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Kavak posted:Honestly, after the debacle with Matt McFarland and how close they were professionally, I don't trust them. Are you loving kidding me? She worked unknowingly alongside a monster who was embraced by the whole goddamn industry for the better part of a decade and you A) blame her and B) use it to take shots at her over an unrelated take? gently caress off. Addendum: she motherfucker Dave Brookshaw posted:Lots and lots of people were close with Mat professionally. All of us CCP-era White Wolf writers / initial tranche of Onyx Path writers (myself and Olivia included). The whole drat IGDN. I have not seen Olivia defend him after we all found out. This is some heartbreaking poo poo. LaSquida fucked around with this message at 14:31 on Nov 19, 2020 |
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Zurui posted:I'll name a name: Olivia Hill is losing her poo poo over people calling out IPR and basically saying it would be the end of the industry. More broadly: I do wonder how much of this issue arises from the attempt by small press publishers to try and match the production values of the top RPGs published. Sure, maybe you get some eyes on the product if it looks nice and shiny... but I don't think any informed consumer is going to hold it against a small press publisher if, say, they went for a plain monochrome presentation for their stuff instead of full colour, because I don't think anyone reasonable would seriously expect a small press/indie release to work with the same production budget as Wizards. And let's face it: if you are selling indie/small press RPG products, you are selling to informed consumers who have done their research, because you're just not going to be able to match D&D or other games in terms of mass market cultural osmosis and imagining that you can work on that basis is business suicide. If you are not deliberately pitching your indie RPG product to informed gamers who've done their research rather than casual purchasers who don't have much deeper knowledge of the hobby, you're probably pitching to the wrong market.
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Nov 19, 2020 14:41
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Kai Tave posted:It sounds like IPR is basically one bad day away from bringing the indie RPG distribution network down with it and that should be cause for concern if nothing else (and there's plenty else to be concerned about here). Magnusth posted:I don't think "This is lovely and predatory, but just burning it down is going to cause more problems for a lot of people" is a bad take. And I don't think it's lovely to point out that you are someone who would be hurt. It's not like the choice is "IPR definitely keeps going and thriving" or "IPR is destroyed". It's "IPR maybe finds some way to rearrange their business setup so that it has long-term viability" or "IPR collapses when they finally have that One Bad Day and take a bunch of folk with them" or "The indie RPG realises that the strut is crumbling and shifts weight away from it so they don't all get dragged down when One Bad Day happens". Warthur fucked around with this message at 15:17 on Nov 19, 2020 |
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Nov 19, 2020 14:52
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Dave Brookshaw posted:RPGs are a trap. You either work for a pittance at a "big" shop and ignore that you're getting laughably low wages and don't keep the ip, you publish your own work through one of the handful of routes like DTRPG or IPR who get by by treating their own employees worse, you go for Itch.io and accept that your game will have lower costs to match with the lower returns, or you go in for a coop and try to ignore why the other creators in the coop have gone for it (many can't get published anywhere else for good reasons). Or you publish things for free just for the fun of it cementing the industry's status as a hobby. Even TSR focused on its fiction publishing after a point.
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Nov 19, 2020 15:24
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Kavak posted:Or you publish things for free just for the fun of it cementing the industry's status as a hobby. Even TSR focused on its fiction publishing after a point. Like, if some sort of disaster happened which meant Hasbro went down and the D&D rights fell into a legal loophole, I am fairly sure the likes of Critical Role would be able to keep going just fine because they've been able to make livings for themselves streaming themselves playing a game. 5E's fortunes are largely down to Critical Role and similar getting eyes on the game. And if D&D were dead I am sure that Critical Role would either put out their own retroclone or point people at other rules sets. I can completely imagine a world where putting out RPG rules and material for the consumption of others becomes solely a cottage industry of hobbyists, and Actual Play is where people are making actual livings out of RPGs. I don't necessarily want that - I like my big chunky books with ribbon bookmarks and gorgeous art too, and I don't see an industry of part-timers making many of those except for those few which get enough traction (or recognition on Critical Role) to run a Kickstarter for a deluxe print run. But I can imagine it happening. Warthur fucked around with this message at 15:41 on Nov 19, 2020 |
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Nov 19, 2020 15:32
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Kavak posted:Or you publish things for free just for the fun of it cementing the industry's status as a hobby. Even TSR focused on its fiction publishing after a point. Yup. The only people who can write an rpg of the length and scope people expect from a publisher are those with very well-paying jobs that don't take up all their time. And every one who does it means the people who *do* rely on the industry for cost of living get a little bit worse off, as they can't compete. Itch.io pamphlet-sized games are a good way to satisfy the creative urge if you accept your game will never be popular. Warthur posted:Like, if some sort of disaster happened which meant Hasbro went down and the D&D rights fell into a legal loophole, I am fairly sure the likes of Critical Role would be able to keep going just fine because they've been able to make livings for themselves streaming themselves playing a game. You've hit on the best way to make money in rpgs right now. Don't create - stream yourself using others' work.
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Nov 19, 2020 15:38
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Dave Brookshaw posted:You've hit on the best way to make money in rpgs right now. Don't create - stream yourself using others' work. It's the other side of the "teach someone to fish" thing: once you have given that person a robust fishing rod which they can keep using forever, then they can profiteer off all the fish they catch all they like - but if you demanded they pay you a royalty for each fish they catch, everyone would see you as the villain. It sucks that the creators of the rules popular streamers use don't get compensated so much for it, but on the other hand if the popular streamers just did their own homebrew rules then professional designers wouldn't be compensated either. Which comes back to this thread's perennial refrain of "Mercer should be using his fame to help promote smaller creators instead of giving Wizards a boost they don't need."
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Nov 19, 2020 15:45
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Kavak posted:Honestly, after the debacle with Matt McFarland and how close they were professionally, I don't trust them. Don't imply this kind of poo poo without a stronger case than "said a thing I don't like."
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Nov 19, 2020 16:28
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https://twitter.com/machineiv/status/1329148660186136576
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Nov 19, 2020 16:36
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Warthur posted:Yeah, it's a tricky thing to think about because unless the stream is running a prewritten adventure using prewritten characters, it's not an exclusively uncreative endeavour: making your own characters is creative, making your own setting/scenario is creative, doing the in-session improv and the between-session prep is creative. This borders an issue I was thinking about recently, as a 'let's play' aficionado. Is it legal to stream creative content that is based off of existing content? Short answer: Yes, extremely yes. Long Answer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqmzxw0t6Ok
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Nov 19, 2020 16:50
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I mean, even if I buy the argument that IPR going under would be bad for people who rely on it, them going out of business is entirely on them.
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Nov 19, 2020 17:03
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I've been aware of IPR since it launched, I think, and yet, I don't think I, as a consumer, ever cared. Like, Agon and Monsterhearts and Fiasco all show up in my FLGS with IPR's hands on them somewhere in the stream, but I don't have any sense of their brand identity. It's Evil Hat or the Bakers or whatever. All the angry people on twitter aren't their customers - publishers are, right?
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Nov 19, 2020 17:27
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Hill needs to learn the number one technique to weather a Twitter controversy: stop tweeting
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Nov 19, 2020 17:36
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She's gone past the point of showing her rear end and is now photocopying it and posting it up around town.
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Nov 19, 2020 17:50
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Xiahou Dun posted:This is gross as gently caress, but she probably got lucky in that she would've been in one of the places with enough English speakers to get home. I doubt she was in like rural Xinjiang or something. (Not disagreeing this was hosed up, just commenting that "well I guess it's nice that the bulldozer coming at her wasn't on fire.") She was in Suzhou. What mostly happened is that Eos flew her out to China to live on their dime on the grounds that this way they'd have her on hand and could start a giant Chuubo transmedia project using cheap Chinese art and printing resources. Unfortunately, "their dime" tended to run out at the end of every month and she spent a lot of time trying not to run out of food money before they sent her some more. Also they were generally more interested in opening maid cafes than publishing books. They contributed more or less nothing to the process of making Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, and then after Jenna finally got fed up and left for America they kept the print budget but never actually printed anything. Then they stopped answering emails. They will probably announce their next Kickstarter in 2021 because that's how this kind of thing seems to work.
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Nov 19, 2020 18:29
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I'm not sure I really buy the whole "there's no way to make good money in RPGs, be a noodle vendor" thing when you have an increasing number of creators doing poo poo all on their own through crowdfunding who are able to offer fair wages and create quality games without needing to rely on something like IPR to make it happen. If the argument is "well Kickstarter or DTRPG also exploit their workers, there's no ethical consumption under capitalism" then okay cool but by the same token there's no publisher for fiction that's going to be a perfect ethical paragon either (how many publishers have had scandals behind the scenes again?) and as poo poo as Kickstarter or DTRPG may be behind the scene it doesn't approach "move to Gerlach Nevada" levels of blatant alarm-bell ringing. What this may mean is that it is not possible to have a full time 40 hour a week "I do this as my sole career" sort of thing in elfgame publishing but I haven't had a stable 40 hour a week job that paid my bills in a long, long while anyway regardless of what I've done, so I'm not sure I really see that as a unique drawback. e; basically I've noticed that the whole "you can't ever get money in RPGs you might as well not try" thing, while not untrue, really comes out like a bludgeon whenever something like the IPR situation comes to light and people rightly criticize it, and it comes across like a way to shut down that criticism more than it does wisdom from the mountain.
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Nov 19, 2020 18:43
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Rand Brittain posted:She was in Suzhou. It's an incredibly Chinese business practice to not pay your employees. It's very common for employers, even state institutions and state run corporations, to not pay their employees for months at a time. That whole thing sounds like most small business projects, which had nothing to do with gaming or publishing, I heard about that got started in China. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Nov 19, 2020 |
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Nov 19, 2020 19:00
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CitizenKeen posted:I've been aware of IPR since it launched, I think, and yet, I don't think I, as a consumer, ever cared. Like, Agon and Monsterhearts and Fiasco all show up in my FLGS with IPR's hands on them somewhere in the stream, but I don't have any sense of their brand identity. It's Evil Hat or the Bakers or whatever. All the angry people on twitter aren't their customers - publishers are, right? They have a direct sales frontend too so I guess their customer base is publishers and people who buy direct from them and FLGS who get stock from them. Kai Tave posted:I'm not sure I really buy the whole "there's no way to make good money in RPGs, be a noodle vendor" thing when you have an increasing number of creators doing poo poo all on their own through crowdfunding who are able to offer fair wages and create quality games without needing to rely on something like IPR to make it happen. If the argument is "well Kickstarter or DTRPG also exploit their workers, there's no ethical consumption under capitalism" then okay cool but by the same token there's no publisher for fiction that's going to be a perfect ethical paragon either (how many publishers have had scandals behind the scenes again?) and as poo poo as Kickstarter or DTRPG may be behind the scene it doesn't approach "move to Gerlach Nevada" levels of blatant alarm-bell ringing. quote:What this may mean is that it is not possible to have a full time 40 hour a week "I do this as my sole career" sort of thing in elfgame publishing quote:e; basically I've noticed that the whole "you can't ever get money in RPGs you might as well not try" thing, while not untrue, really comes out like a bludgeon whenever something like the IPR situation comes to light and people rightly criticize it, and it comes across like a way to shut down that criticism more than it does wisdom from the mountain.
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Nov 19, 2020 19:11
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Warthur posted:It's the "through crowdfunding" bit which is the key here. To get something like the level of traction needed to actually pay your bills off DTRPG sales and/or a big chunky Kickstarter campaign, you already need a bunch of eyes on you. Until such time as you have those eyes on you, RPGs are not paying your bills so, yes, you need to go be a noodle vendor and do your RPG poo poo in your spare time unless you particularly enjoy the precarious lifestyle, stress, and overall harm that comes from not being able to pay the bills. Yeah but the point is you can do exactly just that instead of forsaking elfgames to go do another job ala "Just write fiction instead. You'll be happier." If that means RPGs are your side gig instead of a full time one, I guess I fail to see how this is a meaningful step down from the situation huge numbers of people already deal with in the present day. Instead the narrative from certain corners sounds a lot like "if you can't accept participating in this ramshackle exploitative Rube Goldberg machine that props the traditional publishing and distributing arm of indie RPGs up on its back, you might as well just quit and go do something else." Warthur posted:From my end it is 100% not about shutting down criticism of IPR, it's about saying that IPR have dug themselves into a hole and they are being profoundly irresponsible in asking other people to come join them in the hole, when what they really should be doing is climbing out of the hole. And if the thing which is keeping them in the hole is being shackled to a business which cannot be run viably without keeping them in the hole, then it would be better to cut that chain than to pay the human cost of keeping those people in the dang hole. See, I'm taking the exact opposite away from this. People are talking about how "calling for IPR to go out of business is going to have consequences for a lot more people than them, did you know THAT while you were saying they deserved to go under, huh?" which while factually true and unfortunate, sure sounds a hell of a lot like chiding to me. Like yeah I 100% agree this is a problem of IPR's own making, but people calling for them to go under aren't doing so to charge up some sort of business-closing spirit bomb, they're saying that nobody should take this frankly awful seeming job and that, consequently, if the only way IPR can remain in business is relying on someone to be the sacrificial sucker who takes that job, then them going under is just an inevitability at that point. What are people supposed to do, exactly? Go "yes this situation is unfortunate but someone has to take the job anyway?" To be clear I agree with you that they need to A). climb out of the hole or B). cut the chain, but saying that is exactly what's resulted in some folks going "now hold on a second here, let's not be hasty, think of all the people this would hurt" or lecturing about thin margins to an audience that's largely already well aware of that fact.
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Nov 19, 2020 19:37
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Rhandhali posted:It seems to me there is no good reason to have a company whose ostensible purpose is to move poo poo around the country located so far away from the nearest major transport routes. Apparently one of the higher ups at IPR either already had a ranch in Gerlach or inherited it from a relative, so they use it as their distribution center.
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Nov 19, 2020 20:49
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That's one load bearing strawman right there. I just don't even know what to do with lines of reasoning like this either. How do you explain to people that, if they want change, they don't always get to dictate the form that change takes? That demanding that something changes means that things might, actually, change? Do they think that fully automated luxury communism means waiting for idiots like IPR to kill themselves off politely because anything else might hurt people, which is definitely not happening right now I mean they've only had ONE OD death recently. Darwinism fucked around with this message at 20:57 on Nov 19, 2020 |
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Nov 19, 2020 20:54
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:It's an incredibly Chinese business practice to not pay your employees. It's very common for employers, even state institutions and state run corporations, to not pay their employees for months at a time. That whole thing sounds like most small business projects, which had nothing to do with gaming or publishing, I heard about that got started in China. Yes, the Chinese are the only people to not pay employees. Really?
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Nov 19, 2020 21:00
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I sort of thought that any demand that IPR should significantly improve its labor practices or else go under, implied that if IPR went away someone else could step in and take up the business opportunity of distributing indie games to retailers. But maybe that implied part should be said out loud. Because ultimately what people are really saying is: we don't find this situation as we see it to be tolerable, it needs to stop. And game-makers who are dependent on an intolerable situation have the difficult - perhaps impossible - task of finding a new arrangement that would be tolerable. It's valid for them to point out how disruptive doing so would be, and likely that several would find their incomes gone - some for a while, some permanently - and so everyone has to recognize that there is more cost to demanding IPR shape up or shut down than they might have considered. But the moral equivocation inherent in saying "some unidentified person or people have to suffer so that a larger group of the rest of us don't suffer" is gross and it's sad to see it. The trolly problem is a rhetorical trap. In real life, you can never have absolute certainty that one or the other group on the tracks will definitely be killed. Olivia Hill finds herself on one of the tracks, the unidentified $10/hr Gerlach employee(s) on the other, and either side yelling at customers to pull or not pull the lever are falling into that trap bigtime. Those of us driving the trolly need to insist that no, there actually are other options here. e. and Olivia Hill does seem to understand this, now I look at some more of her tweets: https://twitter.com/machineiv/status/1329155150754136064 But she's also boiling what IPR are doing down to just "this is simply an unavoidable aspect of capitalism" which I don't accept. IPR could be a small, very cheaply run distributor paying low wages, but also still not be located so far from any form of medical treatment that a moderately dangerous medical situation is far more likely to be lethal because it'll be an hour for EMTs to arrive. Like, IPR isn't merely a struggling business that can barely make ends meet doing its best... it's apparently a weird cultish minimum wage labor ranch located so far from anywhere that its employees are likely trapped there. This goes past "welp capitalism sucks." It's totally legitimate to say no, I won't support distribution of indie games if this is the only way to distribute them: find a better way, announce plans for reform, or we're out. We do want a better industry, Olivia. Help us make it happen, you have a significant voice here. IPR doesn't need to be permanently located in Gerlach? Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Nov 19, 2020 |
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Nov 19, 2020 21:11
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Kai Tave posted:Yeah but the point is you can do exactly just that instead of forsaking elfgames to go do another job ala "Just write fiction instead. You'll be happier." If that means RPGs are your side gig instead of a full time one, I guess I fail to see how this is a meaningful step down from the situation huge numbers of people already deal with in the present day. Instead the narrative from certain corners sounds a lot like "if you can't accept participating in this ramshackle exploitative Rube Goldberg machine that props the traditional publishing and distributing arm of indie RPGs up on its back, you might as well just quit and go do something else." Yeah, sorry about that. I'm letting my own utter disillusionment take over, and it was in no way meant to deflect criticism away from IPR's terrible advert. I wish rpg creation paid enough that they could run their business properly. EDIT: Or someone else could perform the role they do in supplying an avenue to mid-range publication *while also* not being in the middle of the Nevada desert when not grinning and bearing assholes while manning a convention booth. Dave Brookshaw fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Nov 19, 2020 |
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Nov 19, 2020 21:22
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I have a DTRPG side hustle that I don't really promote online or do crowdfunding for because it's more of a passion project, and I make fine money at my actual job. It roughly makes electricity bill money about once every four months, let's say $100-$120, because I'm continually supporting the product and running sales 3-4 times a year. That, if I'm reading the stats correctly, apparently puts it in the top 10% of products on the site. For every big crowdfunding project there are a thousand duds, and physical publishing is a loving shitshow of razor-thin margins and people working for the experience and the love of the game. If that's your bag go for it. But I generally do not buy the idea that there's a living in RPGs for anyone but a tiny minority of people, and it's not a particularly good living in most of those cases. The same as most publishing. The entire TG industry is propped up by CCGs, or was when you could go to a store. The flagship, D&D, is unimportant compared to Magic, and it shows. I think it's critical that people get real about publishing and the so-called RPG renaissance is going to be a mirage for most people who want to make a serious buck on it. The stuff on DTRPG with the full-color layouts, professional art, and high-quality book releases has a large amount of experienced professionals and prohibitive cost driving it. Most everyone else is doing some dramatically lo-fi publishing between stints at their actual job.
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Nov 19, 2020 21:25
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Kai Tave posted:To be clear I agree with you that they need to A). climb out of the hole or B). cut the chain, but saying that is exactly what's resulted in some folks going "now hold on a second here, let's not be hasty, think of all the people this would hurt" or lecturing about thin margins to an audience that's largely already well aware of that fact. The people thinking "But think of the PUBLISHERS who will face hardship if IPR shut down!" aren't saying "Just write fiction, you'll be happier," to my eyes: they're saying "There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, so if people want to economically self-harm themselves and abandon any hope of being able to afford to retire in order to enable the industry, we should let them". I mean, it was Dave who specifically said "Just write fiction, you'll be happier", and he also said that being involved in RPG publishing is an economic trap. The people who are saying "don't be hasty, think of the publishers, if IPR go under I'd take a financial hit and would need to change career" are not saying "RPG publishing is an economic trap, do not consider making it a primary/sole income source", they're the people who are making a virtue out of being caught in the trap and trying to make out that there is something noble in allowing the trap to continue yawning open ready for the next succulent, juicy leg to bite into. EDIT: Ah, crossposted with Dave. FWIW, Dave, I didn't see what you said as deflecting, I saw it as reiterating the point that some fields aren't rewarding enough to be worth moving to goddamn Gerlach for and that making out like it is just serves to make the industry the sort of mirage strewn about with bleached bones that sodomy hussein talked about. Warthur fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Nov 19, 2020 |
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Nov 19, 2020 21:31
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I wasn't on the "IPR should go out of business" train but I'd nuke them in a second if it also got rid of Wizards
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Nov 19, 2020 21:43
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get rid of wizards and give me the rights to D&D
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Nov 19, 2020 21:43
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Sodomy Hussein posted:I have a DTRPG side hustle that I don't really promote online or do crowdfunding for because it's more of a passion project, and I make fine money at my actual job. All of this applies to literally everything these days is the thing. There isn't a living anywhere, in any field, for 90% of people even if "your field" is minimum wage stocking shelves at a Wal-Mart. I haven't had a 9-5 job with stable 40 hour work weeks and good benefits for basically my entire life and I have only just now, this year, begun actually doing elfgame-related work for money. Yes of course indie RPGs are very hit-or-miss and for every runaway success story there's a bunch of less successful stories but that's just how things work these days in pretty much any field, creative or non-creative, unless you happen to be born into the right circumstances and connections to have a cushy, stable job waiting for you somewhere. I would wager that the current crop of indie RPG creators do not labor under any illusions that they're going to make a full-time living off of doing RPG stuff, and in the meantime there are ways to pursue that work that don't require you to abide by terrible wages and practices for whatever return you receive on it.
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Nov 19, 2020 21:45
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Every time I ride a link to twitter, I'm that much more glad that I burned and salted my old account. Never again.
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Nov 19, 2020 21:55
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Sodomy Hussein posted:I have a DTRPG side hustle that I don't really promote online or do crowdfunding for because it's more of a passion project, and I make fine money at my actual job. I think the key thing is this is basically any creative industry at all. As Kai Tave says, separately, this is almost all other actual jobs, too. To work one job and pay your bills you usually need to be degree educated and have a bunch of experience, and it's still not uncommon to end up working loads of overtime anyway. People making tons of money off any art are a tiny tiny minority who got extremely lucky, which, to be clear, is extremely hosed.
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Nov 19, 2020 22:13
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I would just say that like many others here I read the condition of the industry into IPR. This is what "successful" publishing looks like for a lot of people. These are problems that can't be solved by crucifying IPR. It seems that some people have totally unrealistic expectations of publishing. The money is dogshit, and not in a "well I can live with that instead of working at Wal-Mart" way. And that's before you get into the small slice of publishing that is the RPG world. Stocking shelves is typically much more lucrative. I don't want to come off like I don't care about people's problems or that I think it's fair or whatever. It isn't. It's just very poo poo and people need to keep that in mind.
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Nov 19, 2020 22:46
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Yeah my point is not "the situation in the RPG hobby isn't hosed," it's that it isn't actually more hosed than any other job you could get nowadays, and getting a good job in any other field...writing, coding, even working retail...is just as much a matter of luck as making it big in elfgames. It's no longer just a uniquely RPG hobby thing to point at, this is now the general state of the world. Quitting RPGs to go do something else will not actually be an automatic improvement anymore.Sodomy Hussein posted:I would just say that like many others here I read the condition of the industry into IPR. This is what "successful" publishing looks like for a lot of people. The other point I'm trying to make is that I do not actually think that "the industry" and "IPR" are inexorably bound together. There are people out there making and selling games that are not leaning on this model of traditional publication/distribution to bookstore shelves. While this is what successful publishing looks like for a lot of people, maybe this particular version of "successful publishing" is long past outdated. Of course IPR going under will have knock-on effects and upend some peoples' lives but at this point it sounds like IPR is going to go under sooner or later anyway no matter what anyone says about them on twitter.
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Nov 19, 2020 23:02
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The secret to thriving in the creative industry is to have SWAG* *Spouse With A Good (job)
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Nov 19, 2020 23:05
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I feel like at this point the big thing we need to be doing as customers is figuring out how to insist that the people we're buying from raise their prices.
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Nov 19, 2020 23:07
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Yeah like, that kinda comes back to my "IPR isn't really the industry" thing in a roundabout way because there's a chunk of indie RPG people who go "yeah it would be nice to raise prices but then nobody would buy games so we just can't do it" and then there's a chunk of indie RPG people running kickstarters where they straight up say "we're raising funds so we can pay our writers 15 cents a word, if we hit this stretch goal then all of our writers will also get a pay raise on top of that, this is why our KS costs X instead of Y" and people are still funding them, so maybe the takeaway here is that it's not actually as disastrous to raise elfgame prices as people in the former camp continue to adamantly insist.
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Nov 19, 2020 23:12
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Rhandhali posted:It seems to me there is no good reason to have a company whose ostensible purpose is to move poo poo around the country located so far away from the nearest major transport routes. It seems to be such a poo poo town, that even with a railway line going right past it, there isn't a station.
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Nov 19, 2020 23:15
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spectralent posted:I think the key thing is this is basically any creative industry at all. As Kai Tave says, separately, this is almost all other actual jobs, too. To work one job and pay your bills you usually need to be degree educated and have a bunch of experience, and it's still not uncommon to end up working loads of overtime anyway. People making tons of money off any art are a tiny tiny minority who got extremely lucky, which, to be clear, is extremely hosed. Kai Tave posted:Yeah my point is not "the situation in the RPG hobby isn't hosed," it's that it isn't actually more hosed than any other job you could get nowadays, and getting a good job in any other field...writing, coding, even working retail...is just as much a matter of luck as making it big in elfgames. It's no longer just a uniquely RPG hobby thing to point at, this is now the general state of the world. Quitting RPGs to go do something else will not actually be an automatic improvement anymore. At least a subset of the bad jobs that are out there at least have some sort of pathway to attaining a somewhat better job. Unless IPG are outright lying (in which case double gently caress 'em), all of them are making similarly lovely wages out there in Nevada. There is no upward trajectory, nothing to be promoted into, and you are a long drive away from any viable source of alternative/supplemental work. Maybe a great deal of jobs out there at the moment are a death march to nowhere, but this is a death march to nowhere which has significant costs even for starting on. It is actually an automatic improvement to pass on the job because it means you haven't moved yourself to the utter rear end end of nowhere to work, game with, and burrow deeper into an economic trap with a gaming cult. EDIT: And more generally, given that people in the industry thread have regularly pointed out how the freelancer rates for RPGs compare poorly to more or less any other writing gig, it kind of is more hosed. Or at least, if you want to argue that all fields are equally hosed, you're going to need to bring more evidence because to me it seems like there's sliding scales of fuckedness out there based on objective measures like payment, healthcare, is there/isn't there scope for promotion, etc. Warthur fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Nov 19, 2020 |
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Nov 19, 2020 23:17
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You definitely don't need to convince me that this IPR thing is several steps worse than the usual lovely job, trust me. My position is very firmly "do not take the RPG job in the middle of the Nevada desert, no matter what."
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Nov 19, 2020 23:19
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Kai Tave posted:Yeah like, that kinda comes back to my "IPR isn't really the industry" thing in a roundabout way because there's a chunk of indie RPG people who go "yeah it would be nice to raise prices but then nobody would buy games so we just can't do it" and then there's a chunk of indie RPG people running kickstarters where they straight up say "we're raising funds so we can pay our writers 15 cents a word, if we hit this stretch goal then all of our writers will also get a pay raise on top of that, this is why our KS costs X instead of Y" and people are still funding them, so maybe the takeaway here is that it's not actually as disastrous to raise elfgame prices as people in the former camp continue to adamantly insist. All I know is these days I look at "Pay What You Want" and go 'uuuuuuh, could you please actually price this and offer a price break for poor folks who contact you or something, and give them an easy way to do that'
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Nov 19, 2020 23:43
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