Research purpose |
Active-player ratio | Identifiable active players divided by a clearly defined customer or participant population | Estimates participation relative to the defined population |
Speculative purchasing share | Spending attributed primarily to anticipated financial returns divided by measured spending | Estimates the importance of speculative motivation |
Repeat-play rate | First-time participants who return within a defined period | Measures early retention |
New-player conversion | People who begin playing after an identifiable initial interaction | Evaluates the pathway from interest to participation |
Price-to-play divergence | Changes in market prices or sales compared with changes in active participation | Identifies periods when commercial and participation indicators move differently |
Downturn resilience | Changes in purchasing, retention, and event activity during a market downturn | Examines the relationship between price movements and participation |
Each measure requires a clearly defined population, observation period, and data source. None should be treated as a universally accepted industry benchmark without additional evidence.
One distinction deserves particular attention: the proportion of people in a group is not the same as the proportion of spending attributable to that group.
A relatively small group of high-spending buyers could account for a substantial share of revenue. A much larger population of regular players might spend less per person but provide the recurring participation that sustains the game. A meaningful analysis must examine both dimensions.
7. Research Questions and Proposed Methodology
The preliminary evidence supports further investigation, but a more definitive study requires a structured research design.
7.1 Central research question
Can a tabletop game appear commercially successful while its active playing community remains small, stagnant, or in decline, and what indicators can publishers use to identify that disconnect?
Supporting questions include:
How closely do commercial growth and active participation move together?
How do different purchasing motivations relate to repeat play and retention?
When secondary-market prices decline, do customers with different motivations show different patterns of continued engagement?
Which publisher practices are associated with stronger conversion from initial interest to sustained play?
7.2 Proposed comparative sample
A future study could select a small number of games representing different market structures:
Pokémon TCG and Magic: The Gathering as established collectible card games with secondary markets.
A board game with a significant crowdfunding or limited-edition component.
A TTRPG with a substantial published product range and an identifiable community or organized-play structure.
Selection should be based on data availability, comparable observation periods, and a clear reason for including each case. The purpose would not be to rank publishers or label particular games as failures. It would be to examine how different market structures influence the relationship between commercial activity and participation.
7.3 Proposed evidence collection
The study should combine several forms of evidence.
Academic research would establish what is already known about collectible pricing, consumer motivation, and participation.
Publisher reports would provide company-reported data on revenue, organized play, retail networks, and community initiatives.
Secondary-market data would help track resale prices, transaction activity, price concentration, and changes surrounding product releases or reprints.
Player surveys and interviews would examine purchasing motivations, actual play frequency, and reasons for continuing or leaving the hobby.
Longitudinal participation data, where available, would track whether new participants return and whether communities remain active over time.
Each source has limitations. Publisher reports may use definitions that differ from those of other companies. Marketplace listings may not represent completed transactions. Surveys may overrepresent highly engaged community members. Participation data may omit informal play.
These limitations should be documented rather than hidden. Where the available evidence cannot establish a conclusion, the report should state that clearly.
7.4 Proposed analysis
The first stage would establish a baseline for each game, including the available commercial and participation indicators.
The second stage would identify periods of meaningful market change, such as a substantial price decline, a major reprint, a product release, or a change in organized-play access.
The third stage would examine whether participation changed during or after those periods.
The final stage would compare the findings across cases, distinguishing recurring patterns from market-specific explanations.
A relationship between two indicators would not automatically establish that one caused the other. Stronger causal claims would require additional evidence and an appropriate research design.
This methodology would allow future research to investigate possible disconnects between commercial performance and active participation without presuming that such a disconnect exists in any particular game.
8. Implications for ASCEND Forge
The research has practical implications for how ASCEND Forge evaluates game projects and publishing opportunities.
8.1 Evaluate engagement alongside commercial visibility
A project may receive considerable attention because of its artwork, creator reputation, crowdfunding campaign, or collectible features. These can be valuable assets, but they do not establish whether people understand the rules, enjoy playing, return for additional sessions, or recommend the game to others.
ASCEND Forge should therefore evaluate projects across several dimensions: product quality, audience interest, accessibility, repeat participation, community development, and commercial feasibility.
8.2 Keep the playing experience central
Scarcity, premium editions, collectible variants, and promotional releases can serve legitimate purposes. However, their role should be considered in relation to the game’s core experience rather than treated as evidence of community growth in themselves.
For an independent game, a useful question is whether a customer can enter the hobby, learn the rules, find other participants, and continue playing without depending on rising resale prices or repeated purchases of expensive products.
8.3 Examine the pathway from discovery to long-term engagement
ASCEND Forge can assess a game’s development through the following proposed progression:
DISCOVER → JOIN → PLAY → CREATE → SUPPORT → RETURN
Discover: Introduce the game to a potential audience.
Join: Give interested people a place to connect.
Play: Turn interest into direct experience.
Create: Encourage community contributions and further development.
Support: Enable sustainable production and distribution.
Return: Examine whether the experience continues to attract engagement.
This progression is a proposed operational framework, not a validated model of consumer behavior. Its value is that it encourages publishers to examine the stages between initial visibility and recurring participation.
A project that attracts attention but struggles to move people into actual play may need clearer rules, better onboarding, more accessible demonstrations, or stronger community support.
A project that generates strong initial play but weak retention may need to investigate game balance, session length, social barriers, content cadence, or the availability of opponents.
A project with a committed community but limited commercial sustainability may need a different pricing, distribution, or production strategy. These are different problems and require different responses.
8.4 Distinguish game quality from market conditions
A good game may struggle because it lacks distribution, discoverability, organized play, funding, or effective onboarding. Commercial difficulty alone does not establish that a game is poorly designed.
For ASCEND Forge, the goal should be to understand what helps a worthwhile game become accessible, sustainable, and capable of supporting a lasting community.
9. Limitations and Areas for Further Research
This paper is a preliminary comparative review, not a completed empirical test of the relationship between commercial performance and participation.
The existing research covers different questions, populations, and methods. The Pokémon field study measures card sales within a limited sample. The Princeton thesis analyzes secondary-market pricing. The Magic investment study evaluates selected cards as financial assets. Salonia’s paper provides a theoretical model of publisher and player decisions.
Publisher-reported participation figures add useful operational context, but they are not directly comparable across companies and do not establish causation.
The available evidence does not establish:
The actual proportion of TCG customers who primarily speculate, play, or collect.
A universal threshold at which speculative purchasing begins to harm a game’s community.
Whether secondary-market price declines reliably cause players to leave a game.
Whether organized-play investment alone produces long-term commercial sustainability.
Whether findings from major TCGs apply equally to independent games, board games, and TTRPGs.
The proposed framework would need to be tested using consistent definitions, transparent sampling, and longitudinal data. Future research could also examine the effects of reprints, product rotation, limited editions, release cadence, competitive accessibility, and digital alternatives. Each may influence purchasing and participation in different ways.
The objective is not to assume that one business model is universally correct. It is to identify the conditions under which commercial activity and active participation reinforce one another, and the conditions under which they may diverge.
10. Conclusion
Commercial performance and community participation are related, but they are not interchangeable measures of a tabletop game’s success.
Research into Pokémon card sales demonstrates how revenue can be concentrated among particular products. Research on Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering shows that collectible prices can reflect multiple factors, including scarcity, demand, card characteristics, and financial expectations. Established publishers also demonstrate that participation and community infrastructure can be measured separately from sales.
However, the available evidence does not establish that speculation is inherently harmful or that one particular relationship between investors, collectors, and players is necessary for a successful game.
The more useful question is how publishers can distinguish demand for a product from sustained engagement with the game, and how those dimensions interact over time.
For ASCEND Forge, the practical lesson is to evaluate games not only by the attention they receive or the products they sell, but also by their ability to create meaningful, repeatable, and accessible play experiences.
Collectors, casual customers, investors, and competitive players can all contribute to a game’s ecosystem. Long-term sustainability depends on understanding those audiences, supporting their legitimate interests, and ensuring that commercial decisions do not obscure the needs of the people who actually play.
A sustainable tabletop ecosystem requires more than a successful release. It requires a product people want, an experience they can access, and a community they have reasons to return to.
The Market-to-Play Participation Model provides a preliminary structure for investigating these relationships. Its next stage is empirical testing using defined samples of games, combining commercial data with customer motivation, participation, and retention measures.
This would move the discussion from a general observation about market activity toward a practical, evidence-based approach to evaluating the long-term sustainability of tabletop gaming.
References and Further Reading
[1] Heck, J., Schormann, S., Krichevsky, B., et al. (2026). “Sales characteristics of Pokémon trading cards: A prospective one-year field study.” PLOS ONE, 21(3), e0334289.
Peer-reviewed field study examining Pokémon card sales, pricing, and revenue distribution.
[2] Danz, T. (2026). Gotta Catch ’Em All: How Scarcity, Sentiment, and Secondary Markets Influence Pokémon TCG Financial Dynamics. Princeton University Senior Thesis.
Link: https://theses-dissertations.princeton.edu/entities/publication/d986d830-5826-4523-ad5b-7216a45557bf
Analysis of 4.77 million observations across 138 Pokémon TCG sets, examining rarity, scarcity, character identity, card age, and secondary-market pricing.
[3] Pompei, A., & Nonino, F. (2026). “Trading card games as an alternative asset: portfolio diversification and risk-return analysis.” Journal of Asset Management, 27, Article 35.
Peer-reviewed research analyzing selected Magic: The Gathering cards as financial assets and their relationship with traditional investment markets.
[4] Salonia, E. M. (2017). Magic the Gathering: Economic Analysis of the Market of a Collectible Card Game.
Theoretical economic model examining booster-pack production, player purchasing decisions, card playability, and secondary-market exchange.
[5] Hasbro, Inc. (2026). Magic: The Gathering business and organized-play reporting.
Company-reported organized-play participation and Wizards Play Network store figures through the end of 2025.
[6] Games Workshop Group PLC. (2019). Annual Report 2018–19.
Link: https://investor.games-workshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2018-19-Annual-Report-with-Cover.pdf
Company reporting on Warhammer Alliance and initiatives to introduce new customers to the hobby.
[7] Wizards of the Coast. (2024, December 20). “Thanking Our Community for a Great 2024.” Dungeons & Dragons Beyond.
Company-reported event attendance, first-time players, digital character creation, and other community engagement indicators.
Source Interpretation
The references serve different purposes and should not be treated as equivalent evidence. Academic studies investigate specific market or economic questions, while publisher reports describe company-reported outcomes and practices.
The Market-to-Play Participation Model and the proposed cross-market methodology are analytical proposals developed by ASCEND Forge based on the research reviewed in this paper. They remain preliminary and require further empirical testing.
Published by ASCEND Pro Systems, an ASCEND Forge Research & Development publication.
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