Quote from: Necrozius;897846Anything that I do for the hobby is for fun. I have a day job. I'd love to make money off of my amateurish artwork and module writing, because I like my art, my writing and my game module ideas. But I don't see why anyone should pay for my stuff.

My hopes are low because of the endless torrent of stuff on OBS or even on G+ communities. LIke, every day people are churning out shit like "10 magic items!" or "a new prestige class for 5e" and charging money for them. Not sure how I can compete with that, to be honest. I don't have that much free time.

Do what I'm attempting to do. Find the thing that fires you up and do it well.   Quality over quantity.

Quote from: JamesV;897758All fair deals are about mutual consent, and I'm wondering where the power imbalance is in the RPG Publisher/Artist discussion, that would merit the spectre of exploitation? When is a publisher being a cheapskate because they're poor, compared to competition for artists in the market, etc.?

Best post of the thread.  You've uncovered the crux of the entire issue; the artist or writer is free to value their services at whatever price they wish, but the purchaser is under no obligation to accept the offer.  All marked prices are a bid to enter a contract of sale; the seller is free to set the price wherever they wish, and the purchaser, by paying the price, agrees to the contract.

Or not.  Nobody HAS to buy a Cromdamned thing, and especially not a RPG.  This entire thing started with somebody bitching that the market didn't value his work enough to let him make as much money as he wanted to.

This is called "the law of supply and demand in action."

Quote from: Warboss Squee;897752What's a fair price for art?

Whatever the creator accepts.

Different people value their time and efforts differently, often without a recognition of their output's quality.

The problem from a Publisher (especially Self-Publishers) business perspective is balancing the capital spent on art vs. the expected profit from the project. And I don't mean NET profit, I am just talking gross profits necessary to pay back the capital costs.

It's one thing to say "I'm gonna pay artists well" when you know you can move 1,000 units in the first quarter. It's quite another thing to say when you don't know if you can move 100 units in the first year.

EDIT: Let's do some math.

Our example will be the standard $10 PDF thru DriveThru.
They take 30% so you keep $7.

If you paid $20 for each picture and you have 10 pictures, that's $200 in art expense.
Then let's say you spent $100 for the cover. Now it's $300 in art expense.

$300 costs / $7 profit = 43 units must be sold JUST to cover your art costs.

If you had 20 pictures and paid double those rates ($40/pic and $200 cover), then that's $1000 in art and you would need to sell 143 copies to break even on your art costs.

And thus why doing Kickstarters *may* be a good idea.

Kickstarters are great for getting budget to do up-front costs that you can't otherwise cover.  Things like tooling and setup for manufacturing, and, yes, purchasing art.

I'm a bit more skeptical for "fund me while I'm doing the primary development of this".

Quote from: robiswrong;898038I'm a bit more skeptical for "fund me while I'm doing the primary development of this".

This always bothers me, too.  I saw $600k go toward an MMORPG, and I'm fairly sure the developers for that game took the money and ran.  None of them had any game development or programming experience, and the last rumor I heard was that people kept bickering about the lore behind it and firing, re-hiring, then re-firing writers because they couldn't get along.

Quote from: Crüesader;898042This always bothers me, too.  I saw $600k go toward an MMORPG, and I'm fairly sure the developers for that game took the money and ran.  None of them had any game development or programming experience, and the last rumor I heard was that people kept bickering about the lore behind it and firing, re-hiring, then re-firing writers because they couldn't get along.

Even worse there I would expect (thinking about those who paid money towards the Pathfinder MMO beta especially). If a tabletop RPG is incomplete, you could still take what you have and package it up as a PDF. A computer game may be far too unfinished.

Quote from: Lynn;898060Even worse there I would expect (thinking about those who paid money towards the Pathfinder MMO beta especially). If a tabletop RPG is incomplete, you could still take what you have and package it up as a PDF. A computer game may be far too unfinished.

I'm certain.  It's hard for me to judge- the most I've ever contributed is mediocre lore to campaigns and such, so I'm sure that making your 'masterpiece' come to life is a challenge.  However, the issue with this particular MMORPG was that there was little to no transparency.

Quote from: Spinachcat;897991And thus why doing Kickstarters *may* be a good idea.

No, they are not.  Objectively.  They are offering you, the customer a promise, an idea.  And worse, a lot of these people do not have any business sense on how to use the money.

Here's a few common problem about Kickstarters I've noticed:  Too many people want in.  Which means that if they had a deal with a printing house for about a hundred books?  They have to recalculate that deal to cover the suddenly (for example) 1000 orders.  Which suddenly increases the printing cost exponentially, due to the amount of extra material (ink, paper, card stock for covers, so on and so forth) which means the the money they received may not be enough after all.  This has happened.  Multiple times.  And there are too many instances of KS' get a message thanking all the interest and then apologizing because they didn't calculate for that much interest in said project.

And this is assuming it comes out in a timely fashion and people still care about it, and haven't written it off.  So when it does come they're happy that it actually came.

Quote from: Warboss Squee;897752Well here's the question that pops to my mind.  What's a fair price for art?  I would assume that a more established and popular artist would charge more than a new comer, but is the newcomer really getting screwed if the selling price is low so long as they're getting their name out there?

Like anything, its worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it balanced by whatever someone is willing to sell it for.

The whole "getting their name out there" thing is mostly bullshit though. If someone wants to do some art for a project for a low price, good on them, but no one should be acting like they are doing an artist a favour by letting them give you free/cheap art.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;896985I wouldn't call Microsoft owning Windows a monopoly on who owns Windows. Linux runs on pretty much every Macintosh these days. Crazy people could say that Linux has a monopoly on Macs.

FreeBSD runs on Macs IIRC.

Quote from: robiswrong;898038I'm a bit more skeptical for "fund me while I'm doing the primary development of this".

Kevin Crawford of Sine Nomine has laid down the gold standard for RPG kickstarters. His "rough" draft is done before the KS. Everyone who pledges gets access to the rough draft PDF as soon as they pledge and the KS is aimed at buying art...which he then puts in the public domain.

I wouldn't fund a RPG project that isn't effectively done. I'm in a DCC setting KS right now ("Hubris") that wasn't fully complete, but I pledged based on the strength of the author's blog posts (Wrath of Zombie) and based on the updates, I'll be seeing the book soon enough. Here's an example:
https://wrathofzombie.wordpress.com/2013/10/01/land-of-perpetual-stone-and-mire-an-example-of-the-layout-of-hubris/

Personally, I believe his KS would have done better if he had finished his draft beforehand.

The entire reason I have not done a kickstarter for my game is that 99% of it can be done for free, which is what I'm working on. By the time I'd consider asking for funding it will be written and edited in its entirety, and formatted to the point I like it. Any funding would pay for the costs of publishing. This assumes I ever finish it. It's been about 75% there for what seems like an eternity.

The thing with getting your name out there - if a product won't sell enough to pay for its own art, then it probably won't do a good job of getting your name out there. As someone who has released 5 OSR modules, I've had one break the 100 sale barrier at RPGNow, and that only because it was based on HP Lovecraft

Probably better to do free or community stuff, like Petty Gods or maybe something at Dragonsfoot. Those rack up 1000s of downloads.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;898063No, they are not.  Objectively.  They are offering you, the customer a promise, an idea.  And worse, a lot of these people do not have any business sense on how to use the money.

Here's a few common problem about Kickstarters I've noticed:  Too many people want in.  Which means that if they had a deal with a printing house for about a hundred books?  They have to recalculate that deal to cover the suddenly (for example) 1000 orders.  Which suddenly increases the printing cost exponentially, due to the amount of extra material (ink, paper, card stock for covers, so on and so forth) which means the the money they received may not be enough after all.  This has happened.  Multiple times.  And there are too many instances of KS' get a message thanking all the interest and then apologizing because they didn't calculate for that much interest in said project.

And this is assuming it comes out in a timely fashion and people still care about it, and haven't written it off.  So when it does come they're happy that it actually came.

Bizarre reasoning.  Economies of scale is one of the truest things in this human world.  They may have problems because they didn't calculate their costs correctly and their miscalculations multiplied to overcome their scale efficiencies, or they are dealing with amateur printers who can't execute, or unforseen factors conspired against them (USPS price increase for example), but blaming it on being too successful in an error.  Stretch goals have been particularly dangerous for KSers who were insufficiently prepared.  Most new businesses fail, so I don't see why KS would be behave any differently.

Quote from: Teazia;898075Bizarre reasoning.  Economies of scale is one of the truest things in this human world.  They may have problems because they didn't calculate their costs correctly and their miscalculations multiplied to overcome their scale efficiencies, or they are dealing with amateur printers who can't execute, or unforseen factors conspired against them (USPS price increase for example), but blaming it on being too successful in an error.  Stretch goals have been particularly dangerous for KSers who were insufficiently prepared.  Most new businesses fail, so I don't see why KS would be behave any differently.

Because people, the ones who pay for the promises, do.  You're dead on, but the issue that mishaps and mistakes happen way too often.  And a lot of the time, people are paying for a promise of a product that hopefully will be 'good'.  They are NEVER putting money down on something that is tangible.  That is just bad for the consumer, no matter what they want to tell themselves at night to make them feel better about giving their money away.