I started off drafting this really verbose and tedious post about how our tiny niche hobby had thrown up this brilliant case study of socialism in action, but decided nobody really needed to read it. So, instead I'll say I came across a video once of Milton Friedman being interviewed back in the 1970s. The interviewer asked him about how unfair the market was and wasn't it better for the state to step in and help people. Friedman's reply was along the lines of, why do you think people will act any more benevolently in a political process than they do in a market? In fact isn't the opposite more usually the case (Soviet commissars vs your average corporate CEO)? An unexpected bonus was how the interviewer was obviously floored. You could almost see the thought process in his head - he just KNEW he was right, because everyone he'd known since college thought the same way as he did, but here was this nasty man with his logic and his facts that couldn't immediately be dismissed.

Let me hurriedly drag that vaguely back on topic by saying the same logic applies to the RPG industry.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;1121767Harlan Ellison wrote a very good piece called "Pay the Writer" which he explained in an interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj5IV23g-fE

I highly recommend watching it, but briefly, he talks about the importance of getting paid for ones work.  I have always thought that was 100% correct, I believe it fully.

But I don't believe someone "deserves" to get paid vast amounts for a niche work.

That's all in the context of working for someone else. You want to create and sell it to someone? Welcome to the cesspool of the free market. There's really no difference though. It doesn't matter if you are creating and selling it someone else or if you are working for someone else. Market forces will drive the cost down to the lowest it can be. There's an overabundance of people willing to work/sell for close for nothing and no one cares about quality.

Just do your own thing and release it for free as a hobby. One day, maybe, you can make some beer money off of it.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;1121767Harlan Ellison wrote a very good piece called "Pay the Writer" which he explained in an interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj5IV23g-fE

I highly recommend watching it, but briefly, he talks about the importance of getting paid for ones work.  I have always thought that was 100% correct, I believe it fully.

But I don't believe someone "deserves" to get paid vast amounts for a niche work.

It's a good video, I remember that interview.

It's spot on. You have to be responsible for what you think your work is worth. But the corollary of that maxim is: Just because you believe it's worth something doesn't mean the rest of the world believes that.

Writers have bring their product to market. The market *has* to exist, OR you have to grow it. These "writers" complaining about not making a "living wage" are amateurs and/or they're panning for water in a desert - if the goal is to make a "living wage". So either make stuff and market it - bring people to your product. Or go be a writer where the markets will bear your demands and put out work that generates demand, dummies.

Quote from: bryce0lynch;1121801That's all in the context of working for someone else. You want to create and sell it to someone? Welcome to the cesspool of the free market. There's really no difference though. It doesn't matter if you are creating and selling it someone else or if you are working for someone else. Market forces will drive the cost down to the lowest it can be. There's an overabundance of people willing to work/sell for close for nothing and no one cares about quality.

Just do your own thing and release it for free as a hobby. One day, maybe, you can make some beer money off of it.

Here is the important aspect about all this. market forces really don't drive down the costs to the lowest it can be, if it did, then there wouldn't be luxury products at all. It's really more an issue of supply, and demand, and this is true whether quality exists in a product, or not. I'll give you a specific example of this supply and demand aspect in action with low quality products. Lowe's, and Walmart that are both home improvement chains in the United States. When I was living in Fort Lauderdale, I lived on the beach. Just three blocks from the ocean, about two hundred yards or so. I could go to Lowe's or Walmart and get sandbags and lumber cheap, very inexpensive, like $1 a sandbag, that was full of sand. Or I could get lumber, a 4'x8' sheet of plywood for like $10 (good for making gaming tables also by the way....).

Now, along comes September, and a Hurricane is suddenly bearing down on South Florida. Didn't happen every year of course, so Walmart, and Lowe's never upped their order of lumber and sandbags just because Hurricane Season started. We get a mandatory evacuation notice. For people like me, who was a hotel night manager, we couldn't evacuate. We had to stay and protect our hotel, from the hurricane, and from looters, because often the looters refused a mandatory evacuation order and simply hid. and we had to protect the hotel from and from everything else as well... So a trip to Lowe's was in order. Usually by the time I got there them $1 sandbags, if any were even left, were like $10 or $15 ...each. The sheets of plywood we would custom cut and fit over our windows to keep flying debris from shattering the windows during the storm were no longer $10, they were like $60 or $80 dollars, apiece. Same deal for water, canned goods, etc. Very common low quality items outrageously marked up, with last minute buyers being gouged because of a temporary supply and demand situation.

My first year with a hurricane, I was soooo surprised. People were brawling at Walmart and Lowe's literally fighting each other for a case or two of water, or for a few sheets of plywood. ...and then the store ran out, and people got angry at the managers and riotous and surly like becuase the stores didn't have what they needed. I was blown away, but not by the hurricane, by the stupidity and greed of the shoppers, and by the ignorance of the store management (really, they could stock a little extra survival supplies during hurricane season), yah?

The higher the quality or perceived quality of the of the item, the more the markup. In gaming, that would be the white D&D book set, which once sold for $10. Now you are lucky to find one for less than $400, and the brown boxed D&D set, any printing... like $5,000 now. So yeah, ...don't release your gaming stuff for free. If anything charge more for it because it is rare, and much less common. Or find a new product with a high perceived value, in RPG gaming, or in another Industry, and sell that instead.

Or you can wait for the Hurricane to mark up your prices, but uh, Hurricanes really aren't all as common as people perceive. If there is an overabundance of people working on something, work on something where there is not an overabundance of competition, and viola, income and livelihood problem solved!

What I learned from my first few hurricane seasons in Florida... was to plan ahead. We would buy the lumber and sandbags at the normal inexpensive prices when it wasn't hurricane season, and then stored that on the hotel property, and then used it if we got hit with a hurricane warning / evac notice.

So the poor SJW rpg writer cannot make "a living wage" with their "art". Cry me a river!Here is my solution to the problem get a real job and make your "art" a side gig.

Quote from: tenbones;1121809You have to be responsible for what you think your work is worth. But the corollary of that maxim is: Just because you believe it's worth something doesn't mean the rest of the world believes that.

Which is part of why advertising, and the ability to reach audiences, is so critical. Even before convincing people of the worth of your product, you have to be able to let them know about it, and make them remember it, and the more competitors you have the louder the metaphorical noise you have to be heard over.

Which in turn is one reason why RPGs that can pick up the license for an existing, branded IP have a head start right out of the gate, and even the best possible "serial numbers filed off" expy has an uphill fight ahead of it.  Not every game can do what Zweihander did and spend two years in publicly visible amateur development first.

But once advertising becomes a critical part of the process, so does spin.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1121760Good question. Paizo?

All the others may actually just be owner-run ops plus hiring freelancers on a job-to-job basis.

Doesnt SJG have a tiny little stable of writers? What about White Wolf? Are they now just all freelancers?

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1121829Which is part of why advertising, and the ability to reach audiences, is so critical. Even before convincing people of the worth of your product, you have to be able to let them know about it, and make them remember it, and the more competitors you have the louder the metaphorical noise you have to be heard over.

Which in turn is one reason why RPGs that can pick up the license for an existing, branded IP have a head start right out of the gate, and even the best possible "serial numbers filed off" expy has an uphill fight ahead of it.  Not every game can do what Zweihander did and spend two years in publicly visible amateur development first.

But once advertising becomes a critical part of the process, so does spin.

Absolutely! I think Zweihander is a bit of an anomoly. Marketing and finding/creating that audience can't be underscored enough. It's the difference between creating a new product with all the bells and whistles, and trying to convince people to come play... and creating the right product, for an established game with its own fanbase, with a fanbase of your own - and pull off a seven-figure Kickstarter like Colville did (kudos to him).

Quote from: tenbones;1121907Absolutely! I think Zweihander is a bit of an anomoly.

Zwei thought touted itself as "liberating" the WHFRP system and just filing the serial numbers off.

paying for art to the degree that the artist gets a living wage would not leave room for writers and editors and layout people to also get a living wage unless the product is highly priced or very popular, in fact, even if you did the whole thing as a one man show there is likely not enough for even one person to rake in living wage i'd bet

Quote from: Omega;1121916Zwei thought touted itself as "liberating" the WHFRP system and just filing the serial numbers off.

And you literally couldn't go into anything vaguely related to 'fantasy RPG' without the guy or one of his many alt-accounts chain shilling.

Quote from: Snark Knight;1121927And you literally couldn't go into anything vaguely related to 'fantasy RPG' without the guy or one of his many alt-accounts chain shilling.

... and yet it worked apparently. I was interested in his game... but *he* put me off from buying it because of his online antics. But I guess I was in the minority. Oh well.

Quote from: Slipshot762;1121917paying for art to the degree that the artist gets a living wage would not leave room for writers and editors and layout people to also get a living wage unless the product is highly priced or very popular, in fact, even if you did the whole thing as a one man show there is likely not enough for even one person to rake in living wage i'd bet

This is why CCGs are the most costly games to make. I can tell you flat out that some artists made quite a bit of money during the boom period. But any CCG that failed had a high risk of potentially sinking the parent company. This is also the problem with the push for colour art in RPGs. Its costly and it jams up the price of the book. But actually does nothing to boost sales.

Quote from: tenbones;1121968... and yet it worked apparently. I was interested in his game... but *he* put me off from buying it because of his online antics. But I guess I was in the minority. Oh well.

Normally grifters like that fail as it just annoys people. But Zwei played every card possible.

Quote from: Omega;1121916Zwei thought touted itself as "liberating" the WHFRP system and just filing the serial numbers off.

Oddly enough I've been taking a stab at that myself just lately.  When he filed off the serial numbers he also padded it out way too much for my tastes.