Quote from: SineNomine;633294[opportunity costs] The market doesn't care why you set the price the way you set it. The intrinsic motivation for the production is irrelevant to the market- it's going to pay what the product is worth to it...My professional worth is what I can get away with charging, and you can bet your favorite teeth that I'm going to try to find that price as fast as I can.

Exactly why I want to bracket the deep "love" every game writer expresses for the medium, just for a fraction of an hour. The amount of joy I get telling people I write games instead of working register in a filling station is an intangible good. Sure. It is as you say completely irrelevant to the market price you want to discover. If it is worth talking about at all, it may not be priced to make the entire endeavor worthwhile. Let's find out.

Right now, the going rate on "love" seems to be worth the difference between $2.50 on the one hand and minimum wage or any other job of your choice on the other. That's the price of love on an opportunity cost basis. Maybe you're working toward a long profit at the end, I sure hope so.

In the here and now, that "love" is generating a better economic return than sitting on my ass playing video games or pontificating on forums or whatever my pure hobby pursuit happens to be. It's not nearly as lucrative as pumping gas, which is OK as long as we are honest and clear with ourselves that the "love" is worth the sacrifice.

But the amount of resistance I'm hearing -- not necessarily from you -- tells me this is a weirdly sensitive subject so we may never know.

Well the beauty of this particular internet argument is that in the end boils down to how many sales did I have at the end of the day. A number that can't be argued with.  

Last year I grossed about $1,200 worth of sales had about $300 worth of expenses and the net effect is that all my gaming purchases didn't come out of my pocket and some unexpected bills got paid quickly.

While not generating much sales, Blackmarsh recently exceeded 3,000 downloads something that pleases me greatly.

Anyway I feel I been well compensated for the extra work it took to make my projects publishable.

Quote from: estar;633300Last year I grossed about $1,200 worth of sales had about $300 worth of expenses and the net effect is that all my gaming purchases didn't come out of my pocket and some unexpected bills got paid quickly.

I always love your transparency. Your hobby paid for itself and I think your numbers are getting bigger.

I think what's on my mind is another designer you've worked with in the past who has really struggled to turn this into a day job and hasn't had any luck. He's priced himself into the ground and there just isn't enough love in the day to pay the bills. But he just isn't finding another job.

What do we tell that guy? I feel that this is both far removed from the clone debate and circling back on topic somehow. EDIT Because that guy started in the d20 boom when there was so much demand for product that he could conceivably earn enough back then to survive. Now every guy like him is the master of his own clone. Is that part of what's changed, or was he always just doomed?

Quote from: econobus;633295But the amount of resistance I'm hearing -- not necessarily from you -- tells me this is a weirdly sensitive subject so we may never know.

What do you expect when you are talking about love?

If you don't live in this kind of space where you are variably measuring your time for various income streams, it is very hard to relate to or understand it, much like working for someone else vs starting your business.

Not everything can be so easily compared with 1 hour of work gets me X amount of pay one time, within a two week period.

Quote from: Lynn;633303What do you expect when you are talking about love?

Yeah! But I'm never the one who brings up the love. I'm the one who looks at this solidly as a business and then has the gentle amateurs throw the intangibles in my face.

As a cut-throat freelancer myself in both the game and straight world, I hear you on the income streams. It's why my game credits dropped off the face of the earth the minute someone agreed to pay me what was then the equivalent of a huge $10 an hour. Nowadays, our cats would starve on that kind of rate scale.

So is it impossible to unbundle the love from the money for just an afternoon? You seem to say yes, but I may be wrong.

Francine: Listen, sweetheart, you have a stable job, an adoring wife, and a family that loves you. That makes you the richest man in the world.
Stan: Oh. Oh, that's fantastic, Francine. I'm the richest man in the world. [Grabs phone] Hello? Bill Gates? Turns out I'm the richest guy in the world because I have an adoring wife and a loving family.
Francine: Oh, Stan, please.
Stan: Oh, hang on. That's the other line. Hello? UNICEF? Yes, I'd like to donate some of my immense riches. What's that? Children are still starving in Africa because wife love is worthless to you? What an odd policy.

Quote from: econobus;633295Exactly why I want to bracket the deep "love" every game writer expresses for the medium, just for a fraction of an hour. The amount of joy I get telling people I write games instead of working register in a filling station is an intangible good. Sure. It is as you say completely irrelevant to the market price you want to discover. If it is worth talking about at all, it may not be priced to make the entire endeavor worthwhile. Let's find out.

For a lot of publishers, I think their answer to this is just a matter of revealed preference. If it is, they'll keep doing it, and if it isn't, they'll stop.

In my case, calculating 160 hours a month year-round, I earn about $10 an hour on it before taxes. That's enough to convince me to spend a week tearing my beard out trying to assemble 20 new SWN tags that adequately characterize mercantile policy in a way that generates plot hooks and adventures. The sum is adequate, though it gets real iffy there on the margin on Sunday night.

The thing is, in the year before I was earning about $4 an hour on that same time investment. My return on the time climbs to the extent that I have many different products and a constant stream of new releases. If that stops, my side income stops, so I am incentivized to work always and forever.

In the larger sense, I think the reason you're getting pushback from the suggestion that more authors should just give up any hope of making money on their work is because cash is the major way society shows you that what you do is awesome. Yes, subculture cred is great, and encouraging emails are always wonderful, but at the end of the day and taken as a whole, cash counts. To tell somebody that he should just accept that his work will never be rewarded noticeably is to tell him that his work is crap by the most widely-accepted standard there is. Telling him that it's really awesome by niche, specific, unsalable metrics is not going to smooth the situation.

Really, a lot of writers in any genre need to accept that they simply cannot produce words that other people will buy in significant amounts. Everybody knows the writer who's working his life away just trying to get a deal he's never going to get. But telling them that is not going to be taken by them as a positive social interaction.

An interesting observation made by an old friend who works at an FLGS is that RPG books are more similar to textbooks and reference manuals than novels, but that folks are more used to paying a novel pricing structure for entertainment media. This is why fans balk when paying double for a hard bound RPG book as opposed to a hardback besteller ($60 vs $30) from a big box retailer.

That said, while I *personally* have no need for clones, I feel that anyone who feels the need and wants to risk their labor against the needs of the market should do so.  If it's good, then the market will shake out the stuff that it finds useful.  If they want to do stuff for free, then that's good too.  No one is making me check out a product.  While I personally would find adventure content more useful, I encourage anyone who feels the need to create and has what they feel is a good idea go for it, especially if they have a point to make. Many of the debates in gaming are decisively solved on the strength of the success of product. Don't hate, create, put up or shut up.

Quote from: SineNomine;633271If the hobby wants me to put up with the aggravating, unfun, unpleasant parts of producing a salable product, it's going to have to pay me. There are parts of the process I really love- it's wonderful to just be able to sit down and write any old thing and play around with words all day. It's a great way to spend the time... except then you need to edit. And proof. And do layout. And contract art. And do many other things that are not remotely fun if you want to give other people a nice RPG book and not a blogpost full of dashed-off ideas.

This is the crux of the matter. The difference between an amateur giveaway and professional products, whether we're talking RPG material, music, or games, is a lot of un-fun but necessary labour that has traditionally been carried out by paid professionals. With traditional publishing models eroding, we're going to find out how much people are willing to pay for editing, layout, etc.

Quote from: T. Foster;633269Sadly, most rpg GMs creating house-rules and adventures for their buddies (or even, in some cases, for the buddies they wish they had) don't recognize that difference.

To be honest, with respect to rules or creativity- I don't think is there ever was a significance difference in RPGs. It was and will never be big enough to attract real profession talent.

About the best that can be done is that professional layout, editing and art can be brought for a design. But it basically ends there.

Quote from: SineNomine;633307In my case, calculating 160 hours a month year-round, I earn about $10 an hour on it before taxes. That's enough to convince me to spend a week tearing my beard out trying to assemble 20 new SWN tags that adequately characterize mercantile policy in a way that generates plot hooks and adventures. The sum is adequate, though it gets real iffy there on the margin on Sunday night.

Thanks and congratulations! That's an excellent return in this biz -- far above the $200 ceiling that brought me out of the woodwork to begin with. Is it "enough?" As you say, that's up to every entrepreneur to gauge.

Hearing that It Gets Better is even better. I can't think of anyone who doesn't want their hobby project to grow until it truly can crowd out everything they do for more money and less love. That's how it should work. If I were mouthing off any more, I'd hope you could find ways to annuitize that back catalog, keep 'em earning cash even if you're off doing something else. Content creators should be about building trailing streams, not constantly having to hunt sales like sharks. But you already know that.

Quote from: SineNomine;633307In the larger sense, I think the reason you're getting pushback from the suggestion that more authors should just give up any hope of making money on their work is because cash is the major way society shows you that what you do is awesome. Yes, subculture cred is great, and encouraging emails are always wonderful, but at the end of the day and taken as a whole, cash counts.

That's the only reason I want to move the emails and subcultural cred into one doily-lined box and the paycheck into something a bit more quantitative. Because I see endless people going into this business for the doilies and vague long-term dreams of a payout someday, but in the near term they wreck whatever fundamentals the industry ever had and their own balance sheets in the process. And then I see people go into this business thinking they can feed their families and it actually does break my heart. A little.

So if love is the primary motivator -- like every single "hobbyist" keeps shouting -- then try letting love be the only motivator. Put it up for free, sell a kidney to make it happen, eat ground up Judges Guild modules because it's cheaper than ramen, do NOT tell me it's all about love and then blame the money.

And if money is the primary motivator, then don't talk to me about love at all. You are a professional then. It sounds like you personally are a professional, a rare and precious thing in this business.

Quote from: SineNomine;633307Really, a lot of writers in any genre need to accept that they simply cannot produce words that other people will buy in significant amounts. Everybody knows the writer who's working his life away just trying to get a deal he's never going to get. But telling them that is not going to be taken by them as a positive social interaction.

Quoted for that magical combination of truth and pain. Plenty of people can create content and feed their families. It happens all the time. Anyone reading this can churn out gibberish for Wall Street at five, six times the rpg rate and it scales up very fast from there. So why does it have to be gaming? Is it the emails, the doilies, the rush of having your name on the book?

If not, maybe save your redundant clone of Holmes-with-a-soupcon-of-Redbox-plus-THACO-and-also-paper-minis-in-the-18th-century for when you have something more revolutionary to say. Something that makes it all worthwhile.

Quote from: econobus;633305So is it impossible to unbundle the love from the money for just an afternoon? You seem to say yes, but I may be wrong.

If you can afford to do it, I wouldn't knock something that seems to work for some people. I always have a lot of irons in the fire, and if placing one iron close to another generates twice the heat, then Ill give it a try. That's my method, but it is not for everyone.

Quote from: T. Foster;632947If there are I haven't seen them yet. A few years ago when OSRIC/1E-stats stuff was first starting to be released I bought and/or downloaded a lot of the more-heavily-hyped adventures and while there were a few decent-ish "meat and potatoes"-style adventures (mostly by James Boney and thedungeondelver, who are both good at capturing the "default 1E" feel of stuff like the Giants modules), there weren't any that I considered to be a "modern classic" that I felt I absolutely HAD to run, and most of them - even well-reviewed stuff like the DCC 1E-conversions and a lot of the dragonsfoot modules and various "megadungeons" - did nothing for me at all. When I was radically downsizing my rpg collection earlier this year I wasn't even tempted to save any of it. The only newly-published quasi-OSR module I kept was Bottle City by Rob Kuntz, and that was solely for its interest as an historical artifact, not because I have any desire to actually run it.

After that I decided it wasn't worth my time or money to go through all this stuff on the chance I might eventually stumble across something I really and truly liked. Nowadays something would have to get an absolute rave review from one of the small handful of people whose opinion I really trust for me to be willing to even take a look at something, much less drop any money on it. And so far, within the last couple-three years, nothing has risen to that level. Which isn't to say it isn't out there, below my friends' radar, but I haven't seen it.

Well, there we are.. once again you gain your rep as the old-school Taliban.

RPGPundit

I want a game that gives me what Car Wars did back in the day, when we did (without realizing it) our own Braunstein-style gaming.  A little more crunch for the character, but that's about it; just clone the game and buff up PCs.

I love Car Wars, but it's available in .pdf and if you want an expanded character system, classic Traveller plugs in very nicely if you change space skills to naval skills.