Measure of Success: Publishing, Cons, etc

#21

So, thinking about this some more. A community and business have something in common: they probably have costs which need covering somehow. They can be covered through a system of monetary transactions (which can be structured in lots of different ways - membership fee, pay per item, discount for particular groups, etc), through contributions in kind, donations, etc.

They have another thing in common: they provide a service. The service can be provided to a restricted group of members (for example in a community) or through an open market (most businesses). The service can be better or lower quality, and can deliver differing experiences tailored to different needs and preferences.

So I think the underlying issue you’ve been driving at @William_Nichols, correct me if I’m wrong here, is the extent to which you prioritise merely covering your costs (and nothing more) and delivering a service tailored to the preferences of the community, vs making money and delivering a service which drives maximum sales. These are not completely mutually exclusive strategies, and they can be mutually supportive in the right circumstances. In the wrong circumstances they’ll compete and one will dominate the other. I say “circumstances”, that sounds like it’s down to luck, but clearly you can steer things in one direction or the other.

One thing I’d like to reiterate here is the value of labour. People giving their labour for free is a thing they can do, but it’s got all sorts of problems if used as the standard model in our current economic system. It advantages some people over others. It prevents most people from making the thing they love into their main gig. Even if only some people do it, it distorts the market and makes it harder for other people to earn money from their work. All of this is more apropos of the other thread but I think it bears mentioning here.

With all that in mind: I think navigating the space between “ruthlessly seek maximum profit” and “try to selflessly maximise community benefit” is a hugely subjective affair. It requires judgements to be made about both strategy but also fairness, and in many communities this means individuals are having to make that calculation blind, as in the your example where people are donating twenties. Because money does matter, if you adopt a wholly selfless model you can end up with something that’s unsustainable based on some people giving more than they can really afford in the long-term (whether that’s money or time). Equally, because goodwill matters, adopting a ruthless business model could mean you end up losing customers and therefore money.

My feeling is that most indie designers are working hard to reconcile the two. We’re trying to contribute and build community, in the belief that this is good for everyone, including our business. Many of us are also trying to make money, but also to spread it around among other creators.

So back to the point in the original thread, it’s not exactly a false dichotomy, but it also kind of is.

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#22

I definitely understand where that cognitive dissonance comes from, but there are lots of good reasons to get past it.

When we launched our Patreon in late 2016 (the first time we raised even a single dollar for The Gauntlet) we were in a position where we had no choice. It was personally costing me several hundred dollars a month just to maintain everything we were doing. Even then, I felt really weird doing it. To me, it was this fun thing we were doing for our mutual happiness, and just the idea of asking people to pay for it was hard—even though it was paupering me. Our Patreon, then, was my version of “passing the hat.”

Now, what ended up happening, is that I created Codex alongside our Patreon. Originally, it was very important to me that the Patreon succeed, and so I wanted for there to be something that Patrons could put their hands on, so to speak. I thought they would be more likely to pledge if they got something they couldn’t otherwise get for free. This was the same reason I put up what was, functionally, a paywall for Gauntlet Hangouts. We straight-up needed the money. And trust me: I got a HUGE amount of pushback for both of those things. There was almost this indignation from a significant segment of our membership that we might try to raise money off what we were doing. And some of those members never got over it and left (and I haven’t heard from many of them since).

But it worked as planned. The Patreon was fairly successful out of the gate and has been growing at a good clip since then.

Now here’s the thing: that cognitive dissonance you speak of, and that I experienced, is the main reason why the ttrpg industry is so immature. Consumers straight up do not value the kind of work that I and The Gauntlet do. They value pretty books. They value attending physical conventions. But they don’t value community-building. They don’t value critical frameworks. They don’t value media organizations. By asking our membership to pay for what they use, we are essentially saying “Value those things, please.” And furthermore, for reasons related to privilege and access, the culture of “I feel sheepish asking for money” basically ensures only white men have clout and influence.

I still remain vaguely uncomfortable with turning The Gauntlet into a wealth-extractor, but I try to remember all the good we do. We are at the forefront in terms of putting dollars into the hands of creators from marginalized communities, for example (at least as a percentage of dollars spent). We have created a dazzlingly fun, safe, accessible space to play ttrpgs online in Gauntlet Hangouts. Gauntlet Con is major, and is pretty close to free to attend (non-members pay five bucks). And we do important work to change the basic culture surrounding tabletop roleplaying games.

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Critical Role numero uno
#23

One more thing (and at the risk of making it seem like all I’m doing is justifying The Gauntlet’s existence): another way I measure success is how much we help others achieve their version of success. For example, there are many, many publishers, big and small, who benefit financially from the work we do, and from whom we don’t receive a penny (outside of an odd Patreon pledge). Even as we move into publishing ourselves, the vast majority of our podcast coverage, the games we run and make videos about, and so forth, are from other publishers. But the creation of a vibrant indie ecosystem is important for all of us, and so we’re happy to do it.

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#24

@jasoncordova Man, the kickstarter and patreon models are easily among the most ethical means of raising money from a crowd. There’s nothing to justify in having a patreon, and I’m personally sorry if this thread has made you think you were being asked to justify your existence!

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#25

Oh, I don’t feel that way at all. I’m just trying to be really clear about our approach to things.

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#26

It’s really great! I wish other organizations and people felt so comfortable.

But: part of what capitalism does is make us fear discussing where we fall on the capitalism ladder, right?

The Patreon ecosystem is peculiar. I betcha there are folks The Gauntlet patreons who also patreons The Gauntlet. So the money cycles and only sometimes comes out of the Great Wheel of Patreon.

I don’t love paywalls, and i for sure don’t using money as gatekeeping to a community but because capitalism, things cost money. And it seems like you’ve done a good job (especially with these forums) at providing a free venue for discussions of games.

I know you don’t want to replace all of G+, but you’ve replaced the majority of my use cases.

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#27

If I’m being perfectly honest, I don’t yet know how The Gauntlet Forums fit into the equation for us. We had to put them together in a hurry because we needed a public-facing place for people to find us once the G+ closure was announced (and then accelerated). And the forums are really different from a G+ Community. We exercised much tighter control of the conversation on G+, for one thing. It remains to be seen how our particular culture will be translated to these forums (but there are good signs!). I hope people like it here, but at the end of the day, there are many, many places for people to get RPG convo. I want people to go wherever they feel comfortable and fulfilled.

I myself used the term “paywall” earlier, but I don’t love it. I think it strongly mischaracterizes what is happening in our spaces. For a start, the “paywall” around our Slack and Gauntlet Hangouts is a fairly marginal amount of money over the Codex level pledge (where you are actually paying for a product). We could definitely charge more—for Gauntlet Hangouts, especially. But part of the reason for having the paywall is so toxic people self-select out. It’s a way of helping ensure our most private, vulnerable interactions (Slack chats and playing games with each other) are safe from creeps. It also increases the level of seriousness with which people engage. And you don’t have to charge much to get that effect, and so we don’t.

I also think there is value in re-considering what we define as a “paywall” and what we define as a “community.” So, for example, Big Bad Con very explicitly sells itself as a community of gamers. They have a certain culture, they have community standards and norms, and so forth. And they definitely charge for admission into that community. But, like, I’ve never heard of anyone calling BBC’s entrance fee (or community participation fee, if you will) a “paywall.” When boiled down to their basics, I don’t consider what we do to be significantly different from BBC. Except our stuff is online and only costs a couple bucks a month. But that definitely goes back to what I said earlier about what we value as ttrpg consumers.

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#28

Huh: Paywall implies digital, doesn’t it?

The Money is something I think a lot of our little communities are dealing with. I … have been suggesting a different model, and meeting with a huge degree of resistance.

Essentially, my suggestion is that whenever we’re talking about events, community infrastructure (like your Slack), etc then the barrier to entry should be as low as possible and the optional payment should be as high as possible. Essentially, my emperical claim is that there’s enough free money in the community to subsidize the participation of those who can’t.

We definitely see this emerging with scholarship funds and waivers and everything else. I think that’s right and good and lets the community leaders use means other than the financial to keep out the grossness.

I’ve no idea if it’s sustainable or will work, and it is contingent on making it easy for those flush with cash to provide it to the community. In my particular view, it is also important that there be nothing special given to those who provide the money.

That’s for sure true at the high level: What I want to avoid is the creation of a monied class within gaming who have expectations that everyone else will do the labor and tend to them.

For some reason, I don’t think this applies to the Slack at $6/month. I think the difference is one of scale: $6/month is radically different from $60 or $600 and a much greater number of people can afford it.

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#29

Yeah, and to be clear, that $6 is just a $1 add from getting Codex each month, which is $5. Both are underpriced, imo, but it works for us.

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#30

In my opinion, the measure of success boils down to the trust you have built in the industry.

You are more successful when publishers, fellow game designers, professionals and potential customers can trust you.
This trust is related to the quality of your work, your reliability in projects and your relatability & integrity as a human being.

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#32

This absolutely cannot be over-emphasized. The value of even a very modest barrier to entry (and a single cup of coffee a month is an extremely modest barrier to entry) in keeping the place free of trolls and random haters is incredibly strong. When I owned the stores, when we started charging (not even charging, asking a deposit) to use our space and engage our staff for instruction and GMing, there was kicking, screaming, and gnashing of teeth about how we literally no right to charge for the services we provided, but damned if we didn’t immediately permanently lose the most toxic and obnoxious members of our community, and they either never came back, or eventually slunk back with significantly less attitude.

Even if we lived in a magical fairy land where no one ever worked for anything and video games grew on trees in the capacious yards of our post-scarcity individually-constructed personal mansions we’d quickly figure out some kind of way to signal actual commitment to the communities we created because it’s literally a safety tool, the first cull of the assholes.

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#33

Wow, really great thread. It’s nice to see so many being candid with how they manage to do the things they do.

If I may add something to justify this thread resurrection, I think that so many people having the attitude that “success is personally defined” is subtly toxic to the overall community and industry. I don’t think it’s intentional malice on anybody’s part, but it is a negative symptom of the knee-jerk obsession with personal responsibility capitalism foists on us. For someone to define success as “I just want people to play my games” pre-supooses that the person has the ability to support themselves outside of making games, and even more than that, that they have the free time and ability to even make games when they aren’t spending time supporting themselves. I think we do ourselves a disservice by capitulating to the market forces that say “don’t expect to make any money from this”. Creators deserve to be rewarded for creating. If someone who plays your games says they wouldn’t be willing to pay for them, they are straight up telling you your art is not valuable, and we can’t internalize that philosophy. People deserve to be able to support themselves doing what they love.

Now, not everyone is capable of paying for the games they play. I would predict that if every indie creator charged at a rate that allowed them to sustain themselves, not many people would be able to afford any games at all. However, we cannot accept that as a fundamental aspect of reality, it’s a flaw of capitalism. It’s amazing that we have structures like Patreon and pay-what-you-want pricing, because it allows us to use the system correctly (or at least in a more correct way). I think if we want to have a discussion about what it means to be successful, we can’t just keep throwing up our hands and saying “it’s self determined”, why are we bothering to have the discussion as a community if that’s the answer every time?

As a first stab, I think “success” should be defined as you should be able to support yourself (and your family) by creating ttrpgs as a full-time job. Is this feasible in the current structure? I would say it leans towards the “infeasible” spectrum right now. Every time I talk with game creators nobody seems to be doing it as a full time job and as their only source of income. Maybe I’m missing perspective, and I will fully admit that my definition of success is probably flawed, but what I feel strongly is that the definition I provided is not asking too much, and that it shouldn’t be disregarded as wanting an unreasonable compensation for the very real work we all do.

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#34

I think this is a fine definition of success for someone who has that goal. I agree that it’s problematic that our current culture and industry make this so hard. But I think it’s much more toxic to insist on this as the primary (or only) definition of success. I’m really confused by the reasoning that opting out of selling games is somehow more of a capitulation to capitalist forces than deciding that success only counts when it matches the capitalist definition of success.

RPGs started as a folk art before they were a business. Some of us are happier continuing to experience them that way. I can’t honestly assess whether this necessarily comes at the expense of industry viability more broadly. Certainly that’s the concern of would-be professional knitters and crafters, in a world where knitting and crafting is still a hobby for most. But if you have any friends who knit, go tell them they are not “successful” because they don’t sell their knit goods. They probably give a lot away to loved ones because they like making people happy. Calling that failure, and insisting that turning something they love into a moneymaking enterprise is the only metric for “success” in order to stick it to capitalism, feels strangely backward to me.

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#35

Very good point. I definitely was not trying to say that your work must be capitalized in order to be successful. I have no ill feelings towards people that create exclusively as a hobby, and I respect someone’s decision to choose not to monetize their work. But that option is only available to people who support themselves or are supported by an alternate source of income, and I don’t think it’s ok to say that that should be the default. If the tabletop industry is structured around that style of creation, then that is a driver (amongst many other factors) for why the industry has diversity problems. People are making amazing strides to course-correct, but unless we address issues built into the system itself, we are always going to be fighting against the current.

And I think change can be achieved in large and small ways. As customers we need to give an honest value assessment to the games we support. PWYW pricing only works if the people who can afford to pay actually do pay, and from my anecdotal experience they often do not. We need to respect a creator’s choice to monetize their product as much as we respect their choice not to, and we need to call out bad behavior to show that games can be more than a side gig.

Lots of people play sports in their free time for enjoyment, there are also gigantic industries around them because people are willing to pay to watch sports played. Games are important! All kinds of games, and it’s kind of shitty that certain types of games are given more capitalistic respect than others.

I gotta stop myself from rambling on and on. But I hope I’ve gotten my point across without sounding like I’m disparaging people who actively choose not to do what I’m defining as “success”.

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#36

I think what you’ll find is that capitalism is kind of shitty. Everything else follows from that, and in particular how much capitalism has infiltrated every part of our lives.

That we are all essentially reliant upon our ability to extract wealth from an investor class that would rather keep it to themselves – and who is very good at it! – gaming has to stress making money. That’s why it seems weird to give away games, as we’ve decided that we’ve got to charge what the market will allow. And that, somehow, it is morally inappropriate for people with money not to pay for games when they can.

That’s not a business. That’s charity based on fundamentally unfair system of distribution of wealth.

Imagine if everyone had as much as they need. If everyone got their fair share. What, then? I contend that it would fundamentally not matter if RPGs made money, as all people would have enough wealth to have the remaining energy to, ya know, make games or whatever else they so choose.

In a world where some folks have to work three part-time jobs strung together and don’t have health insurance, then for sure they need to make money from recreation. In a world where that is not the case – where everyone has health insurance and a fair share of the pie – that is a lot less true.

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#37

I have three products up for download on DriveThruRPG. Two are $1 supplements. The other is my Mirrorrim setting document, which is Pay What You Want (and usually people download it for free). I’ve had 799 downloads across all three products and have earned $266 since 2/2017 (after DT takes its cut).

The free product is 62 pages of large text. It has been downloaded 391 times and it got a mention on a blogspot post or two. Maybe 10 people paid anything for it (usually the recommended $1, but some wiseacres paid a penny and a dime for it).

I’m happy that people are interested in my products enough to pay a buck for them. For the amount of work I put into the other (non-free) supplements, I feel like they’re “successful” enough.

To me, real success is a combination of recognition (hey, people know this product) and use (people are actually using my stuff in their games). If people are downloading stuff, reading it, and shrugging, then I don’t feel that successful. I want my ideas to have a lasting impact of some kind.

I’m pretty comfortable with the fact that a 10-page supplement for a relatively unknown RPG isn’t going to make much of a lasting impact, and I set my expectations accordingly. My fondest hope is, when I publish my Towerlands setting – which is a huge labor of love – that it would find a tiny but fanatical following.

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#38

I agree that a small payment for the Slack access is smart. However, I think Slack access should be offered before the Codex option. $3 - 4/Month Slack access and Keeper title. Then, $8/month to include Codex. My 2 cents on this point.

To be clear, what I can see being done at The Gauntlet is GREAT! I am clearly obsessed with the forum. I also love The Gauntlet as an indy publisher / broadcaster concept that supports the business of indy rpgs as well.

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#39

There are different ways to measure success. RPG design is a mixed bag…

I will preface the below by saying I ran over 300 6-9 hour sessions of various games before I even found PBTA and started a game of my own.

Good stuff

  • I have 18 products on drivethru, half have sold over 100 copies.
  • My name has been mentioned over 60 times spread over 25 different podcasts.
  • Interviewed about my game on +1 Forward, a podcast i value as a player, MC and designer.
  • So far i’ve funded all my own stuf so am organising/releasing on my own timeline.
  • It’s all pdf so I can update stuff whenever I like.

Bad stuff

  • People do not ask me to collaborate on their projects with them.
  • Other MCs are not running my game.
  • When offering my game online it rarely fills, if I run MOTW it fills in 1 hour.
  • Since I didn’t use kickstarter my game went under the radar.

I think there are levels of success, for example as a Designer
People enjoy a game you run < Someone showing enough interest to buy your stuff < Someone running your game < Someone asking for you to collaborate with them.

Whereas when Running or Playing i’ve enjoyed every game, no they weren’t perfect, but they were all pretty darn good.

There is also expectation - I do not expect to make enough to live on, i just don’t think the industry is financial enough, outside of D&D (which is not the game for me, pbta is my forever home) but the result is I am not disappointed by the trickle of cash.

I’m also a straight white guy, and am well aware of how POC and Women in gaming have been treated badly in the past, so am happy for POC and WIG to get more support, spotlight time etc. Diversity is great, it makes more ideas, more games, more customers. Win win win for everyone.

i’ve joined in chats and asked questions during peoples podcasts, twitch streams and design journals, and people enjoyed me interacting, these interactions have helped me a great deal as a person and a designer.

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#40

That’s awesome Blake, thanks you.

A follow up question: if you are not making much from the PDFs, why charge at all? That is: why is charging for PDFs essential?

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#41

I can’t speak for Blake, but I have been pretty closely following the “why charge at all?” conversation around the industry/community, and just started offering my games as pay-what-you-want rather than as free. (And I am likely to start setting minimum prices for some games in the future.) Some food for thought:

(1) Charging money for high-quality products and services combats the common expectation that RPGs “should” be free or cheap.

I personally disagree with the position that individual creators have a moral imperative to charge for their own self-published products—sometimes, adding money to the equation actually damages your ability to take pleasure in an activity for its own sake, and most of us regard RPGs as a hobby, and a source of pleasure. That’s why my very short games are still available free: It’s a hobby for me, and refocusing on it as a business would make me unhappy. But I do think that working for free or cheap for other publishers undercuts people competing for jobs they actually need, and I also believe that putting a price tag on products with high production values (including professional art and graphic design) helps popularize the idea that if you want good-looking RPGs, you need to pay for them. (I’m still wrestling internally with the implications of this for games with poor production quality but brilliant game design. The game design is worth something, too! But I don’t think it’s unreasonable that the average customer has no interest in paying for access to my unedited Google Docs.)

(2) Sales offer a metric to measure “success” that’s more meaningful than downloads, and easier to track than actual use in play.

This is the reason I finally relented and started accepting money via pay-what-you-want offerings, even though I dread what it will do to me when it’s time to prepare my taxes. I want to know how my games are being received, what people like to play, which of my designs are worth expanding on to contribute more to the hobby and find people with similar tastes to enjoy games with. Free downloads are nice to track, but effectively meaningless if you want to get a sense of who’s even read your game, let alone played it. (How many free games do you have sitting unread on your hard drive?) A game that somebody has paid for, however, is a game that is more likely to be read (if for no other reason than that the buyer wants to get their money’s worth), and being read is a prerequisite to being played.

Don’t get me wrong—I really appreciate that my first month of game sales have covered half of my Metatopia registration already! But for a designer with a day job, the earnings from sales are kind of incidental compared to the sales’ significance as a metric vaguely reflecting player interest.

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