The unofficial best-selling 2025 DriveThruRPG analysis: Human vs AI

This is the third part of our deep dive into the 2025 sales data. So far, we have looked at the individual products that dominated the charts and compiled the unofficial publisher league table to see which companies won the year’s sales battles.

Now, we turn our attention to the ‘how’. DriveThruRPG requires publishers to disclose if a product contains AI-generated content. By cross-referencing this metadata with our unofficial best-seller lists, we can finally answer an industry burning (perhaps also an industry-burning) question: Is AI content actually selling?

Copper best-sellers

Silver best-sellers

Gold best-sellers

Platinum best-sellers

Mithral best-sellers

Adamantine best-sellers

The 2025 data suggest that AI in TTRPGs is currently a “quantity over quality” phenomenon. It is helping more people put products on the digital shelf, but the paying public is still overwhelmingly voting with their wallets for human creativity.

I don’t want to suggest that gamers who want to avoid paying for AI co-produced TTRPGs (DriveThruRPG bans content exclusively produced by AIs) restrict themselves to the metal badge charts, as it is hard enough for indie developers to get noticed already. Still, the data does say that a good and quick way to find a popular and AI-free game is the charts.

As usual, it is worth noting that correlation and causation are different. Publishers with more time and money are less likely to need to use AI and are in a more advantageous position to market a best-selling TTRPG.