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Darwinism posted:I mean yeah we live in a capitalist hell of our own making but it doesn't mean people shouldn't try to change it? Whole lotta elfgames fatalism going on here in response to "people, specifically POC, are starting to demand more equitable conditions" which is... a common trend happening elsewhere and is seeing some success?
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Feb 24, 2019 05:34
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Terrible Opinions posted:Like I completely agree and the pay raise demands should be pursued exactly as they are. However it's more reasonable to think that pay increase can be achieved by running rpg companies more intelligently and actually advertising outside of tiny insular communities, not by somehow thinking that charging more for the same product will somehow result in people paying more. How do you imagine creators are going advertise outside of tiny communities - having to compete with ad dollars from real companies - if they can't charge a real amount of money for their products?
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Feb 24, 2019 05:37
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running RPG companies more "intelligently" would result in higher prices regardless, because the intelligent take is that they're underpriced and the workers are underpaid
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Feb 24, 2019 05:39
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slap me and kiss me posted:How do you imagine creators are going advertise outside of tiny communities - having to compete with ad dollars from real companies - if they can't charge a real amount of money for their products? Then after that you need to have a content treadmill like D&D or Pathfinder. Having anything else is just not going to be able to support a fulltime job. No one is going to buy new system after new system and no RPG is so popular that you can make a career off of just selling one to three books.
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Feb 24, 2019 05:44
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Ghost Leviathan posted:The audience for RPGs is almost entirely young people, who in this age typically have very little if not negative net worth, and zero qualms about piracy if they can't find what they like at an affordable price point. Yeah I didn't pay for a single rpg while I was still a poor student because I had better things to spend the money on so I just pirated what I wanted. I buy them now but that's still not a lot since new interesting products don't come out that often. My group isn't very interested in buying the PDFs for stuff we play either since they generally only use the thing for character creation and maybe not even that. Rules are learned during actual play and everything else comes through me. That doesn't leave a lot of money on the table for the creators. Andrast fucked around with this message at 05:52 on Feb 24, 2019 |
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Feb 24, 2019 05:46
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Terrible Opinions posted:We have already directly loving seen it. RPG actual play podcasts are more popular than any RPG on the market besides possibly 5th edition D&D. Every small time RPG featured on one of them immediately sees a massive increase in sales. Which actual play podcast does pay for play?
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Feb 24, 2019 05:47
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Unfortunately none that I know of but you're going to have way more luck trying to become friends with the McElroys or Matt Mercer than you are gonna get nerds to pay a fair price for a new product.
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Feb 24, 2019 05:50
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Not to mention that the "1 to 3 book" segment of the field has lots of producers who are hobbyists and not interested in being full time RPG producers. Raising prices is always going to be difficult when there's a big chunk of the production only wanting to more or less break even on their hobby, rather than make it a career.
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Feb 24, 2019 05:53
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Terrible Opinions posted:Unfortunately none that I know of but you're going to have way more luck trying to become friends with the McElroys or Matt Mercer than you are gonna get nerds to pay a fair price for a new product. If I'd been thinking, a smarter response would have been 'but actual play podcasts already exist and industry average rates are still a pittance because nerds don't pay for things.' I don't disagree that writing a brilliant game and then befriending Matt mercer and having him create a new gaming podcast showcasing your creation' is a more viable way to make something resembling decent money for the time invested than charging nerds $40 for a game they'll play for dozens or hundreds of hours, but it's also a deeply loving stupid state of affairs.
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Feb 24, 2019 05:54
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gradenko_2000 posted:running RPG companies more "intelligently" would result in higher prices regardless, because the intelligent take is that they're underpriced and the workers are underpaid
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Feb 24, 2019 05:55
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Oh completely agreed. It is deeply stupid. edit: as for intelligently running a business I primarily mean getting some flashy superficial thing to justify a higher price to stupid nerds akin to indie video games having some weird art style or a lot of unnecessary length, and creating some consistent revenue stream with continuous stream of additional content that you can keep charging for over and over. Terrible Opinions fucked around with this message at 06:11 on Feb 24, 2019 |
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Feb 24, 2019 06:00
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The "intelligent" way to run an RPG company is to shut the company down and use the capital and labor to do anything, literally anything, other than run an RPG company.
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Feb 24, 2019 06:25
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we need lootboxes, to save tabletop gaming.
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Feb 24, 2019 06:26
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CCGs?
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Feb 24, 2019 06:28
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Terrible Opinions posted:We have already directly loving seen it. RPG actual play podcasts are more popular than any RPG on the market besides possibly 5th edition D&D. Every small time RPG featured on one of them immediately sees a massive increase in sales. That last part in particular makes it sound like hobbyist devs will just end up making better games. Book treadmills almost inevitably mean a dive in quality.
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Feb 24, 2019 06:34
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Only so much as any other creative endeavor you turn into a job.
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Feb 24, 2019 06:40
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FMguru posted:The "intelligent" way to run an RPG company is to shut the company down and use the capital and labor to do anything, literally anything, other than run an RPG company. It does seem like there's something of a catch-22 there.
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Feb 24, 2019 06:48
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Even Paizo has run up against the universal fact that there's only so much poo poo flavored tinsel you can hang on one tree. D&D exists as a branding device for WotC, reprinting the same content for 30+ years with minor mechanical changes and still not scratching the revenue Magic does.
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Feb 24, 2019 06:52
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Still more success than most other rpgs.
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Feb 24, 2019 06:57
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Hear me out, D&D: Battle Royale.
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Feb 24, 2019 07:01
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Is there a standard way to do pay-what-you-want for RPG products? E: as the seller, obviously Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 07:15 on Feb 24, 2019 |
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Feb 24, 2019 07:12
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Is there a standard way to do pay-what-you-want for RPG products? From the perspective of a content creator? Don't do it, set a price because hardly anyone pays anything.
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Feb 24, 2019 07:14
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Hooray, I'm an outlier 
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Feb 24, 2019 07:16
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Make smaller books and charge the same price for them. Relatedly, don’t feel your books with unneeded cruft and excessive tables just to pad out the page count. Page count doesn’t matter in making a good game. Have less words, less art, and pay your freelancers more for both and charge the consumers the same price.
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Feb 24, 2019 07:17
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Barudak posted:Hear me out, D&D: Battle Royale. Given that original D&D was so optimistic about how many people you could get to play at a time that it had a guideline like 1 referee per 40 players, maybe this was Gygax's original vision
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Feb 24, 2019 07:19
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Pay-as-you-want usually means most people pay nothing or like 1 cent because they cannot be arsed figuring out what they feel they 'should' pay when they'd probably pay anything from 5 to 20 bucks for it as an impulse buy. It works for Steam at any rate. You always want to make it as easy as possible for the customer to give you money.
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Feb 24, 2019 07:21
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Yeah PWYW is a fast way to get tons of "sales" with no money.
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Feb 24, 2019 07:32
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Countblanc posted:we need lootboxes, to save tabletop gaming. Achmed Jones posted:CCGs? D&D 4e. You mean D&D 4e.
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Feb 24, 2019 07:44
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TheSoundNinja posted:D&D 4e. You mean D&D 4e. A streamlined 4e using cards would be great. Oh wait they already did that and it was called Gamma World. It was awesome.
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Feb 24, 2019 07:46
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Vancian casting except you need to buy spell preparations with microtransactions
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Feb 24, 2019 07:48
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TheSoundNinja posted:D&D 4e. You mean D&D 4e.
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Feb 24, 2019 07:50
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Apparently PWYW gets you nothing on Drivethrurpg but actually gets some people paying actual money on itch.io, another reason why that service is superior.
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Feb 24, 2019 07:53
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Andrast posted:Vancian casting except you need to buy spell preparations with microtransactions loot-spellbooks
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Feb 24, 2019 07:59
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Ok, so, going back to the QTPOC list of demands: I have been able to pay 10p/word for my projects so far. I know that Rowland Rook and Decard (the Spire creators) pay a bit more. It is possible to pay people a fair wage, and one that reflects their expertise. It is horrific that Onyx Path isn’t even paying an experienced line developed 7c/word, and frankly the financial precarity and unprofessional environment they use to justify that are, I feel, a big factor in the culture of abuse that has grown up in White Wolf/Onyx Path. We can do better as publishers, and this document is a good guide towards how.
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Feb 24, 2019 08:14
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Kai Tave posted:Also it's a pretty fuckin weird flex to be labeling a place a "hive of scum and villainy" when your gripe with them is "they're saying this person is, at the very least, more abuser-adjacent than he should be" instead of something like "they're covering for and/or actively enabling abusers" which seems to me like it'd be much more worthy of the scum-and-villainy label to me. I had an exchange with Olivia Hill on twitter and it made me remember some rad owns she had against a prominent video game designer. I remember spending weeks slammin' that like button, so I decided to see what that dude was up to. The dude was complaining that SomethingAwful was cynically controlling the alt-right in order to SWAT people??? The fact that people still seriously think Somethingawful does anything but collect bad posts in 2019 astounds me. Mormon Star Wars fucked around with this message at 08:36 on Feb 24, 2019 |
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Feb 24, 2019 08:30
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Bless you for setting the standard you want to see.
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Feb 24, 2019 08:57
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Flavivirus posted:Ok, so, going back to the QTPOC list of demands: I have been able to pay 10p/word for my projects so far. I know that Rowland Rook and Decard (the Spire creators) pay a bit more. It is possible to pay people a fair wage, and one that reflects their expertise. It is horrific that Onyx Path isn’t even paying an experienced line developed 7c/word, and frankly the financial precarity and unprofessional environment they use to justify that are, I feel, a big factor in the culture of abuse that has grown up in White Wolf/Onyx Path. We can do better as publishers, and this document is a good guide towards how. Yeah I left OPP at 4.5. And that was after millions of words. I've been paid 10 for a couple of projects. Most of the time when I work for indies I'll settle between 5 and 10, depending on how much background work I've got to do. But I don't think I've ever had an indie try to negotiate me down below 5. I can't remember getting more than 5 from anyone you'd call a "major player" in games. MachineIV fucked around with this message at 09:09 on Feb 24, 2019 |
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Feb 24, 2019 08:59
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Meinberg posted:Apparently PWYW gets you nothing on Drivethrurpg but actually gets some people paying actual money on itch.io, another reason why that service is superior. on bundle of holding I usually pay at least the max unlock and some times kick in a few more bucks, like with the Chuubo/Nobilis thing since it was a dev who really did a lot of work on lines I loved when I was younger and I never got a chance to check out her other work. I hope Moran wound up getting some decent cash off of that 
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Feb 24, 2019 09:03
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Coolness Averted posted:on bundle of holding I usually pay at least the max unlock and some times kick in a few more bucks, like with the Chuubo/Nobilis thing since it was a dev who really did a lot of work on lines I loved when I was younger and I never got a chance to check out her other work. I hope Moran wound up getting some decent cash off of that Developers tend to get paid much less than writers per word anyway, on the basis that they’ll get it for the book’s entire word count. My devcpw is way lower than my writecpw OPP does pay better than it used to, and has started to actually apply rules for when writers get pay rises (I remember having to ask to get Olivia one). Writing-wise, they are not the worst but not the best. Some writers are on much better contracts than me, and I’d expect better conditions if I did another book. It’s just that 7cpw is firmly in the upper limit of the industry. There’s a few guys (and it’s usually guys) who command higher fees, such that you’ll never see them in many companies’ books simply because they can’t afford them. The kicker, though, is pay on delivery vs pay on publication, which can make much more of a difference to a freelancer than a couple hundred bucks extra - for various reasons, pay on pub is essentially “you will get your money when God wills it”. I once wrote a book that came out five years I turned it in, and 2+ is unusual but not staggeringly so. Many companies split it half on delivery and half in pub. Some use full pay on delivery as a reward for loyalty and reliability.
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Feb 24, 2019 09:30
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I remember when Greg Stolze started doing ransom-model supplements for Reign (short duration proto-Kickstarter projects, essentially) that the guideline he used for pricing was, essentially, "I want to make 10 cents a word for this and if folks don't want to pay that much for it then I'll spend my time doing other stuff instead." It's hard to say how much of the success of this endeavor (some dozen or so supplements funded in this manner) was due to him being Greg Stolze and therefore An Elfgame Writer of Renown, but this was like a decade ago and RPG writers in the year of our lord 2019 asking for a similar amount of money for the work they do is entirely reasonable and frankly should be the bare minimum expectation. I remember being approached ages ago by someone on RPGnet who liked my posts (fuckin why?) and wanted to know if I'd be interested in contributing to some publication they were putting together. I'm not sure I really wanted to be a part of any project that would have me as a contributor but I asked what they were offering out of curiosity and it was a penny a word. One cent. And I get that compared to the Greg Stolzes of the world I'm a virtual nobody but gently caress off with that nonsense.Flavivirus posted:Ok, so, going back to the QTPOC list of demands: I have been able to pay 10p/word for my projects so far. This is cool to hear and I'm glad you've been able to do this.
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Feb 24, 2019 09:32
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