Quote from: The Traveller;686674We're less nice to the kind of freewheeling bullshit that is hard currency on rpgnet, but more nice to everyone else, with a few exceptions. Which is a real, significant difference.

If people stick around to find that out, yeah. Underneath the toxic sociopathy, there's interesting discussion, which is why we're all here.

Getting people to stick around is the issue. Obviously we don't need to go RPG.net far.

I've been thinking about this a great deal lately, myself, because I think something drastic has happened to RPGs in the same way as it's happened to conventional publishers. Publishers now have the power to build an immortal backlist.

For the first time in the hobby, it is theoretically possible to have a publisher's entire corpus made easily available to a buyer. You can use OBS to buy every Sine Nomine book ever published just as easily as you can use it to buy the most recent release. Watching my sales numbers, I see it often- some new guy downloads Stars Without Number, and then the next day he's back buying half a dozen books. He doesn't need to worry about whether they're on the FLGS shelves or finding them on ebay, he just clicks the button and gets his book from a reliable, well-known POD printer.

RPGs are essentially impulse purchases to the most financially remunerative chunk of the market. $20 to these customers is something they drop on a whim. If they hear about something, if they notice something on the website, and they can get a $9.99 PDF of the book, they'll hit it just out of idle curiosity. When your entire backlist is sitting right there in front of them, you have a much better chance of making that sale.

Now, combine that immortal backlist with the "do it cheap" publishing ethos. One guy or a small handful of collaborators will put together the game, farm out any art or design work they can't perform themselves, and then pitch it with little to no marketing. These games do not even exist as far as most FLGSes are concerned, let alone mass-market outlets. The only place they[ll ever get sold is through the author's website, OBS, and maybe a few secondary online outlets. Gross sales will be tiny compared to even the minor releases of the bigger publishers. But it's not gross sales that defines your profit- it's gross sales less expenses. Not paying health insurance? That's a saving. Settling for small publisher b/w art and production? That's a saving. Doing your own layout and editing? Saving. By the time you pare your overhead down to the bare essentials and make some compromises you'd rather not make, you can get a product out the door at a ridiculously low cost.

I'll take two of my own products as examples here. I published Skyward Steel around January of 2011. I did all the layout myself in InDesign and shelled out about $50 on stock art for the interior. As of today, the net profits on it are $3,817.81 before taxes. For my my recent campaign book, Suns of Gold, I spent the heftier sum of $300 or so for the art. I released it in early June this year and my profit on it so far has been $2,184.55. These numbers are not going to get me to quit my day job, but they're not trivial, either. And they're not my only products. So far this year I've moved $30K gross sales worth of product, and $21K of that was product with an initial release before January 1st of this year. Hell, my backlist paid off my student loans this year.

So I keep building my backlist, doing callbacks with fresh product and trying to keep as much of it alive and useful to new buyers as I can. The only way I run out of buyers is if I manage to saturate the entire game-buying market with my material, with no new influx of curious buyers or first-time readers. And I have precisely zero inventory or fulfillment costs- that warehouse full of unsalable late-era TSR stuff? Never going to happen to people like me. That's an entire huge chunk of the old industry that simply does not apply to me.

I think it's too early to tell if the "live on your backlist" model is going to be long-term viable, but it seems to be pretty hot with a lot of old publishers on OBS right now. And as it stands now, counting only my after-tax net game income, I'm still making more than the federal poverty level, which is a positive triumph by writer/musician/artist standards. What are those numbers going to look like after another three years of publishing, when my backlist is theoretically three times as large?

Quote from: J Arcane;686672I think there's also a bit of 'People are getting paid to make RPG things and I'm not, therefore those people should lose their jobs and everyone should have to work for free like me.'

You get those people in other writing fields too.

Sounds like an extreme form of "if I can't have something, nobody else can".

Quote from: Ladybird;686691Underneath the toxic sociopathy, there's interesting discussion, which is why we're all here.

If by that you mean conversations without fear of repercussion, I don't see how that would turn anyone off except the kinds of people the hobby is a lot better off without.

Quote from: Ladybird;686691Getting people to stick around is the issue. Obviously we don't need to go RPG.net far.

How do you mean, rpgnet makes zero effort to welcome newcomers, let alone going 'far'. Less than zero in fact, they are actively hostile in case new people might not fit neatly into the hugbox.

QuoteI've been thinking about this a great deal lately, myself, because I think something drastic has happened to RPGs in the same way as it's happened to conventional publishers. Publishers now have the power to build an immortal backlist.

I think this does work, but because of the initial build-up period it takes to make it work, there's a tendency towards shovelware.

IE, guys like LPJ, who do or did indeed make a decent amount of bread but did so because they simply pumped out a new product a week until there was simply so much of it that turning a profit was all but inevitable. There's still a fair few folks pulling this act on OBS to this day.

I think if Bedroom Wall Press is ever going to work it'll have to be the same way you've done with SineNomine: just keep making stuff, until the breadth of product is eventually enough that trickle sales add up well, and the growing visibility and sales build on each other.

The trouble is that I wonder if I can really afford to keep working like this long enough to make that happen. I have a new life that doesn't necessarily get along with 12-hour work days and sub-unemployment levels of income. I'll probably continue to write little stuff here and there to sell in PDF, but I think that my days of doing full-sized releases may soon be at an end. And I think that sucks, because I am nothing if not bloody-minded, and I hate the idea of letting the bastards win.

Quote from: SineNomine;686692I've been thinking about this a great deal lately, myself, because I think something drastic has happened to RPGs in the same way as it's happened to conventional publishers. Publishers now have the power to build an immortal backlist.

For the first time in the hobby, it is theoretically possible to have a publisher's entire corpus made easily available to a buyer. You can use OBS to buy every Sine Nomine book ever published just as easily as you can use it to buy the most recent release. Watching my sales numbers, I see it often- some new guy downloads Stars Without Number, and then the next day he's back buying half a dozen books. He doesn't need to worry about whether they're on the FLGS shelves or finding them on ebay, he just clicks the button and gets his book from a reliable, well-known POD printer.

RPGs are essentially impulse purchases to the most financially remunerative chunk of the market. $20 to these customers is something they drop on a whim. If they hear about something, if they notice something on the website, and they can get a $9.99 PDF of the book, they'll hit it just out of idle curiosity. When your entire backlist is sitting right there in front of them, you have a much better chance of making that sale.

Now, combine that immortal backlist with the "do it cheap" publishing ethos. One guy or a small handful of collaborators will put together the game, farm out any art or design work they can't perform themselves, and then pitch it with little to no marketing. These games do not even exist as far as most FLGSes are concerned, let alone mass-market outlets. The only place they[ll ever get sold is through the author's website, OBS, and maybe a few secondary online outlets. Gross sales will be tiny compared to even the minor releases of the bigger publishers. But it's not gross sales that defines your profit- it's gross sales less expenses. Not paying health insurance? That's a saving. Settling for small publisher b/w art and production? That's a saving. Doing your own layout and editing? Saving. By the time you pare your overhead down to the bare essentials and make some compromises you'd rather not make, you can get a product out the door at a ridiculously low cost.

I'll take two of my own products as examples here. I published Skyward Steel around January of 2011. I did all the layout myself in InDesign and shelled out about $50 on stock art for the interior. As of today, the net profits on it are $3,817.81 before taxes. For my my recent campaign book, Suns of Gold, I spent the heftier sum of $300 or so for the art. I released it in early June this year and my profit on it so far has been $2,184.55. These numbers are not going to get me to quit my day job, but they're not trivial, either. And they're not my only products. So far this year I've moved $30K gross sales worth of product, and $21K of that was product with an initial release before January 1st of this year. Hell, my backlist paid off my student loans this year.

So I keep building my backlist, doing callbacks with fresh product and trying to keep as much of it alive and useful to new buyers as I can. The only way I run out of buyers is if I manage to saturate the entire game-buying market with my material, with no new influx of curious buyers or first-time readers. And I have precisely zero inventory or fulfillment costs- that warehouse full of unsalable late-era TSR stuff? Never going to happen to people like me. That's an entire huge chunk of the old industry that simply does not apply to me.

I think it's too early to tell if the "live on your backlist" model is going to be long-term viable, but it seems to be pretty hot with a lot of old publishers on OBS right now. And as it stands now, counting only my after-tax net game income, I'm still making more than the federal poverty level, which is a positive triumph by writer/musician/artist standards. What are those numbers going to look like after another three years of publishing, when my backlist is theoretically three times as large?

Those are some good numbers.

Actually quite a big larger than I had expected.

Quote from: J Arcane;686678I compared you to Richard Stallman because in a previous G+ convo you basically took his philosophy and applied it to RPG writing, and because you've both made your name by cloning someone else's work.

Ryan Dancey had a goal to increase both his company's profits, and allow other people in the industry to profit from their work too, work that couldn't have been easily published without the OGL he created. He's batshit too (his ideas on game design are just lunacy), just not batshit in the Stallman 'hacker ethic/everything must be FREE, man!' way.

Eh, crowdsourcing a RPG works.  It's light, easy work that anyone can do on a budget of zero.

That's what WOTC are doing right now, of course (on a non-zero budget).

Quote from: Piestrio;686696Those are some good numbers.

Actually quite a big larger than I had expected.

To date, I have made a grand total of about $2500 net in a year and a half of RPG writing, between H&H, Heaven's Shadow, and the KS funds for the soon-to-be-released Arcana Rising.

Which I guess means I'm doing pretty well, by market standards, a fact that is both heartening and disheartening at the same time ...

Quote from: J Arcane;686643When you remove all incentive for success, quality suffers, and then dies, because anyone with any talent finds something else to do that will at least feed and clothe them.  We've been seeing this for as long as RPGs have existed.  Most of the Lake Geneva crew went into insurance or some other equally boring shit. Warren Spector and dozens and dozens of others went into video games. I've talked to at least one or two who went into scriptwriting, and of course there's always those who give up making a published game of their campaigns and modules and write novels or manga or comics about them instead.

The RPG industry is a great way to be a dozenaire.

I know a ton of professionals that have gone on to computer games, or even left games entirely and gone into work in the 'straight' world.  Well-known names are now working at Wells Fargo.

(The computer games part isn't surprising, because that's where I met them)

Quote from: Haffrung;686665Okay, take adventure paths. If Paizo stopped publishing them, would AP fans wake up one morning, give their heads a shake, and start writing their own sandbox adventures? No. They won't. They'll just stop playing/buying because, for various reasons, they don't want their RPG to be that much work.

Well, that's kinda not my point, anyway.  I'm not offended that people are buying APs.  My likelihood of buying anything PF is pretty damn low, really.

My issue here is that I believe (as in, I have no proof) that the products that are put out, and the major needs that they service, are in fact things that will drive away new players.

If the hobby wants to expand, it has to figure out what will attract and retain new players, not just keep the people that have been playing for 10 or 20 years.

And I personally don't believe that linear railroads and a focus on character optimization and hundreds of pages of rules is it.  I think that those things drive new players *away*.

An ideal product for me wouldn't be at all what an ideal product for a new player would be.  I'm not advocating for things *I* want (though in some cases I think that there's overlap.  Personal bias and all that).

Again, I could be wrong.

Quote from: J Arcane;686695The trouble is that I wonder if I can really afford to keep working like this long enough to make that happen. I have a new life that doesn't necessarily get along with 12-hour work days and sub-unemployment levels of income. I'll probably continue to write little stuff here and there to sell in PDF, but I think that my days of doing full-sized releases may soon be at an end. And I think that sucks, because I am nothing if not bloody-minded, and I hate the idea of letting the bastards win.

There's no doubt that it comes at a price. I have a 40-hour day job, but I spend 40 hours a week on Sine Nomine material at the least. I get up, I go to work, I come home, I eat, and then I write/typeset/map/practice until it's time to sleep. And that's what I've been doing for the past two-odd years. If I were in it purely for the money it would be folly, but it's satisfying creation combined with non-trivial monetary recompense. I'm curious to see what I'm going to be able to do after another nine or ten years of this.

Quote from: Piestrio;686696Those are some good numbers.

Actually quite a big larger than I had expected.

Most small publishers make beer money if they're lucky, but if you labor maniacally for years on end, you're going to get paid unless you're totally incompetent. Over the past three years, I've sold a little north of $100K worth of books. And from the sales ranking info on DTRPG, I see that there are dozens of publishers ahead of me in sales- and I know not all of them are "big names".

Quote from: robiswrong;686700I know a ton of professionals that have gone on to computer games, or even left games entirely and gone into work in the 'straight' world.

How much of this can be attributed largely to "burnout"?

Quote from: ggroy;686702How much of this can be attributed largely to "burnout"?

Considering that the guy I'm specifically thinking about is probably a 30 year old vet, and is still producing things in his off time?

I'm going to guess "not"

The majority of the ex-RPG guys I know are still involved in computer/video games.

Quote from: SineNomine;686701There's no doubt that it comes at a price. I have a 40-hour day job, but I spend 40 hours a week on Sine Nomine material at the least. I get up, I go to work, I come home, I eat, and then I write/typeset/map/practice until it's time to sleep. And that's what I've been doing for the past two-odd years. If I were in it purely for the money it would be folly, but it's satisfying creation combined with non-trivial monetary recompense. I'm curious to see what I'm going to be able to do after another nine or ten years of this.

Trouble is, I've a wife now, who already gets stressed out by the amount of attention RPG writing takes away from her, and I've immigrated to a new country in which I'll soon be entering a naturalization program to learn the language.

I just don't think I can do that much work anymore, and I know from experience that trying to part-time it in the off-hours doesn't work for me where creative pursuits are concerned. Once I start something, I have to push through and work it to the end as hard as I can. My family has a history of workaholism, and in me it seems to manifest in how I write.

QuoteMost small publishers make beer money if they're lucky, but if you labor maniacally for years on end, you're going to get paid unless you're totally incompetent. Over the past three years, I've sold a little north of $100K worth of books. And from the sales ranking info on DTRPG, I see that there are dozens of publishers ahead of me in sales- and I know not all of them are "big names".

I could, honestly, genuinely live on that right now, though I dunno how long I could continue to do so or how long my wife would put up with that being my income contribution, which is the other worry. Sales can fluctuate so wildly, that a total like that can sound nice, until you realize that it isn't necessarily spaced out like that and so you really have to play careful with the budget to make it work for you.

I dunno. There was that great piece by Zen Pencils and Watterson that's been floating around about just picking your niche and making happiness work for you, and part of me does want to just keep doing what I do, just because dammit, when it's working it's fun as hell and it seems to be a peculiar specialty for my own writing ability.

I think the first step in deciding how best to proceed in rpg publishing would be to make some sort of attempt to do a study of roleplayrrs demographics. And by that I don't mean people who chat on rpg forums, or go to conventions, but the other 99% of the hobby. I'd enlist the aid of hobby shop retailers, but there would still be a vast demographic that hasn't set foot in a games shop in years. This would have been better in the early 80s when the hobby was mainly focused around college campuses, and I'm not sure how One would approach the task nowadays, but regardless of how titanic an undertaking that might seem, we're basically blindly flailing around in the dark until that happens.

As for the " you're just jealous" theory, even the comparatively rare person able to make a living as an rpg writer/ designer are not making what one could call "good money". I ccertainly don't envy anyone living on less than 100k a year in modern society. I understand them being protective of their jobs and willing to make concessions to do something they love for a pay cheque, but that doesn't mean that it's a correct assumption in any way to conflate the state of the rpg industry with the hobby. The industry is not a lucrative one overall, mainly because the hobby doesn't and never has depended on the industry to thrive. When a (non-independent) publisher expresses concern about "getting more people into the hobby" , I read that as "how can I get more people to buy my books?". And generally speaking, the best way to do that is ignore gamers who actually game and instead try to appeal to people who just read/collect.