As a trans game designer, I can confirm that charging a fair market rate for my games means that a trans person gets paid for hard work. There is no universe in which I’m about to let anyone guilt-trip me into being an abusive employer to myself.
Choosing price as a design element
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What do you think is the balance between recording your hours (and this working out what your hourly rate would be) and allotting a price per word (as is common for editors and perhaps when commissioning work from other people)?
For me they’re totally separate. I’m recording my hours so I know how much of my time it takes to write a game, playtest it, kickstart it, deliver the physical product. This will help me know whether my game design work is paying me a reasonable hourly rate, and also potentially to establish fair charge-out rates eg to run someone’s kickstarter campaign for them.
The per-word rates are a pretty arbitrary way to pay people a consistent amount for freelance work. As a concept they make no sense, because sometimes you can write 1000 words in an hour, other times it could take ten times that and it isn’t easy to predict which way it will go. As an employer I can’t say “I’ll pay you by the hour” if I have no idea how many hours the job might take. So per-word is just a benchmark, a way to generate an arbitrary yet reasonably fair pay rate.
All that said - when I’ve got better data about my hourly rates, I’ll rethink what is a fair freelance rate. I will at that point know roughly how long it takes me to design and then write a given number of words of game (including any playtesting) and I hope that should help me calibrate the per-word rate.
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Makes sense.
As it happens I’ve been keeping track of time since January this year, so I know that I’ve spent 32 hours on my game on a combination of hearing from playtests, revising rules, sending them out for further playtests and planning kickstarter.
Although it wouldn’t be particularly accurate, I could guess that in the Jun-Dec timeframe when I was producing the first and second draft of the game I would have spent about 75 hours based on my rough proportion of time. I could add on another 12 hours of playtesting and 20 hours of research in the early days on top of that.
I mention this because right now I’ve got no idea how many hours people normally spend on things, but in a spirit of transparency I’m happy to let people know how long it is typically taking me, in case that is of any interest to them. I’d be very interested to see how much time it typically takes other people on doing things.
Cheers
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I’ve certainly seen in other areas of life that the price something is given sets the scene for its perceived value. Sometimes very valuable things in themselves are seen as given too cheaply and thus are not valued so much by the recipient. I remember particularly seeing that sometimes with children, where those who had to work to obtain a thing valued it more than those who were just given it for the asking.
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My most recent project in development has 85 hours recorded, including playtests. Separately I’ve got about 50 hours for delivery of Flotsam, and a very incomplete record of work running Kickstarter. Those numbers are probably underestimating by 20% or so given that not everything gets recorded, and all are for partially completed projects. So I guess a finished full-fat A5 RPG book project might be 250-300 hours all in, but that could easily be more. We’ll see!
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So far, I haven’t charged for any games because it involves too much tax-related paperwork for the marginal revenue from my perpective.
Also considering the hundreds of hours I put into game design, I can only justify this as a passion and not as a sound business. If I really want to focus on making money, personally there are other domains where I’m much more profitable.
But I agree that pricing a game even just 2$ changes its perceived value.
Sometimes I am also shocked to see what people charge for poor game design. More than once I have seen games that slap premium cover art on top of half-baked game mechanics and charge a two digit price for that.
As a buyer, after a couple years of impulsive Kickstarter backing I have become much more selective.
Unless I know the game designer and blindly trust the quality of their work, as a general rule of thumb, I am very reluctant to spend more than 10$ on a PDF game.
Also, if I don’t blindly trust the game designer, I’d like to see the core game mechanic as a free PDF before backing a KS or buying a PDF.
I appreciate it when projects offer a special price for people who cannot afford a game based on their own judgement.
I only care for extensive artwork in physical color books. Thus, I’m not willing to spend extra for artwork in PDFs.
When I love a game, the sky is the limit of what I’m willing to pay.
If more games offered shipping within Europe, I’d buy more physical books.
I would love to buy more card-based indie games.
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Doesn’t this basically assure that currently-marginalized creators remain that way?
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I know what you mean about European shipping - these days I back kickstarters at pdf level only as it means I can back more of them - because shipping to the UK from the US often doubles the price.
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It’s annoying, because shipping from the UK to the US is actually quite cheap. I feel US creators could almost do better getting their books printed here.
(Hey maybe we should start a handling agency for US creators.)
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The corollary to “a price tag adds to the perception of value” is that if your game then disappoints at $2, you’ve lost a $20 customer way down the line. So take pride in your work and playtest and edit it, regardless of what you charge for it. Early games will and should be terrible, but make them terrible because you swung for the fences, not because you didn’t care enough to try it out and see if it worked, or because you didn’t bother to copy edit your words.
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In the past I’ve used DTRPG as a Print on Demand sales channel, because that means that I can get local shipment into US and into EU (well, the latter for a few more days at least, although what happens next is anyone’s guess).
I did come across one oddity with DTRPG though - I was looking at shipping prices for cards (as I’m considering them for a game) and shipping prices for those to the UK are huge compared to the price of shipping them in the US or Canada. The difference is so great that I’m wondering whether those are only printed in the US (and whether it would make sense for me to print them in the UK with a specialist and then ship them out to overseas from here - a much cheaper option, apparently).
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AFAIK cards are indeed only printed in the US.
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Well, most of the game designers I blindly trust are currently-marginalized creators. 90% of the games I buy are unconventional indie games, anyway. I really wish that more indie game designers get recognition and can make a living of their excellent work.
I just want to suggest for fairly new creators to have an entry-level offering at a low price.
For example, when the City of Mist Kickstarter came up, I didn’t know anything about it and backed it on a very basic level at ca. 10$. Seeing the initial PDFs, I was very impressed with the quality of the material and liked the setting, so I raised to >100$ during the backing period.
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Two things on this. Firstly as @Chaosmeister has said they are only printed in the US and we know that US to UK shipping is weirdly expensive. I say weirdly because UK to US is about £5 which is hugely cheaper. But also I think books are zero-rated for customs duty and cards are not. So if you are shipping cards from the US to here then in addition to the increased shipping you’ll have to pay customs duty on them when they arrive.
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In addition, at least here in Germany I have to drive all the way up to the customs office outside of town to pick up my package.
On-demand card game fulfillment within Europe would be wonderful.
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I am firmly of the opinion that you should charge a fair price for your work, which means you should charge an amount you can use to pay yourself and still feel like you can sleep at night. In too many industries, there is a race to the bottom in terms of pricing and that is an unsustainable trend.
There isn’t a specific formula for this, because the cost to produce a book can vary so wildly. The reasons people use to justify what they’ll spend on a book are also completely arbitrary in many cases, so I don’t feel comfortable recommending anyone poll the market, either.
For print books, a good rule of thumb is to charge 4x to 5x the cost to produce the book. That’s because by the time it goes into retail distribution, you need to be able to charge a fraction of the MSRP and still make a cut for yourself.
If you’re not doing retail you can be a little more flexible. Personally, I still say 2x-3x your cost at a minimum, because otherwise you get eaten alive by fees This is especially true for print-on-demand products, because you’ll pay the cost to print plus the retailer’s cut if you’re using a site like DTRPG or CreateSpace.
Finally, I don’t recommend listening to the common advice that you should price your PDFs at 50% of your print price. Print costs are almost never double PDF costs because most of your production costs apply to both versions of the book. There are a ton of people who won’t even look at your game if it isn’t at least half the cost in PDF as it is in print, but IMO those are the people who we shouldn’t let determine our prices.
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