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I am legit envious of Monte Cook's ability to transform a loyal fan base into money. He's probably the best in the TTRPG industry at extracting cash from people.
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Feb 24, 2019 19:28
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thespaceinvader posted:FFG are pretty good at it I think. MaRo explained in detail what their user personas were 5 years before anyone in my industry did. (And I whispered to myself, oh, that's the thing from Magic The Gathering. I get it.) Boy, I would love to see what user persona's look like for tabletop RPGs. Not the player personas (which are repeated endlessly in the DMG and don't seem to help at all because I already know my table), the purchaser personas.
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Feb 24, 2019 19:38
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DalaranJ posted:MaRo explained in detail what their user personas were 5 years before anyone in my industry did. (And I whispered to myself, oh, that's the thing from Magic The Gathering. I get it.) You really think they thought that deeply?
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Feb 24, 2019 19:41
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slap me and kiss me posted:That's also discounting printing costs of the book. DTRPG will charge you $39.92 to produce a single 300-page premium colour book (not calculating quantity discounts here). They then take 30-35% cut of the profits. To pay for the writing alone, you need 716 $70-book sales. I assumed PDF sales with no overhead, for simplicity. If DTRPG takes a 30-35% cut, let's be generous and call it 300 books sold, a DTRPG Electrum seller? Flavivirus posted:Well, frankly, if you’re predicting you’ll sell 200 copies you shouldn’t write a 200,000 word brick of a book - or work on it in your free time if it’s your passion project, I guess. Part of being an indie creator is picking a scale for your projects that the market will support, and making small things to build you the capital to afford to make the big things. A serious problem here is that the market just kind of sucks and is too small to support what people are willing to pay. Cut down to a 100 page light RPG supplement, and you can maybe squeeze that down to 25 USD/copy, but DTRPG would like their 30% so it's really 35 USD/copy. And people just aren't that interested in paying thirty-five dollars for a 100-page booklet because they can get the *checks DTRPG front page* Vampire: the Masqueade V5 Core Rulebook for twenty-five.
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Feb 24, 2019 21:29
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I guess the biggest hurdle is that most indie games tend to be a one and done affair, so there isn't really a product line for people to buy who like the initial purchase. No matter how much I loved Blades in the Dark once I bought the corebook I am pretty much done with things I can buy. Even spin off books like Scum and Villainy are just what I already own reskinned slightly. The only recent company to even try and create a full product line was 7th Sea, but that Kickstarter also has destroyed the company because they got greedy for "transmedia" glory. The movie pitch trailer was the worst stretch goal in Kickstarter I have ever seen (which is saying something), and giving away the whole, beautiful, product line for 65 bucks was straight up madness. If not that certainly paying to develop a board game that failed on Kickstarter twice was.
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Feb 24, 2019 22:00
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DalaranJ posted:MaRo explained in detail what their user personas were 5 years before anyone in my industry did. (And I whispered to myself, oh, that's the thing from Magic The Gathering. I get it.) Is that the Johnny/Spike/whoever thing? I always liked that. The explanations of their design process, especially for Innistrad, were cool too. I would love to see some in-depth explanations for the design of 5e, for very different reasons.
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Feb 24, 2019 22:01
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LatwPIAT posted:A serious problem here is that the market just kind of sucks and is too small to support what people are willing to pay. Cut down to a 100 page light RPG supplement, and you can maybe squeeze that down to 25 USD/copy, but DTRPG would like their 30% so it's really 35 USD/copy. 100 pages isn’t a booklet - 20 pages is a booklet, and I can sell that for £5 PDF/£10 printed. So, here’s an example: Worldfall is 70 page book with ~20000 words, and as a supplement/setting hack for another game it’s definitely not something you’d expect to do big numbers. I’m selling it for £7.50 for the pdf and £15 for the book. I paid its author 10c/word, aka $2000. Its artist cost $1500. Printing 800 books cost ~$2400 - so a total production cost of $5900. In the last year I’ve made ~$6400 from selling the book after deducting store and distributor costs, and still have 200 copies of the book left to sell. I’d say the market is healthier than folks here give it credit for? Sure, those numbers are helped by having the book as an addon in a pretty successful kickstarter, but I hope this helps give some context for my optimism.
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Feb 24, 2019 22:21
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thespaceinvader posted:You really think they thought that deeply? What? No, I didn't mean 5e specifically. You saw the surveys, it was clear they weren't. I meant, in a perfect universe this information would be collected by someone and publicly shared. Admiral Joeslop posted:Is that the Johnny/Spike/whoever thing? I always liked that. The explanations of their design process, especially for Innistrad, were cool too. I would love to see some in-depth explanations for the design of 5e, for very different reasons. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. He did a great GDC talk too.
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Feb 24, 2019 23:18
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Flavivirus posted:100 pages isn’t a booklet - 20 pages is a booklet, and I can sell that for £5 PDF/£10 printed. If it wasn't an add-on and instead standalone, even if you got the same numbers, you would have had to put up at least some of that money up front before seeing any return. And then there would be a chance you wouldn't make it back, or a chance that some poo poo goes horribly awry with the production and you get screwed. So you do a bunch of work as publisher and take a bunch of risk, and what you get is... $500 so far? Like honestly, the money is totally fine as a sideline thing that lets a person get paid for poo poo they do anyway as a hobby, but a professional trying to make a living with it probably can't do those numbers sustainability. We saw Evil Hat, one of the bigger indie publishers, have to cut a bunch of its employees this year. So if you want to know why some publishing companies only pay 5c/word? Maybe they can't afford to keep any staff if they pay 10c/word. And hey, if I personally need to hire someone for my future publications I'm happy to pay the union rate because hell yeah unions! I'm okay getting small returns because it is just fun money for me and I have a day job (multiple, part-time, precarious - hooray for being a millenial). The people trying to make a living doing this kind of work deserve to be paid well, though the sales numbers that indie RPGs do won't at this point support as many of them as we would like.
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Feb 24, 2019 23:32
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DalaranJ posted:What? No, I didn't mean 5e specifically. You saw the surveys, it was clear they weren't. This is honestly what a solid industry org is good for, that does broad, professional research with the goal of expanding the overall market, standardizing practices, etc, and collects costs and sales by channel across even the small press so that everyone can make intelligent production investments instead of winging it and getting lucky until you have enough personal experience to do it well.
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Feb 24, 2019 23:33
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Any attempt at making tabletop RPGs sustainable in a market economy will require increasing the size of the audience.
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Feb 24, 2019 23:55
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Bongo Bill posted:Any attempt at making tabletop RPGs sustainable in a market economy will require increasing the size of the audience. I'd love it if one of the big live streams would showcase a system that isn't D20, that would genuinely help.
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Feb 25, 2019 00:01
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thespaceinvader posted:I'd love it if one of the big live streams would showcase a system that isn't D20, that would genuinely help. it's particularly funny because the draw of most of those groups isn't seeing tactical combat or crunchy mechanical decisions, it's seeing nerd celebs laughing together and doing funny voices. D20 is like the worst system for their goal, except for the part where it's the only thing their target audience cares about.
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Feb 25, 2019 00:11
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thespaceinvader posted:I'd love it if one of the big live streams would showcase a system that isn't D20, that would genuinely help. Geek and Sundry does Vampire 5E.
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Feb 25, 2019 00:17
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Yeah those community guidelines from a few pages back are something I started following a few months ago. A big part of it being QTPoC driven is some time ago tons of Actual Plays and RPG projects were calling on non-straight non-white people to consult or appear. A lot of these were established platforms and when the people they wanted to guest would ask about compensation it always turned into a muddy discussion because there was no standard pay for appearing in a game. That created a conversation in certain parts of Twitter about establishing guidelines for compensation, which eventually lead to that statement. It's not even that signing this requires that those fees be paid every time. Its a voluntary thing a few people are kicking around to make a floor for how much they'll take. People who have signed similar things have and do appear for free. Its just that this statement would make it understood that if you go on a stream and don't take money you gave that channel an $80 dollar gift rather than the channel assuming people will just show up "for exposure". Similarly writers were talking about how things like PWYW were creating an unsustainable market. I believe it started with someone(probably DC) saying that designers should feel confident that their work was as valuable as a cup of coffee and that PWYW or donation sales should be reserved for things like a single 5e class that didn't stand alone. Essentially this is an attempt to create an industry standard price because most people starting out in RPGs underprice their content to an unsustainable degree.
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Feb 25, 2019 00:32
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Kai Tave posted: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. I mean, I got more than that writing a story for the fiction anthology for Mage: the Ascension's anniversary, and I was (and remain) a nobody. That's just sad.
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Feb 25, 2019 01:36
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Part of what complicates the compensation issue is the hordes of folks who will literally give away their time for free. I have acquaintances on the periphery of the TG industry who work for fractions of a cent to a cent per word. No amount of discussion/arguement seems to get through to them about how much damage they are doing to the industry, themselves, and other workers. The capstone for them (universally well paid professionals in their "real jobs") is being able to call themselves "Game Designers" or "Authors". I don't even know how to approach fixing this angle of getting creators paid. Beyond burning down Capitalism, dragging out the guillotines, etc, etc; competing with people who will contribute hundreds of hours of time just to see their name on the cover of a book simply isn't possible. Unionization, much like the video game industry is beginning to flirt with might help. However, the "tourist" types I am talking about have zero skin in the game. If they don't get paid, so what? They go back to their desk at Microsoft or Amazon and continue to get rich.
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Feb 25, 2019 02:12
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probably shouldn't hire scabs (and like, maybe they don't mean to be scabs in a pejorative sense, but that's the effect on the industry)
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Feb 25, 2019 02:31
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Sidestep posted:Part of what complicates the compensation issue is the hordes of folks who will literally give away their time for free. This is sort of like asking why anyone would sell nice shirts when sweatshops exist. When inferior cheaper products exist, why indeed would anyone go elsewhere? Also a lot of the people you're describing are probably not professional quality writers, even if they can churn out hundreds of words on an imaginary elf society, and TTRPGs would be better without that kind of armchair author
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Feb 25, 2019 02:32
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You're describing how pretty much every genre author but a few outliers lives. Most people writing in the sf/f space don't make enough at it to quit their day job.
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Feb 25, 2019 02:40
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Sidestep posted:Part of what complicates the compensation issue is the hordes of folks who will literally give away their time for free. Part of forging a strong union is having some ability to disincentivize the shop from hiring those scabs, and one of the major foundations of that is getting either the most desirable or the most amount of potential employees in the union. So, starting out, it might be difficult to get the people on Paizo's 3PP forum to join even though they should be laughing themselves to death over all the half-cent per word contracts on the forum. It seems more achievable to bring in the "celebrities" of the industry to lend weight to a union's bargaining power. Or, potentially joining an existing union which could help smooth over a lot of the difficulties of "starting" a union. quote:However, the "tourist" types I am talking about have zero skin in the game. If they don't get paid, so what? They go back to their desk at Microsoft or Amazon and continue to get rich. This is a weird loving take. There are tons of people doing all this free or nearly-free work who aren't HENRYs. I was unemployed and then working a barely above-minimum wage job when I effectively did ~80k words for what amounts to less than one-tenth of a cent per word, not even accounting for all the non-writing work on top of that. The problem isn't "tourists", it's passionate people who don't properly value their own work, which honestly characterizes nearly the entire industry.
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Feb 25, 2019 02:48
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Liquid Communism posted:You're describing how pretty much every genre author but a few outliers lives. Most people writing in the sf/f space don't make enough at it to quit their day job. I am very aware, it is mostly the same set of people. Patreon has done some cool things in shifting the market. I have some hope that things will continue to swing in favor of creators. However with a lot of the recent news about Patreons VCs looking to strangle the platform for short term gains I am not sure what's next.
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Feb 25, 2019 02:55
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(White) People are certainly having Opinions about DC's mission statement. https://twitter.com/DungeonCommandr/status/1099834687499845632
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Feb 25, 2019 02:58
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That Old Tree posted:
All I can speak to is what I have seen. I watched some pretty savage dinner table fights between people trying to make a living in this hobby and the folks deflating the value of their labor for an authorial credit. Tourists is generally the insult that gets flung out there.
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Feb 25, 2019 03:03
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Sidestep posted:I am very aware, it is mostly the same set of people. Nah, we're talking actual well known names, not the self-publishing vanity press crowd. Edit: It would be really fascinating to see what kind of actual circulation numbers different games do. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 05:55 on Feb 25, 2019 |
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Feb 25, 2019 03:07
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The whole "tourist" thing feels like such bullshit. First, it just completely undervalues the appeal of recognition and having your "name in lights". True, you can't pay rent with recognition, but that doesn't mean it's worthless.[1] I remember my first RPG writing credit, and I walked on cloud for months. I'm sure the marginal value of a writing credit to someone like Jenna Moran or Robert Schwalb is negligible, but to some beginning writer whose writing credits to date consist of an eighth-author-alphabetically credit on a Kickstarter zine, there's a lot of value there. And pretending like that value is worthless because it's not cash-money just feels offensive. "Kennedy, you're just getting started, and you're barely able to get work, but you have to charge more because the 'real writers' are struggling to pay bills." Second, why does RPG writing have to be a full-time job? Every creative endeavor is like this. I work down the hall from a well-known, widely respected, and actively working comic writer. But also, more money is good and he can do both. Maybe Avery makes good money doing a job they love[2], but they could make $5,000 a year writing RPG adventures for the DMs Guild or small Kickstarters or somesuch. Not enough to live off of, but $5,000 a year isn't nothing. It's a real difference in QOL. And then some person on the internet tells them "You should charge more. You're not charging a living wage. You're hurting the industry." Why is it on them? I'm all for the fall of global capitalism, and I think people should be paid more, and I agree with a lot of the recent sentiments and the principles of the QTPoC post. But the idea that if you're not doing this full time or if you care about something other than financial compensation you're a "tourist" is kinda offensive. [1] And there's a distinction between an author valuing recognition and a publisher preying on people and offering recognition as compensation. [2] Or maybe their circumstances don't allow them to be a full-time writer, due to being a SAHP or having a chronic illness or what-have-you.
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Feb 25, 2019 06:06
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CitizenKeen posted:The whole "tourist" thing feels like such bullshit. Calling them "tourists" may have all sorts of weird and unintended connotations so okay, let's set that aside for a moment and zero in on the more pertinent point that one of the reasons that RPG publishers have historically been able to get away with paying writers sub five cents per word wages is because there are no end of people willing to take on the work for lovely wages for the ephemeral glory of being a credited elfgame author. It's great if they get a sense of pride and accomplishment to see their name in the credits of a sourcebook for their favorite game but it's not at all incorrect to say that this pervasive sentiment, that oh yeah I'll work for substandard wages because I'm just thrilled to be involved, is a large part of why the industry is such a shambles from that end of things. It doesn't have to be a fulltime job and you don't have to do work solely for the money, but people who enthusiastically sell their work for cheap do in fact contribute to the perception that such work doesn't deserve a fair wage because hey, so-and-so didn't make ten cents a word, are you saying you're better than them? Go ask a few artists how they feel about people coming to them and asking for commissions then getting offended when they get told that it'll cost them a couple hundred dollars instead of the $20 they paid someone on Deviantart to draw their Original Character this one time. Recognition/exposure and fair pay for work aren't mutually exclusive. You can, and in fact should, get both at once.
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Feb 25, 2019 06:24
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Are those who create as a hobby to blame for the situation?
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Feb 25, 2019 06:32
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I thought we were in a golden age of RPGs.
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Feb 25, 2019 06:46
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^^^The number of successful self-published and crowdfunded RPGs is evidence that we can both be in a golden age of RPGs and that creators shouldn't have to rely on publishers offering them a pittance in order to get their work published in the first place. If a publisher wants to solicit someone's work then they should be prepared to pay fair rates for it, otherwise they have no business soliciting work.Bongo Bill posted:Are those who create as a hobby to blame for the situation? Well it depends on how we're describing "creating as a hobby." I've written some 80,000 words of Lancer homebrew stuff over the last couple of years. Nobody commissioned me to do it, I did it because I felt like doing it. I've been paid approximately zero dollars for any of it, but I also haven't put it out there as anything more than "here I made some stuff in my spare time" to be shared among a tiny audience of die-hard Lancer nerds. I do have some aspirations of, at some point, putting some of it together for actual official publication, and when that happens, whether I'm trying to do it as a full time job or not (I will not be) that moves beyond the bounds of doing something strictly as a hobby. If the game's creators took leave of their senses and wanted to hire me to write something for them, again, that's no longer a hobby even if I'm not doing it as a full time thing, that's work. Maybe it'll be cool work, maybe I'll have fun and enjoy having my name on a thing, but it's still work. In a broader systemic sense no, creators selling their services for substandard wages are not solely to blame for the lovely working conditions of the TRPG hobby but I don't think it's unreasonable to say that a continual willingness to sell work for cheap contributes to the entrenched perception that RPG writing is only worth, say, 3-4 cents a word and that RPGs should never cost more than about $30. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 06:51 on Feb 25, 2019 |
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Feb 25, 2019 06:48
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Like to bring up Lancer once more, there was a dude who showed up in the discord server who was completely and utterly dumbfounded that the creators, who've spent the last two years or so writing some 600+ pages of RPG material, are planning to run a kickstarter for it. "What do they need money for? I don't understand, I thought this was just a hobby? They already have jobs." Even after having it repeatedly explained to him repeatedly that hiring artists, layout editors, etc. all cost money and that the creators themselves deserve to make money off of what is frankly a substantial amount of work, this guy just couldn't fuckin wrap his head around the idea that creators might want to charge money for something instead of giving it away for free.
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Feb 25, 2019 06:56
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Bongo Bill posted:Are those who create as a hobby to blame for the situation? No (in the sense that they didn't start this situation), but they exacerbate an already lovely situation in the same way that people who write/draw/whatever "for exposure" do, and people in creative industries have been speaking out against "for exposure" work in art for a while now.
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Feb 25, 2019 07:15
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I'm working on something with a DIY ethic and vibe. I've never been published and the very small handful of credits I have are under pseudonyms that I no longer use. The product is, in my opinion as sole current creator, going to be "demo song recorded in garage" levels of suck. It was always my intent to give the product away for free and have some kind of "freely redistribute, do not remove credits" license. Is this sort of thing contributing to the problem? Or is this what you'd expect?
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Feb 25, 2019 07:26
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CitizenKeen posted:But the idea that if you're not doing this full time or if you care about something other than financial compensation you're a "tourist" is kinda offensive. Thats dangerously close to https://twitter.com/forexposure_txt, to be honest
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Feb 25, 2019 07:44
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:I'm working on something with a DIY ethic and vibe. I've never been published and the very small handful of credits I have are under pseudonyms that I no longer use. The product is, in my opinion as sole current creator, going to be "demo song recorded in garage" levels of suck. For me this seems to loop back around to the hobby-vs-work distinction, and how some people seem to conflate the two by suggesting that doing paid work can still be considered a hobby and if it's a hobby then maybe it's okay to not be paid much for it. In TRPG terms nobody expects the guy posting D&D homebrew on a forum to charge people ten cents a word to read his collection of 100 Additional Elf Subtypes, but as soon as this guy decides that he wants to actually publish The Even More Complete Guide to Elves he should not be thanking someone for offering him the princely sum of three cents a word and a pat on the head. Once creators decide that they want to make money creating stuff they're no longer strictly hobbyists in my opinion, they've entered the professional realm whether they really wanted to or not. And I mean, nobody here is really putting everyone who's ever worked a low paying job on blast because I'm fairly certain that everyone here has, at one point in their lives, worked a job they've been underpaid for (RPG related or no). The reasons for doing this are many and understandable, but at the same time publishers aren't just gonna start paying creators a fair wage out of the goodness of their hearts as long as there are people eagerly looking to make their "big break in RPGs" by essentially underbidding everyone else.
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Feb 25, 2019 07:47
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:I'm working on something with a DIY ethic and vibe. I've never been published and the very small handful of credits I have are under pseudonyms that I no longer use. The product is, in my opinion as sole current creator, going to be "demo song recorded in garage" levels of suck. By all means, work on your dream game in your spare time and give it away for free - that's never going to be a problem or something that should be stopped. This problem happens as soon as the end result is a commercial product, because then someone is getting paid and the (de)valuation of labour comes in if people who contributed aren't being paid fairly.
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Feb 25, 2019 08:05
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Basically it's the difference between someone saying "you have to monetize your hobby" (which isn't true) and saying "if you want to monetize your hobby, you shouldn't undervalue your work in the process."
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Feb 25, 2019 08:08
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It should literally be illegal to pay people less than minimum wage for work. Oh wait, it is illegal (at least in the US), but there's that gigantic loving loophole called "contracting" that lets an employer treat its employees as if they're actually miniature companies whose labor costs are not subject to scrutiny about minimum wage. Plus throw in additional poo poo like, internships, volunteer work, and outsourcing to other countries, and you get a situation like the RPG industry that essentially runs on below-minimum-wage labor. IMO this is what has to happen for things to change:
None of this is going to happen any time soon, and all of it has to happen for RPG writers to be universally paid reasonably. I feel like the only reasonable conclusion to draw is that if you decide to write RPGs, you are volunteering to starve, and you should probably take your talents elsewhere. Maybe do it as a hobby if you feel driven. Let's take it as a given that everyone in this thread would prefer to live in the world where there is a thriving industry of RPG products produced entirely by people being paid in a manner commensurate with their skills and experience, but we currently do not. It may be that such a market is impossible for the forseable future. This is also true of a lot of other endeavors, including many that are culturally valuable and enriching, but for which a viable, rewarding financial marketplace does not exist. The situation can be improved by better labor regulations which help to take the edge off of the worst byproducts of capitalism, but even when the laws are highly supportive, some things just aren't economical as jobs, because there are too many suppliers and not enough demand to support them with livable wages. And I get that a few people are in fact managing to live on doing this, but they represent a tiny minority of the overall labor pool. Talent does matter, and while the market is obiously not super efficient at it, a few highly talented people who also have the skills to aggressively promote themselves can find consistent work that keeps the rent paid, barely. But I do not think the situation in which the great majority of RPG product is produced by either hobbyists or people accepting 5 cents a word for it is likely to change significantly without a radical change per the above bulleted list. As an aside, I am a software technical writer with 20 years of experience. If I were to switch to contract work, I'd charge a bare minimum of $150/hr for my work. I'd expect someone with just 5 years experience to be charging about half that. And, I would never negotiate a fee based on word count, which is simply an absurd metric for any form of writing outside of, maybe, newspaper journalism, and even there, printed newspapers are basically dead. Contracts are usually based on days or weeks of work, or occasionally, a negotiated flat fee for a specific set of deliverables. If there is a page or word count, it's purely an estimate so both the writer and the client are on the same page as to how much time and effort is likely to be needed, and not an actual contractual obligation. What the customer wants is complete, accurate, navigable, accessible documentation of their products, and this is the model that produces the best product for the lowest cost for the client. My first drafts of content are usually longer than my edited, final product, because cutting down the length is a sign of quality. It takes more effort to be brief but still accurate and complete, than it does to just poo poo out big blocks of text and call it a day. And our customers are decreasingly likely to bother to read content the longer it gets. I shudder to think what my company would be producing right now, if all the tech writers were paid by the word. Of course, RPGs are not 100% technical content, they also contain fluff and flavor and art, including written art such as stories. Even there, though, there is no particular value to being longer rather than shorter. More can be valued, but in the meaning of "giving more stuff for the reader to use or enjoy" and that is not the same thing as "writing more words for the reader to read." Creativity, originality, compelling narrative, etc. are not linear functions of wordcount. And even if you have a metric like "write up details for these 100 monsters" and you've decided each monster gets 1 page, and there's room for about 200 words per page or whatever, that still easily fits into a pay-for-your-time model. Especially if you have your writer produce three or five examples and tell you how much time that took them to do. This industry is awful in so many ways, but one of the ways it's especially awful is that the pay structure for writers is at best only very loosely coupled and at worst completely contrary to what would incentivize the best possible work products for the customers. This post was too long, and got sidetracked by a secondary idea, because I did not spend the additional time it would have taken to make it better. That's all your SA :tenbux: buys, sorry. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 08:16 on Feb 25, 2019 |
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Feb 25, 2019 08:12
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I find myself wondering how practical it would be to run an elfgames company as a public art nonprofit, with the wage value of volunteer labor writing stuff serving as a tax write-off.
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Feb 25, 2019 08:56
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Kai Tave posted:Basically it's the difference between someone saying "you have to monetize your hobby" (which isn't true) and saying "if you want to monetize your hobby, you shouldn't undervalue your work in the process." Right, I get it. So... let's say I did decide to monetise my hobby. What's undervaluing my work even look like here? (e: A better version of the question would be "how do I value my work?") Minimum wage here works out to about 15 USD / hour and I can't see making that back. If it ONLY took me 100 hours I'd need to sell 100 copies at 15/ea and given the numbers I've just seen ITT that seems fantastically unlikely. On the other hand, pricing the product at a buck a pop (maybe someone might even buy it!) to try to make some, any, money back sounds like it falls afoul of undervaluing the work which yeah I agree is a problem. But with PDFs of games we've all heard of being sold at 15-20 I just can't see anyone wanting to pay the same for something like any of what I'd be able to make on my own in my free time. So I'm not sure how someone in my position would start. Make free stuff until I'm a known quantity then Kickstarter? Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 10:22 on Feb 25, 2019 |
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Feb 25, 2019 09:48
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