TheRPGSite

Quote from: David Johansen;686575Anyhow, my belief is that the rpg industry needs a new business model that doesn't do a new edition just for the sake of sales and avoids the endless boom bust cycle of edition changes.  I will go further and suggest that D&D held the top spot for over 30 years without becoming something other than D&D and probably would have held that spot indefinately had it not gone off the rails chasing daisies.

Quote from: LordVreeg;686589hard type of business model to create.  Hell of a discussion there alone.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;686596As long as the customer base needs to have the industry do most of their imagining for them, that business model is DOA.

The current popular trend is to play whatever shit game is receiving the best ongoing support.

Quote from: Piestrio;686598The problem is that game companies are mostly mono-game enterprises.

Roleplaying games should be one element in a bouquet of profitable products.

Hasbro doesn't depend on Monopoly alone for all their revenue and they shouldn't.

WOTC is doing something very smart with the D&D board games, video games, etc...

They need a really good card game next.

Then there isn't the need for the rpg to make huge profits. It just has to reasonable contribute to the bottom line.

For myself, I would be happy to see most of the industry just die already and let the dedicated hobby fans create their own stuff and either sell the PDFs or do limited print runs via Lulu. Treat RPG material like dojinshi in Japan and have most of it be fan-created, with someof the fans becomming risen stars of greater acclaim. Hell, it is what appears to be happening now regardless. Let the Big RPG Industry die and be replaced by the smaller RPG cottage industry.

Quote from: jeff37923;686600Let the Big RPG Industry die and be replaced by the smaller RPG cottage industry.

We're already there, even the bigger names are just cottage industries in the wider world. And with POD anyone can publish anything without needing an actual publisher, there's nothing stopping hobbyists doing what they like.

Merging the two (fan made and 'professional') is a direction that could be taken. Have fans collaborate on work, send it in or publish it, then have larger operations take the best and profit share. It would need some good faith on both sides though.

What I've never understood is why people want the industry to die.  It's like instead of saying "I don't like this stuff, so I won't buy it", it's akin to "I don't like this stuff, so I want it to go away completely, because I can't stand other people liking what I don't like."  I don't like most movies lately, but I don't want Hollywood to die, for instance.

Do people think the lack of major publishers will improve anything?  All that will end up doing is accelerating the hobby's decline.

Quote from: jeff37923;686600For myself, I would be happy to see most of the industry just die already and let the dedicated hobby fans create their own stuff and either sell the PDFs or do limited print runs via Lulu. Treat RPG material like dojinshi in Japan and have most of it be fan-created, with someof the fans becomming risen stars of greater acclaim. Hell, it is what appears to be happening now regardless. Let the Big RPG Industry die and be replaced by the smaller RPG cottage industry.

Which is fine, but then you lose visibility in the market, without large properties to latch onto (D&D, Warhammer, Cthulhu...). Now, people are always going to roleplay, but fan communities don't need to spend money on books and dice to do that and are small enough to stay under the IP lawyer's radar...

Don't get me wrong, I'd rather have more Crawford than Mearls, but the D&D brand name still counts for a lot more than solid design work, when it comes to first impressions.

The hideous secret of the RPG industry is that it sells nothing that you actually need... and even if you do buy something, you can get a huge amount of mileage out of it and never need to buy anything else. It's just too much good value.

Quote from: JRT;686608What I've never understood is why people want the industry to die.  It's like instead of saying "I don't like this stuff, so I won't buy it", it's akin to "I don't like this stuff, so I want it to go away completely, because I can't stand other people liking what I don't like."  I don't like most movies lately, but I don't want Hollywood to die, for instance.

Do people think the lack of major publishers will improve anything?  All that will end up doing is accelerating the hobby's decline.

I don't understand that either. It's nice having an industry, even if there are products that I don't particularly like. I don't want to get in the way of other people having fun.

Quote from: JRT;686608What I've never understood is why people want the industry to die.  It's like instead of saying "I don't like this stuff, so I won't buy it", it's akin to "I don't like this stuff, so I want it to go away completely, because I can't stand other people liking what I don't like."  I don't like most movies lately, but I don't want Hollywood to die, for instance.

Do people think the lack of major publishers will improve anything?  All that will end up doing is accelerating the hobby's decline.

The only reason you'd cheer for the death of major publishers is (and I'm playing a bit of Devil's Advocate here) if you think that the decisions they make in regards to the game, due to what you want in games, are actively harmful to the hobby.

That's a position I hold to a *certain* extent.  I think monetization of power is a terrible influence on the hobby, and I think that linear "adventure paths" are also a bad influence on the hobby.  But I wouldn't go so far as to say "I hope they go out of business".

Quote from: JRT;686608What I've never understood is why people want the industry to die.  It's like instead of saying "I don't like this stuff, so I won't buy it", it's akin to "I don't like this stuff, so I want it to go away completely, because I can't stand other people liking what I don't like."  I don't like most movies lately, but I don't want Hollywood to die, for instance.

No, it isn't that personal to me. I just do not think that the industry is really needed anymore outside of large events like conventions.

Quote from: JRT;686608Do people think the lack of major publishers will improve anything?  All that will end up doing is accelerating the hobby's decline.

So how about instead of a top down profit motivated splatbook mill, there is a bottom up grassroots hobby demonstration movement? I don't see the industry advocating that even though there is a lot of activity by do-it-yourself types.

Quote from: Ladybird;686609Which is fine, but then you lose visibility in the market.

I hate to break this to you, but we have already lost visibility in the market.

Quote from: robiswrong;686618The only reason you'd cheer for the death of major publishers is (and I'm playing a bit of Devil's Advocate here) if you think that the decisions they make in regards to the game, due to what you want in games, are actively harmful to the hobby.

That's a position I hold to a *certain* extent.  I think monetization of power is a terrible influence on the hobby, and I think that linear "adventure paths" are also a bad influence on the hobby.  But I wouldn't go so far as to say "I hope they go out of business".

Case in point here. FFG's version of Star Wars RPG. I would consider its design exclusionary of the hobby based on its task resolution system and their relience on gimmick dice. Harder to grow the hobby with that high profile entertainment property married to a crap game.

As long as there's enough compulsive collectors regularly buying rpg books, there will be an rpg industry.  Even if such compulsive collectors do not even use their books in any rpg games.

Quote from: jeff37923;686600For myself, I would be happy to see most of the industry just die already and let the dedicated hobby fans create their own stuff and either sell the PDFs or do limited print runs via Lulu. Treat RPG material like dojinshi in Japan and have most of it be fan-created, with someof the fans becomming risen stars of greater acclaim. Hell, it is what appears to be happening now regardless. Let the Big RPG Industry die and be replaced by the smaller RPG cottage industry.

+1000

Been saying that for years.

I think the biggest downsides to losing the larger name companies is you are going to lose some big licenses that are good for bringing people into the hobby.

For instance: Star Wars games have brought more of my friends into the RP fold than any other game.

No self-publishing amateur is going to be able to secure a license like that.

From the first thread:

QuoteThe problem is that game companies are mostly mono-game enterprises.

Roleplaying games should be one element in a bouquet of profitable products.

Hasbro doesn't depend on Monopoly alone for all their revenue and they shouldn't.

WOTC is doing something very smart with the D&D board games, video games, etc...

They need a really good card game next.

Then there isn't the need for the rpg to make huge profits. It just has to reasonable contribute to the bottom line.

Quote from: jeff37923;686623I hate to break this to you, but we have already lost visibility in the market.

Not quite. Don't be so defeatist.

Google "warhammer roleplay", and you'll get an RPG of our kind (Insert pointless week-long "It's an RPG, "It's a board game", "It's a three-layer pepperoni and mushroom pizza" argument here). Google "harry potter roleplay", and you'll get a writing community.

Quote from: Emperor Norton;686628For instance: Star Wars games have brought more of my friends into the RP fold than any other game.

No self-publishing amateur is going to be able to secure a license like that.

Wonder how much West End Games was paying for the Star Wars license back in the late 1980's and 1990's.

Or for that matter, how much was FASA paying for the Star Trek license back in the 1980's.

Quote from: ggroy;686635Wonder how much West End Games was paying for the Star Wars license back in the late 1980's and 1990's.

Or for that matter, how much was FASA paying for the Star Trek license back in the 1980's.

1. WEG was an established entity, having already produced board game/wargames and RPGs with good production values.
2. Star Wars was a successful trilogy of movies, but not the multimedia franchise juggernaut it is today.

Basically: The market is not the same, the license is not the same, WEG was in no way an amateur operation (at least, no more than everyone else was at the time at any rate), and even then you aren't going to get a license like what it is now for the price WEG got it then.

Quote from: JRT;686608What I've never understood is why people want the industry to die.  It's like instead of saying "I don't like this stuff, so I won't buy it", it's akin to "I don't like this stuff, so I want it to go away completely, because I can't stand other people liking what I don't like."  I don't like most movies lately, but I don't want Hollywood to die, for instance.

Do people think the lack of major publishers will improve anything?  All that will end up doing is accelerating the hobby's decline.

The hobby isn't in decline, it's only the industry that's ever been in decline and that's because once upon a time D& D was a fad, and everyone seems to think that's something that could/should be replicated. The hobby is doing just fine.

Wanting the industry to " die " doesn't mean wanting any particular game to go away. It means wanting to get rid of the commercial approach to games that leads to cripple ware, splat-based games, the "new edition as new game" syndrome, and the vile politics one inevitably finds when banal, unimaginative, contemptuous Suits involve themselves in a hobby they have no business in, and this eventually extends outwards as the publishing hobby targets demographics that are great for sales and horrible for the hobby.

I don't want less games. I don't see how there could be. Everyday gamers are writing their own, and the Internet means that it's very easy to share those games with the hobby as a whole. Meanwhile in Chapters bookstore, the entire hobby is represented by a 4 foot shelf of D&D 4th and PF, maybe a d20 game that's escaped the discount bin.

For most musicians, making music isn't a business.  RPGs are a lot like the music industry: you can reach quite a wide audience with your work, but it's hard to monetise very effectively, because you're competing with people who'll happily do a pretty good job for free.

Quote from: Emperor Norton;6866381. WEG was an established entity, having already produced board game/wargames and RPGs with good production values.
2. Star Wars was successful trilogy of movies, but not the multimedia franchise juggernaut it is today.

Basically: The market is not the same, the license is not the same, WEG was in no way an amateur operation, and even then you aren't going to get a license like what it is now for the price WEG got it then.

But you might get a good price on Ghostbusters :)

Quote from: TristramEvans;686641But youight get a good price on Ghostbusters :)

Ha. Yes. You probably could.

(on the subject of licenses that probably wouldn't be terribly expensive that I wish someone else would get. Please, god, can someone besides Palladium acquire the Robotech RPG License :/)

Quote from: JRT;686608What I've never understood is why people want the industry to die.  It's like instead of saying "I don't like this stuff, so I won't buy it", it's akin to "I don't like this stuff, so I want it to go away completely, because I can't stand other people liking what I don't like."  I don't like most movies lately, but I don't want Hollywood to die, for instance.

Do people think the lack of major publishers will improve anything?  All that will end up doing is accelerating the hobby's decline.

Bingo.

The doujin scene is a false comparison. Talented doujin writers get picked up by studios and get paid money that will buy them things like food and heat and an apartment slightly bigger than a breadbox. They make those doujin in the hopes that someone will notice them and start paying them something they might live on.

Kill the big publishers, and that dies.  The motivation perishes, because there is no pay off for success or talent, just more poverty and obscurity.  You can't maintain a creative field like that, you just can't.  Even penniless painters might be able to count on posthumous respect and fame.

When 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.

Everyone of any real talent leaves the industry sooner or later, because it's not feasible to keep with it. Making games is a shitload of work, for no pay, and when you tell people that maybe that isn't so hot, or try some other way to fund that work like Kickstarter, for every one person that ponies up there's another dozen entitled jerks who take offense to the idea that games shouldn't just come flowing freely to their eyeballs out of the goodness of a designer's heart.  

OP's 'dream scenario' is already happening, and the mess that's left is what comes of it, and its only going to get worse.  There's such a brain drain now that even the big publishers have stopped giving a shit whether the actual words or rules of their games are any damn good: look at how lovingly 'edited' FFG's games are.

And hey, I don't blame them. Barring a major sales push on release I'll have made less than a penny a word on Arcana Rising. I made less on the Kickstarter than I would've collected in unemployment. You can babble all you want about 'well you shouldn't go into RPGs to make money!' but FFG is. WOTC is. WW is. It's just not going to the people doing the work.

And as long as that's the case, it's only gonna go downhill from here.

Quote from: P&P;686640For most musicians, making music isn't a business.  RPGs are a lot like the music industry: you can reach quite a wide audience with your work, but it's hard to monetise very effectively, because you're competing with people who'll happily do a pretty good job for free.

Can the same be said about individuals who write open source software (using the GPL or BSD licenses)?

As for a model that would bring rpg's to a greater audience market- I don't know, maybe an introductory video showing normal people playing and having a blast, something other than pretending they are bad ren-fair actors.  Something basic to get a total new person started other than the brain melting "what is a role-playing game?" filler that gets stuck in the beginning.

"....  like playing cops and robbers when you were a kid!"  Doesn't exactly get people's blood pumping to play these days and kinda makes the whole thing seem like it's just a kid's game.

Quote from: P&P;686640For most musicians, making music isn't a business.  RPGs are a lot like the music industry: you can reach quite a wide audience with your work, but it's hard to monetise very effectively, because you're competing with people who'll happily do a pretty good job for free.

Those other musicians are doing it for free because they hope to get enough attention to one day not have to. If they were economically smart, they wouldn't, and increasingly other creative fields like graphic design and other writing fields are realizing that.

Quote from: ggroy;686650Can the same be said about individuals who write open source software (using the GPL or BSD licenses)?

Well, I'm curious to hear P&P's response since if he's who I think he is, he's basically the Richard Stallman of roleplaying design.

But what he probably won't bring up is the part where most OSS programmers are in fact paid, and paid well, either in selling support for the otherwise 'free' product, or as paid software teams at commercial companies who pay for teams on staff to contribute to the codebase.  That's been the way for years. The bulk of OSS software in wide use is basically commercial software, at least on the developer end, even if the end result to the consumer user is downloaded free.

Quote from: J Arcane;686643Everyone of any real talent leaves the industry sooner or later, because it's not feasible to keep with it. Making games is a shitload of work, for no pay, and when you tell people that maybe that isn't so hot, or try some other way to fund that work like Kickstarter, for every one person that ponies up there's another dozen entitled jerks who take offense to the idea that games shouldn't just come flowing freely to their eyeballs out of the goodness of a designer's heart.

Harsh but I feel with more than a grain of truth to it. The only problem I'd have with that is the notion that 'big' publishers are ever going to be able to pay for top talent as things stand, or even hungry new talent.

Boardgames are undergoing a great renaissance right now, a resurgence in popularity. Just like happened back in the 80s and 90s, people are deciding that boxes going 'bing' are less interesting than their fellow human beings.

Why aren't RPGs leading the charge there?

There's a deeply dysfunctional culture associated with RPGs which brings a stigma of its own, to a certain extent. A good example of that is rpgnet, people more addicted to chasing phantom demons their lecturer told them about and playing dimestore politics so they can feel like their lives have some sort of meaning rather than going out there and living them.

It would help a great deal if the hobby could cut all ties with academia and nerdiness in general and develop an 'everyman' appeal. They're costing far more than they bring in. It won't ever be a world-straddling colossus of profitability mind you but it should certainly be able to hold its own, at a minimum.

Quote from: The Traveller;686658There's a deeply dysfunctional culture associated with RPGs which brings a stigma of its own, to a certain extent. A good example of that is rpgnet, people more addicted to chasing phantom demons their lecturer told them about and playing dimestore politics so they can feel like their lives have some sort of meaning rather than going out there and living them.

It would help a great deal if the hobby could cut all ties with academia and nerdiness in general and develop an 'everyman' appeal. They're costing far more than they bring in. It won't ever be a world-straddling colossus of profitability mind you but it should certainly be able to hold its own, at a minimum.

There's a lot of truth in your statement here.  How many new people interested in rpg's went to rpgnet and recoiled in horror and dropped a potentially new hobby like a hot rock?

I'd personally rather RPGs not associate with the lowest common denominator. I prefer to play with nerds and academics.

Quote from: TristramEvans;686661I'd personally rather RPGs not associate with the lowest common denominator. I prefer to play with nerds and academics.

If I wanted to hang out with the proletariat, I'd have picked up football.

*adjusts his top hat*

Quote from: RunningLaser;686660There's a lot of truth in your statement here.  How many new people interested in rpg's went to rpgnet and recoiled in horror and dropped a potentially new hobby like a hot rock?

That would be a good example of the lowest common denominator. Heck, the mods said EXACTLY that. Can't be bothered to go there to find the quote, but Kai Tav and Ettin both specifically championed the LCD as the ideal for RPGs, in those words. RPGnet is hostile to geeks and Academia (actual academia, not college age SJWs).Several posters displayed outright hostility to the idea that someone needs an imagination to play.

Quote from: TristramEvans;686661I'd personally rather RPGs not associate with the lowest common denominator. I prefer to play with nerds and academics.

Football hooligans aren't noted for their monopoly skills. I'm not talking about dumbing down the hobby, just moving it away from the basement dweller and the frustrated late thirties early forties academic for whom life didn't work out the way they had planned. Most board games are middle class pastimes - RPGs are a much more narrowly defined niche. And that brings along a lot of baggage we'd all be better off without.

Quote from: JRT;686608What I've never understood is why people want the industry to die.  It's like instead of saying "I don't like this stuff, so I won't buy it", it's akin to "I don't like this stuff, so I want it to go away completely, because I can't stand other people liking what I don't like."  I don't like most movies lately, but I don't want Hollywood to die, for instance.

Do people think the lack of major publishers will improve anything?  All that will end up doing is accelerating the hobby's decline.

You see this all time on RPG forums. In a thread about a publisher or publishing, people chime in with contempt for the very act of commercial publishing. Why give a fuck about something you claim to not give a fuck about?

The answer is the haters do give a fuck. They give a fuck that what is popular is not what they like. And that hurts their feelings.

Quote from: robiswrong;686618That's a position I hold to a *certain* extent.  I think monetization of power is a terrible influence on the hobby, and I think that linear "adventure paths" are also a bad influence on the hobby.  But I wouldn't go so far as to say "I hope they go out of business".

Okay, 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.

Quote from: TristramEvans;686639I don't want less games. I don't see how there could be. Everyday gamers are writing their own, and the Internet means that it's very easy to share those games with the hobby as a whole.

It's easy to share them with people who are already in the know, who spend hours a week on RPG forums clicking around and looking for PDFs. But you won't grow the hobby that way, or even stem the natural attrition and decline. Some 14-year-old isn't going to out of the blue decide to visit Dragonsfoot or some other dusty corner of the web and start downloading an RPG supplement hacked together by an underemployed book store clerk in his spare time.

You know how I found out about D&D? An interview with Gary Gygax in People magazine.

Quote from: J Arcane;686643Kill the big publishers, and that dies.  The motivation perishes, because there is no pay off for success or talent, just more poverty and obscurity.  You can't maintain a creative field like that, you just can't.  Even penniless painters might be able to count on posthumous respect and fame.

When 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.

Everyone of any real talent leaves the industry sooner or later, because it's not feasible to keep with it. Making games is a shitload of work, for no pay, and when you tell people that maybe that isn't so hot, or try some other way to fund that work like Kickstarter, for every one person that ponies up there's another dozen entitled jerks who take offense to the idea that games shouldn't just come flowing freely to their eyeballs out of the goodness of a designer's heart.  

OP's 'dream scenario' is already happening, and the mess that's left is what comes of it, and its only going to get worse.  There's such a brain drain now that even the big publishers have stopped giving a shit whether the actual words or rules of their games are any damn good: look at how lovingly 'edited' FFG's games are.

And hey, I don't blame them. Barring a major sales push on release I'll have made less than a penny a word on Arcana Rising. I made less on the Kickstarter than I would've collected in unemployment. You can babble all you want about 'well you shouldn't go into RPGs to make money!' but FFG is. WOTC is. WW is. It's just not going to the people doing the work.

And as long as that's the case, it's only gonna go downhill from here.

Bingo. I hate to be all uncool and traditional, but you get what you pay for. 99 per cent of free shit you find on the net is worthless. My time has value. I'm willing to exchange money - real money - to not have to spend hours and hours sorting through ugly, badly-designed, amateur PDFs in the hopes of finding a diamond in the turd. Most commercial stuff is crap as well, but at least it has gone through some sort of vetting process (unless you're Goodman Games), and the writers and editors have some sort of semi-professional track record. And maybe it has even been designed and layed out in a manner that recognizes it's not 1993 anymore and presentation is inseparable from usability.

The people who don't need a viable publishing industry are the hardcore DIY gamers and those with more time than money. That's not a population that can sustain the hobby in the long run. If you don't think a once-popular hobby can shrink into being a non-viable, largely solo endeavour, just take a look at historical wargamers. Their big annual convention attracts about 200 guys, and almost every one has grey hair. And for a lot of them, that weekend is the only time they can actually play face-to-face, because the network of players has collapsed.

What business model should RPGs adopt? Whatever makes them the most money. Because that will mean:

A) People like their products enough to pay for them.

and

B) They will be profitable enough to employ professionals.

Quote from: RunningLaser;686660There's a lot of truth in your statement here.  How many new people interested in rpg's went to rpgnet and recoiled in horror and dropped a potentially new hobby like a hot rock?

Yeah, like we're so much nicer.

Quote from: Haffrung;686665You see this all time on RPG forums. In a thread about a publisher or publishing, people chime in with contempt for the very act of commercial publishing. Why give a fuck about something you claim to not give a fuck about?

The answer is the haters do give a fuck. They give a fuck that what is popular is not what they like. And that hurts their feelings.

I 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.

QuoteIt's easy to share them with people who are already in the know, who spend hours a week on RPG forums clicking around and looking for PDFs. But you won't grow the hobby that way, or even stem the natural attrition and decline. Some 14-year-old isn't going to out of the blue decide to visit Dragonsfoot or some other dusty corner of the web and start downloading an RPG supplement hacked together by an underemployed book store clerk in his spare time.

Well, I did, but I fully admit two things: 1. I'm weird, and 2. the internet, believe it or not, was easier to find shit like that on in those days.

I could spend 5 minutes Googling and find lots of fun shit for free, because the hosting options were more accessible, and you weren't competing for as many eyes. Of course, a lot of the free shit wasn't actually very good, and some of it was maybe not even playable, but oddly despite everyone crowing about how amazing it is now for free fandom made stuff, I just am not seeing it.  

And the reason we're not seeing it is because the means of commercial distribution have become as democratized as free distribution was in the old days, and people want to be paid for their work.  And I refuse to believe those people are wrong for that.  I used to complain about it, but then I wrote an RPG.  Now I wonder what the hell anyone in the 90s was thinking, putting up whole books for free like that.

Quote from: J Arcane;686656Well, I'm curious to hear P&P's response since if he's who I think he is, he's basically the Richard Stallman of roleplaying design.

Wow.  Well, that's really rather flattering and I'm actually slightly embarrassed by it, but the Richard Stallman of roleplaying design is Ryan Dancey.  And the Linus Torvald of roleplaying design is Matt Finch.  I'm the Who-The-Fuck-Is-Stuart-Marshall? of roleplaying design; I'm just a fan.  I come here to argue about silly elf games and call the RPGnet mods a bunch of wankers.

I'm afraid you'll be disappointed in my response to ggroy, which is just:

Quote from: ggroy;686650Can the same be said about individuals who write open source software (using the GPL or BSD licenses)?

I really wouldn't know, I'm afraid.  I'm a Linux user, but I'm definitely an end-user sort of person, not a tech industry sort of person.  I presume that software coders get paid somehow but I've never been interested in the details.

But ask me how musicians make money, and I can tell you the answer: they don't.  A musician is someone who packs £2,000 worth of kit into a van and drives 100 miles to play, in return for a fee of £50 and a rider.

Quote from: Ladybird;686671Yeah, like we're so much nicer.

We'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.

Quote from: Rincewind1;686662If I wanted to hang out with the proletariat, I'd have picked up football.

These days and in the future:  the population depicted in the movie "Idiocracy".

(ie. More "Ow! My Balls!", monster trucks, etc ...)  

 :rolleyes:

Quote from: The Traveller;686658Boardgames are undergoing a great renaissance right now, a resurgence in popularity. Just like happened back in the 80s and 90s, people are deciding that boxes going 'bing' are less interesting than their fellow human beings.

Why aren't RPGs leading the charge there?

There's a deeply dysfunctional culture associated with RPGs which brings a stigma of its own, to a certain extent.

Indeed. Why aren't RPGs getting lift from the tabletop gaming boom?

Part of it is that boardgamers tend to actually play games - a lot - and this makes them quite happy and enthusiastic. This enthusiasm is infectious, and attracts other happy, socially literate people. RPGs dirty little secret is how many people in the hobby aren't even playing. It's why forums are so rife with bitter-non-gamer syndrome.

Many of those who do play are twitchy hardcores who aren't exactly great ambassadors for the hobby. Even the most popular RPG in the hobby is dominated by hardcores to the extent that the publisher is sustaining atomic nerdrage over proposed efforts to make the game more accessible.

Quote from: P&P;686673Wow.  Well, that's really rather flattering and I'm actually slightly embarrassed by it, but the Richard Stallman of roleplaying design is Ryan Dancey.  And the Linus Torvald of roleplaying design is Matt Finch.  I'm the Who-The-Fuck-Is-Stuart-Marshall? of roleplaying design; I'm just a fan.  I come here to argue about silly elf games and call the RPGnet mods a bunch of wankers.

I 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.

Quote from: The Traveller;686664the frustrated late thirties early forties academic for whom life didn't work out the way they had planned.

Would these be the frustrated professors who feel they have to win a Nobel Prize in order to be completely fulfilled and whole in their lives + careers?

Quote from: Haffrung;686677Part of it is that boardgamers tend to actually play games - a lot - and this makes them quite happy and enthusiastic. This enthusiasm is infectious, and attracts other happy, socially literate people. RPGs dirty little secret is how many people in the hobby aren't even playing. It's why forums are so rife with bitter-non-gamer syndrome.

Agreed. They come to this hobby looking for something other than gaming and if it doesn't fit their expectations they'll by god form their own hug-circles where it's all okay, shrieking at anyone not part of their mental construct until they go away.

As unofficial anything, I would like to send them this message: please fuck off.

Quote from: ggroy;686679Would these be the frustrated professors who feel they have to win a Nobel Prize in order to be completely fulfilled and whole in their lives + careers?

If they were professors they wouldn't be frustrated. Most of these people are completely unemployable.

Quote from: The Traveller;686682If they were professors they wouldn't be frustrated. Most of these people are completely unemployable.

As in adjunct lecturers or postdocs?

Quote from: ggroy;686684As in adjunct lecturers or postdocs?

As in graduating at all would be a step up.

Quote from: J Arcane;686685As in graduating at all would be a step up.

Correct.

Quote from: The Traveller;686682If they were professors they wouldn't be frustrated.

There's plenty of frustrated professors too.

Especially individuals who work in highly theoretical and/or mathematical areas.  They can't all be Einsteins or Hilberts.

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.

Quote from: ggroy;686650Can the same be said about individuals who write open source software (using the GPL or BSD licenses)?

In a way, basically the best of open source software wind up with the connections to find a good job. Some will find somebody is willing them to pay them to do what they do full time because they get benefit from the software.

Music anybody can heard it and appreciate it if they like. It more complex with software particularly for backend stuff. So people are willing to pay the open source developers to come and configure the software for their particular circumstances. Along with other forms of support.

Some parts of RPGs are like music and others are like software. What going to be interesting is seeing how it all shakes out over the next decade.

I think what is going to become more important is personalized service. Making for somebody or a relatively small group of people (like kickstarter backers) a product tailored to their needs.

When you think RPG publishing you think a person or a team producing a product that is consumed by many. Well with the capital cost of everything so low except for the time you have to put in is somebody going to be able to make a living offering custom creations for individual gamers or very small groups?

Will talk to this later.  
Have been busy, work, family, etc....but my actual work title includes trend advisor and category analyst.   Much of my job is involved with this kind of stuff, albeit at a different scale.

As one as RPGs and their followers are open to technology like roll20 and other means of communications, as long as they approve of toolkit systems, and approve of innovation they will thrive and the industry will thrive, mutate, encompass, and grow.

The opposite is also true.  The micro diversity describe before (friggin card games and such) is so small minded.... It must include so much more, and each system must stop trying to stand so much alone and work towards a good natured, compartmentalism rivalry.

Hmmm...looks like I started something...

Anyhow, Kickstarter interests me.  I really wonder where it will take us.  The capacity of distributors and retailers to strangle the free market is massively diminished now.  The internet alone started that but they still had a hold on the gateway.  I'm not so sure now.  I'll be very interested to see how Reaper's Bones line effects things.  For the first time in a very long time, individual miniatures and small packs are affordable again.  For every person I know who got in on the KS there are ten who wish they had.  My distributor has restocked Traveller V for the third time this summer.  Three restocks in two months for a game with a terrible on-line reputation.

What is happening is that the market is actually taking control of production.  No longer are companies restrained by the retailers looking at their table at GAMA and saying "sorry, no, that won't work, nobody wants that"  Now you can get out on the internet and shout, "Hey out there!  Anyone want this?" and they'll send you money.

Naturally it's in the honeymoon phase now but I think dependable manufacturers and producers who meet their targets will do well and fly by night new guys will have to fight pretty hard to get funded.  That's why I think GW needs to sweat a bit about Mantic.  Sure they aren't quite in the same league but they ship on time.

Quote from: TristramEvans;686714I 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.

That would be a start.

I think the more interesting bit is actually "potential roleplayers".  People who aren't roleplayers, but are open to the idea.

Quote from: TristramEvans;686719As 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".

As I said, I know a number of people that left the RPG industry.  They didn't leave because they got sick of sitting on mounds of cash.  And these people weren't unknown hacks working on some minor supplement to an unknown game.

So, I think there's three tiers of the coming industry.

1 - Big Comercial Producers - we still need these guys to bring in new people

2 - Mid Tier On Line Producers - Formerly first and third tier companies

3 - Micro Breweries - Mad men, terrorists, and artists

I expect that some of the mid tier companies will actually make more money than they ever could in the old system.

Here's the problem.

We need the comercial tier to bring in new people.  They should want that too.  They need to look at the world's population and realize how small a niche gaming is and try to broaden it.  There's lots of room for the second and third tier guys in providing more for those who want it but the big guys need to be focused on bringing in new people it's the only model that works for them because trying to milk the long tail is just plain stupid.  They need to believe that rpgs can bring in more new people and work towards that.

Don't get me wrong.  I'd like, nay love, to see a third tier company become the next big fad and find themselves bringing in new gamers.  In practice though, they lack the finances for marketing and promotion not to mention the capital to ramp up production.  Of course, if they accomplish this with a pdf the sky is the limit so I think it's worthwhile to try.

Quote from: robiswrong;686728That would be a start.

I think the more interesting bit is actually "potential roleplayers".  People who aren't roleplayers, but are open to the idea.

that's an interesting idea. In that case surveying college and high school campuses and bookstores might even be a viable approach.

Quote from: David Johansen;686729So, I think there's three tiers of the coming industry.

1 - Big Comercial Producers - we still need these guys to bring in new people

2 - Mid Tier On Line Producers - Formerly first and third tier companies

3 - Micro Breweries - Mad men, terrorists, and artists

I expect that some of the mid tier companies will actually make more money than they ever could in the old system.

Here's the problem.

We need the comercial tier to bring in new people.  They should want that too.  They need to look at the world's population and realize how small a niche gaming is and try to broaden it.  There's lots of room for the second and third tier guys in providing more for those who want it but the big guys need to be focused on bringing in new people it's the only model that works for them because trying to milk the long tail is just plain stupid.  They need to believe that rpgs can bring in more new people and work towards that.

Don't get me wrong.  I'd like, nay love, to see a third tier company become the next big fad and find themselves bringing in new gamers.  In practice though, they lack the finances for marketing and promotion not to mention the capital to ramp up production.  Of course, if they accomplish this with a pdf the sky is the limit so I think it's worthwhile to try.

some level of wisdom is here.
They will bring more with them, and a linking with other lucrative (to them) platforms.  there is a chance this will bring a lot to the game.  

A chance

My personal experience is that most roleplayrrs are inducted into the hobby. It's , I think, comparatively rare for someone to just buy an rpg and get to it ( and before anyone here chimes in with "that's how I got started", I don't believe for a second that those of us who talk on rpg forums are in any way typical), from my experience (again, with no other info, thats all I have to go on. As always, ymmv).

That said, if there's one rpg that SHOULD be "random person on the street"-friendly that's D&D. D&D is the gateway drug. We still need our pushers though. I have over my life introduced everyone I've ever been friends with (and not trying to boink) to RPGs. About 50% either try it once, or play with me but don't continue on their own. But the other 50% has led to at the least about 100 new gamers since HS.

I like a big damn fancy new edition of D&D every several years.  I like having shitloads of other games to choose from whenever I am not feeling the D&D kick.  The industry as it stands works darn tootin' good for me.  Only thing I would change is for WotC to go ahead and publish their new edition already.

If you want to grow things, RPGs need referral and GM programs.

Give benefit to people who are actually going out there and running games.

I attempted to start a program to reward GMs who play BWP's games with free stuff, but I never got any takers, probably because confirming it is a hassle and BWP didn't have much free stuff to give.

Despite what came of 4e itself, all the reports I've heard were that the Encounters program got more people in stores and actually gaming than anything has in years. That was smart of them.

Quote from: J Arcane;686807I attempted to start a program to reward GMs who play BWP's games with free stuff, but I never got any takers, probably because confirming it is a hassle and BWP didn't have much free stuff to give.

I think Pathfinder has a 'Venture Captain' programme where countries and regions have a single person in charge of recruiting. I don't know that they're financially compensated, but they probably are getting a commission.

Quote from: jeff37923;686600For myself, I would be happy to see most of the industry just die already and let the dedicated hobby fans create their own stuff and either sell the PDFs or do limited print runs via Lulu. Treat RPG material like dojinshi in Japan and have most of it be fan-created, with someof the fans becomming risen stars of greater acclaim. Hell, it is what appears to be happening now regardless. Let the Big RPG Industry die and be replaced by the smaller RPG cottage industry.

Personally, I like Piestro's idea from the thread which inspired this: game companies need to see their RPGs as one prong of a franchise. Wizards almost certainly don't earn enough from the D&D RPG to satisfy Hasbro's investment in the brand name, and it's entirely possible that they never have - but they've used the brand name recognition to create board games, miniatures games, licence out videogames, and so on, and I think when you factor in all that revenue it becomes easier to justify D&D's existence to Hasbro.

If your tabletop RPG's setting is evocative enough, it can support all sorts of other games. If it isn't evocative enough, then you should reconsider publishing it in the first place. (Obviously, if you're deliberately making a generic game this model doesn't work, but even then companies like SJG have always understood that RPGs are not the only fruit.)

A few random thoughts ...

* I'm solidly in the "hobby's doing just fine" camp.  Look, folks: it was never the case that "RPGs" were wildly popular.  It's that for a short period -- and a period that passed more than twenty years ago now -- a whopping lot of people played AD&D.  We haven't been a fad provoking a national media buzz for a long time now, and we're never going to be that again.  It's high time that we accept that we're a niche hobby, and as a niche hobby, we're going to survive as well and as happily as every other niche hobby.

* Do today's table-top gamers really WANT newcomers around? Newcomers won't play the same games that have Always Been Played, with the same kinds of adventures that have Always Been Done. They won't necessarily buy into our received wisdom, or sit down and shut up like good little newbies and wait their collective turns. Their paradigms aren't going to be Moorcock, Vance and JRRT.  They're going to want to play games that look like Twilight or evoke WoW.  Sure you're up for that?

* On the jealousy issue: what sports fan hasn't sat up in his chair and cursed the blunderings of the home team, insistent that the player or the coach is a bum, and that he could do better himself? This derives from the fact that a majority of the men and a growing number of the women in this country at one point in their youths held a baseball bat, kicked a soccer ball or threw a football. It isn't THAT hard, they think, and so they figure they know all about it.

In like fashion, a lot of GMs write (or have written) their own scenarios and adventures. They have a notion how it's done, and they then read a product and mutter, "I could do a better job." Figure that in with the sheer number of semi-pros out there. Very few of you, I imagine, have book authors as personal friends (I've only two myself) ... but there've been seven published authors of GURPS products alone who've been regular players of mine or in whose campaigns I've played, and that figure trebles if we talk about all RPG products.

Now maybe there's a preponderance of game authors in New England, but what's more likely is that there's just a whole lot of them out there, and chances are that many veteran gamers have played with at least one. So you look across the dice at the Sunday afternoon run, and there's Joe Blow, who wrote a module for D&D and a few variant articles for Vampire, and you say to yourself, "Sheesh, he's not any better a gamer than I am. What makes HIM so special?" So the mere implication that he's making dollars from the hobby can be resentment making, and it just goes up from there.

To this conversation that the existence of popular game system under the open game license, notably the D20 SRD and the Fudge/Fate SRD, has not only lowered the barriers to entry significantly but  more importantly allows commercial efforts to tap into already existing networks of gamers.

Quote from: Ravenswing;686821* Do today's table-top gamers really WANT newcomers around? Newcomers won't play the same games that have Always Been Played, with the same kinds of adventures that have Always Been Done. They won't necessarily buy into our received wisdom, or sit down and shut up like good little newbies and wait their collective turns. Their paradigms aren't going to be Moorcock, Vance and JRRT.  They're going to want to play games that look like Twilight or evoke WoW.  Sure you're up for that?

On which note: holy shit, how stupid are White Wolf to not bring out some sort of starter version of Vampire geared to Twilight fans?

Or Harry Potter for that matter.

I suspect that the Street Fighter rpg was a big enough flop that they've written off the idea of introductory products ever since.  Steve Jackson seems utterly hooked on the idea that starter sets based on obscure properties are going to work better than generic ones.  I don't know if the numbers bear him out.  He's so busy shouting "D&D is stupid" that he's pretty much stopped supporting GURPS.

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?

I have heard the same arguement made for spotify.
Yes the numbers per song are tiny but the theory is that you go on streaming massive back calogues for ever. Of course the only hard bit is building up a decent back catalogue.

The business approach to rpgs is going to vary wildly depending on who is producing the material and for what purpose.

Is it a hobbyist wanting to share some cool stuff with fellow rpg enthusiasts?

Is it a small company looking to make a modest living selling gaming material?

Is it a large company trying to figure out a way to turn gaming product into a cash generating machine?

Like any other business, the way to go about it depends on the desired goals of the business.

Quote from: Warthur;686817If your tabletop RPG's setting is evocative enough, it can support all sorts of other games. If it isn't evocative enough, then you should reconsider publishing it in the first place. (Obviously, if you're deliberately making a generic game this model doesn't work, but even then companies like SJG have always understood that RPGs are not the only fruit.)

Exactly, 100% agreed. The recent rash of settingless systems like DW and company aren't ever going to be more than RPGs, whereas a good setting can spawn books, comics, cartoons, movies, merchandise of all sorts.

With that said I've been approached by two parties interested in developing the Floodlands concept (http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=23505) I babble about (http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=25189) here from time to time (http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=23103), one was a MtG online type effort and the other was a phone app which sends out fake news on your phone, like a real newsfeed except set in the future earth. GMs could log on to the website and send updates through the world feed to their players only to help keep things moving, ad supported.

The latter was kinda neat but I turned them both down because I'm not ready with the setting yet, the coolest stuff by far is still melting out of the cheese between my ears, and I don't want to undersell the whole package if I ever get round to releasing it, aka going off half cocked. A good setting draws interest and talent, a good system draws collectors.

Quote from: SineNomine;686701I'm curious to see what I'm going to be able to do after another nine or ten years of this.

That depends on whether you desire a spouse and/or family?

I read an interview with Shane at Pinnacle a couple of years back where he said that their approach was pretty much like that used in "freemium" MMO games. They try to get the core product out to you as cheaply as possible, and to give you something that you could just play "free" forever with, to get you locked in as a customer. And then they try to upsell you with "cool stuff" - be that setting books, adventures, custom dice, game tokens, whatever. Their view is that beyond the core rules you don't need anything they can sell you - so they try to make things that you'll want to make your game better.

They seemed to be very explicitly rejecting the WotC/D&D 3e approach of making all products for the widest possible audience of D&D gamers, and rather saying that they would be happy to have only 10% of their audience buy anything but the core book, as long as they were adding happy customers over time, and that some proportion of the new folks dive in and buy a setting or two.

You can see the same approach in their current Kickstarter for Weird Wars Rome, where unlike many RPG Kickstarters there have been no add-on products via stretch goals - everything added in the stretch has been additional free stuff for everyone who pledges. They're all about sweetening the pot.

Quote from: J Arcane;686807Despite what came of 4e itself, all the reports I've heard were that the Encounters program got more people in stores and actually gaming than anything has in years. That was smart of them.

Encounters was a great Idea and well executed, yes. They need to keep that up for Next (and hopefully address the single most common complaint I've heard about Encounters being a linear string of fights)

Quote from: David Johansen;686846Or Harry Potter for that matter.

I suspect that the Street Fighter rpg was a big enough flop that they've written off the idea of introductory products ever since.  Steve Jackson seems utterly hooked on the idea that starter sets based on obscure properties are going to work better than generic ones.  I don't know if the numbers bear him out.  He's so busy shouting "D&D is stupid" that he's pretty much stopped supporting GURPS.

God damnit I love/hate SJgames. :mad:

"Oh lets spend our meager GURPS resources for YEARS trying to get out a Vorkosigan book! And when we're done with that we'll plow those limited resources into a Discworld game! Hey but at least you're getting a Zombies book! Zombies aren't played out yet... are they...? Ummm... guys where did you all go? Well I guess we can't invest in GURPS because it doesn't make any money"

Gah!

The RPG industry has munching on nicely buttered seed corn for a long long time now. Eventually someone will have to target the pre-teens again in a meaningful way...

GURPS should do a lite beginner's game box for Discworld with high production values, slick design, and good marketing.

Quote from: Daztur;686888The RPG industry has munching on nicely buttered seed corn for a long long time now. Eventually someone will have to target the pre-teens again in a meaningful way...

That's my impression as well. At some point then the fadishness started wearing off in the mid-late 80's the industry, lead by TSR, decided to respond by doubling down on the hardcore fans.

Which kept them afloat but also alienated casual gamers.

Now we're living in that world and I fear that most of us, and especially the folks in charge, have very little to no conception of a 'casual' gamer and what it would take to get them back.

To carry your metaphor a little further we've been eating seed corn for so long we forgot how to plant it.

I talked about this a couple of years ago (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/2846/roleplaying-games/thought-of-the-day-supplement-treadmill).

The short version is that:

(1) You need consumable products. The supplement treadmill burns out and forces a new edition to reboot the treadmill because after 5 or 10 or 25 books, people saturate on reusable content like character options and monsters. (The individual threshold on this stuff varies, but pretty much everybody has one.)

What you need instead are products that get used up: Adventure modules are an obvious example which Paizo leverages very well. Whether you're dealing with someone who reads them for pleasure or actually uses them in play, an adventure module generally gets used once by each playing group and then the group needs a new module.

WotC screwed up the DDI pretty badly, but a subscription service that gave you valuable tools (like a digital tabletop, character creator, campaign management, etc.) would be another example.

(2) I also think there's a market to be explored in strong, alternative game structures (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/15126/roleplaying-games/game-structures).

For example, D&D has strong game structures for combat and dungeoncrawling. (Although recent editions have been steadily losing the strong dungeoncrawling structure.) These structures support vast libraries of support material.

Now let's hypothesize someone creating a strong game structure for, say, a pirate-based D&D campaign. (Note that I'm not just talking about a bunch of rules for ships and ocean weather; I mean a complete, robust game structure.) That would potentially support a core product for the new game structure and then a whole library of support material. It might be a way of refreshing your product line without needing to reboot the whole game. And if you could get a sequence of such products, you might be in a position to significantly or even indefinitely extend the lifespan of your product line.

Quote from: David Johansen;686846Or Harry Potter for that matter.

I suspect that the Street Fighter rpg was a big enough flop that they've written off the idea of introductory products ever since.  Steve Jackson seems utterly hooked on the idea that starter sets based on obscure properties are going to work better than generic ones.  I don't know if the numbers bear him out.  He's so busy shouting "D&D is stupid" that he's pretty much stopped supporting GURPS.

The answer, simply put, is that major licenses cost a great deal of money, have far shorter shelf lives than you think, and generally come with a great deal of interference from the property holders.  SJ Games already's been there and done that with Conan.

Think about it: how many major literary or cinematic properties, with wide public name recognition, are not only currently in print, but have been in print for more than a decade?

Quote from: Grymbok;686869Their view is that beyond the core rules you don't need anything they can sell you - so they try to make things that you'll want to make your game better.

That's basically what Evil Hat is doing.  They're giving away the Fate Core/FAE books (well, pay-what-you-want), and hoping to cash in on supplements and dice.

Also, by creating an ecosystem of games built on Fate, they're hoping to increase the Fate audience more, and again, cash in on supplements/etc.

And FAE is explicitly designed at new players, being a streamlined version of the core game that weighs in at under 50 pages, and even the book is available for only $5.

I think it's a good strategy - and I think that their strategy with FAE is something that other companies need to look at.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;686898Now let's hypothesize someone creating a strong game structure for, say, a pirate-based D&D campaign. (Note that I'm not just talking about a bunch of rules for ships and ocean weather; I mean a complete, robust game structure.)

Watch it, you're starting to sound like Storygame Swine.

Quote from: Piestrio;686873Encounters was a great Idea and well executed, yes. They need to keep that up for Next (and hopefully address the single most common complaint I've heard about Encounters being a linear string of fights)

Organizationally, I think Encounters was the right idea.  I'm just not sold that a linear series of combats is really the best way to highlight the game.

I think if you ask most players what's awesome about RPGs, they'll tell you it's being in character, and the things that happen.  They don't talk about the super-awesome tactical rules.

Quote from: Piestrio;686893Now we're living in that world and I fear that most of us, and especially the folks in charge, have very little to no conception of a 'casual' gamer and what it would take to get them back.

I agree with you on this.  I think people who are already playing have a much different idea of what an entry rpg should be- much more complex than what a casual gamer is looking for.  Basic D&D was a great intro at the time, but I don't know how great it is these days for the same job.

Quote from: Ravenswing;686907The answer, simply put, is that major licenses cost a great deal of money, have far shorter shelf lives than you think, and generally come with a great deal of interference from the property holders.  SJ Games already's been there and done that with Conan.

Think about it: how many major literary or cinematic properties, with wide public name recognition, are not only currently in print, but have been in print for more than a decade?

Except that my point is that there's a point where an obscure licenced property is less viable than a generic book.

Big properties generally kill the holder eventually.  They tend to have fallow periods where there isn't a new Starwars or Startrek or Lord of the Rings movie to drive your sales.

Actually, the WEG d6 Star Wars game brought the franchise back from the dead. Lucas didn't realise how popular Star Wars was until the RPG hit it big and he hired Tim Zahn to do the Thrawn Trilogy.

Quote from: jeff37923;686914Actually, the WEG d6 Star Wars game brought the franchise back from the dead. Lucas didn't realise how popular Star Wars was until the RPG hit it big and he hired Tim Zahn to do the Thrawn Trilogy.

What makes you think it was the game that caused the hiring of Zahn? I'm not saying it didn't happen that way, just not a claim I had heard before.

Quote from: robiswrong;686908Watch it, you're starting to sound like Storygame Swine.

Jason is a bit guilty of talking using his own invented jargon when he goes on about game structures, but having read the (long) series of essays he wrote on the topic I think there's some good observations at the centre of it all.

Quote from: Mistwell;686926What makes you think it was the game that caused the hiring of Zahn? I'm not saying it didn't happen that way, just not a claim I had heard before.

I have heard that, to the point that eu authors in the 90s were pointed towards the game as a reference source.

Quote from: robiswrong;686908Watch it, you're starting to sound like Storygame Swine.

It's heresy on this site, but one of the reasons a lot of STGs are so popular is that they come with baked-in, pick-up-and-play scenario structures. These are often tied to specific scenarios, but not always.

I've said it before, but: When D&D had a game structure and character creation that allowed it to be picked up and played as easily as a board game or card game (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1223/roleplaying-games/opening-your-game-table), it was memetically viral and spread rapidly to new players. The further away it (and the rest of the RPG industry) has moved from that game structure, the less memetically viral the game has become and the harder it has become for new players to start playing.

GenCon provides an excellent example of this: A lot of people ask why indie storytelling games have an event like Games on Demand and RPGs don't. It's because the vast majority of games being played in Games on Demand are literally "pick up a copy of the game and run it".

Anecdote from my own gaming table: Tonight I'm running Lady Blackbird. The process for that is literally "read the rulebook and then play". I can get an equivalent experience with OD&D, but only because I've developed an open table for it. Meanwhile, I'm also in the middle of really struggling to figure out how to make an open table structure work for Eclipse Phase because EP, like most RPGs, is so horribly unsuited to anything except dedicated, long-term play.

Quote from: robiswrong;686908Organizationally, I think Encounters was the right idea.  I'm just not sold that a linear series of combats is really the best way to highlight the game.

There are two structural problems that lead to this problem:

First, combat is massively time-consuming in 4E. Run a couple of combat encounters and that's your gaming session. This makes it really, really difficult to design scenarios that aren't just a linear series of combats. (This is a problem I discuss here (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/9449/roleplaying-games/gamma-world-playtest-report) at greater length.) Even if there's other stuff happening, the amount of time chewed up by combat causes the perception of combat to overwhelm everything else.

Second, every chunk of an Encounters arc needs to end at the same place and in roughly the same way so that if the players come back next week and end up playing with a different group there will still be comprehensible continuity. This can be very limiting in. (But I do think there are a lot of ways to give these chunks more interior flexibility while still guaranteeing consistency on entry and exit points.)

Quote from: TristramEvans;686933I have heard that, to the point that eu authors in the 90s were pointed towards the game as a reference source.

That's not the same statement.

While it is true (and widely reported) that the WEG sourcebooks were widely treated as a setting bible for the EU as it developed in the late '80s and early '90s, I've never heard anything to suggest that Bantam decided to pick up the Star Wars novel license because of the RPG's success. Nor have I ever seen anything to suggest that George Lucas was directly involved in the hiring of Timothy Zahn.

Quote from: TristramEvans;686933I have heard that, to the point that eu authors in the 90s were pointed towards the game as a reference source.

Yes, they were pointed towards the game as a reference, that I think is true.  What I had not heard, is that the game caused Lucasfilm to hire Zahn in particular.  Was Zahn previously affiliated with the game and Lucas hired him away from WEG? Was there some indication that the game's success caused the hiring of Zahn to write new books?

Quote from: Mistwell;686926What makes you think it was the game that caused the hiring of Zahn? I'm not saying it didn't happen that way, just not a claim I had heard before.

Don't forget that the Zahn books came out simultaneously with the first Star Wars comics from Dark Horse. There was a big push at the time about both being the first "official" Star Wars material in fifteen years.

Quote from: Mistwell;686937Yes, they were pointed towards the game as a reference, that I think is true.  What I had not heard, is that the game caused Lucasfilm to hire Zahn in particular.  Was Zahn previously affiliated with the game and Lucas hired him away from WEG? Was there some indication that the game's success caused the hiring of Zahn to write new books?

I don't have a reliable source on that, this info comes from interviews I read in the 90s, possib in Wizard

Quote from: Piestrio;686893That's my impression as well. At some point then the fadishness started wearing off in the mid-late 80's the industry, lead by TSR, decided to respond by doubling down on the hardcore fans.

Which kept them afloat but also alienated casual gamers.

Now we're living in that world and I fear that most of us, and especially the folks in charge, have very little to no conception of a 'casual' gamer and what it would take to get them back.

To carry your metaphor a little further we've been eating seed corn for so long we forgot how to plant it.

Yup agree completely. Over the last year I`ve run 13 one hour DnD sessions for my students and I think they've taught me a few things about this. I'll write up a long essay about this soonish.

Quote from: Grymbok;686928Jason is a bit guilty of talking using his own invented jargon when he goes on about game structures, but having read the (long) series of essays he wrote on the topic I think there's some good observations at the centre of it all.

I agree, actually.  The snark wasn't even really directed at him, necessarily.  It was more directed at the idea that any talk about structure is pointless, etc. - which is often made by people that simply assume the structure they're familiar with.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;686935It's heresy on this site, but one of the reasons a lot of STGs are so popular is that they come with baked-in, pick-up-and-play scenario structures. These are often tied to specific scenarios, but not always.

... big snip ...

Agreed 100%.  As I said above, a lot of times people don't even seem to see the structure they're using.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;686935There are two structural problems that lead to this problem:

Totally agreed and understood.  I still think that the linear nature may do more to turn people off than anything.

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?

Hear, hear for hard data!  Thank you for sharing.  As a successful PDF/POD Publisher, it is illuminating to to hear your thoughts and experiences.  One reason I set up the freedndart site was for folks like you (there is much more public domain art out there as well, but no time to cleanup/transfer/and upload atm).

Cheers

Quote from: Teazia;686967Hear, hear for hard data!  Thank you for sharing.  As a successful PDF/POD Publisher, it is illuminating to to hear your thoughts and experiences.  One reason I set up the freedndart site was for folks like you (there is much more public domain art out there as well, but no time to cleanup/transfer/and upload atm).

Cheers

And considering how much of Arcana Rising's art is going to be from your galleries, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Your collection is practically tailormade for the 'back to folklore' folks like myself.

Give away the rules. The content is what's valuable, so you sell that instead; it doesn't matter if you outline how to have one man attack or injure another man if they don't also have any weapons (or ratings for unarmed attacks) to employ those rules and give them context.  It doesn't matter if you give away rules for diplomacy if there are no NPCs to interact with; rules for government or trade are nothing without an environment to give them context.  Content has value; rules do not.

Quote from: Bradford C. Walker;687241Content has value; rules do not.

I mostly agree but rules do have some value, as the sales of settingless systems recently testify. Just not nearly as much as a good compelling setting, which is very difficult to come up with and bring to life.

Different takes on manelfdwarfkender just aren't going to cut it any more, actual imagination and vision must be employed in copious quantities combined with ill defined skills like writing ability and a keen eye for the epic.

Quote from: The Traveller;687248I mostly agree but rules do have some value, as the sales of settingless systems recently testify. Just not nearly as much as a good compelling setting, which is very difficult to come up with and bring to life.

Different takes on manelfdwarfkender just aren't going to cut it any more, actual imagination and vision must be employed in copious quantities combined with ill defined skills like writing ability and a keen eye for the epic.

Crunch and fluff support each other.  Any setting with crunch written to support that setting-specific logic is an intrinsically better gaming product, all other things being equal.

Quote from: LordVreeg;687273Crunch and fluff support each other.  Any setting with crunch written to support that setting-specific logic is an intrinsically better gaming product, all other things being equal.

My opinion is that it depends on what is being accomplished. Sometimes the inclusion of mechanics is needed at other times it would just add to the clutter of already voluminous work.

The advice I would give is put in what needed no more and no less. Of course figuring out what needed is the trick.

Quote from: estar;687284My opinion is that it depends on what is being accomplished. Sometimes the inclusion of mechanics is needed at other times it would just add to the clutter of already voluminous work.

The advice I would give is put in what needed no more and no less. Of course figuring out what needed is the trick.

I also mean that it should include them or be written for them, 99% of the time.  I love me some Grimtooth and Citybook, but they are the rare exceptions, I believe that there is a synergy with a product whose contents work with the physics engine of the game.

Quote from: LordVreeg;687298I also mean that it should include them or be written for them, 99% of the time.  I love me some Grimtooth and Citybook, but they are the rare exceptions, I believe that there is a synergy with a product whose contents work with the physics engine of the game.

There's a place for generics, mostly setting based rules are add-ons to the stuff that already exists in a generic system. The gist of what I was saying however is that a compelling setting, an interesting world with interesting stuff in it, is far more valuable than any amount of rules and can be turned to many different and profitable ends. I don't know if any setting that started out as an RPG has successfuly achieved a notable level of interest though.

Some of the D&D worlds were pushed along by sheer inertia into novels, and Warhammer has The Black Library and PC games because it actually is a good setting, but other than that, not much to boast of.

The phenomenon of DW and shared narrative games which are not only rules lite but setting lite too (or completely settingless) is an interesting one. As far as I can see they appear to be gaining traction largely through and among a vocal cheerleading camp which will support anything as long as it comes from approved authors or is done in an approved way, taking the concept of plot and running with it straight into a different pastime entirely. Some really nasty stuff in there too, like those jeepform creepers.

The rules aren't that unique and the settings, where they exist, are pretty sparse so I can't imagine there's much of a shelf life there. Storm in a teacup really.

Personally I don't need or want a book to give me a setting. I can make up settings myself, alone or in conjunction with the group, and I find the results to be more satisfying than any published world. What I'm looking for out of a new RPG product is either interesting new rules or other gameable content such as monsters, dungeons, NPCs, etc that I can convert and adapt for my own world.

I'm the absolute inverse. I could care less about another rules system, especially since I'm unlikely to use them anyway. I want more setting material to play with.

If most of my experience with modules was not so bad I'd search there for my cheap setting fix. I'm still scouring bryce's blog tenfootpole.org for stuff. But as of yet give me setting splats and box sets.

I'd like more modules that aren't pre-planned 'adventures' so much as interesting locations and interesting npcs