I believe Pinnacle, creators of Deadlands and Savage Worlds has a very tiny full time staff, and a stable of quite regular freelancers.

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.

I was the same. But I guess it worked on account of him just firing so many bullets that eventually he was going to hit enough. I mean the guy must genuinely have been dedicated to spamming about the game on a hundred different places as his full time job because it was relentless, no matter how many places banned him.

Then again there was talk that he just ended up buying X amount of copies of his own book to drive up figures.

Quote from: Orphan81;1122074I believe Pinnacle, creators of Deadlands and Savage Worlds has a very tiny full time staff, and a stable of quite regular freelancers.

And pretty generous licensing for those third parties certainly helps.

Once again - if you want to make a "living wage", find where the market is, work your ass off, produce good product and market the hell out of it. Profit. The formula is pretty well established. Ignore it to your own detriment.

... or you better start lowering your expectations on the results.

Meanwhile on Reddit people seem to have a pretty good grasp of economics.

Quote from: Haffrung;1120962For those of us not on Twitter, is there any screen caps or links to where this is being discussed?

Apparently RPGPundit doesn't do that, unless you say you can't verify their claims, and then they'll call you a liar.

Quote from: Brad;1120982"Creator." That's the same bullshit as "influencer." Some of those morons on Instagram get paid astronomical sums to pose with shitty energy drinks, and some get zero. Should they all get the same amount, regardless? That's essentially the argument here. But as someone in the comments points out, you can maybe have I dunno, five ridiculously paid Instahoes, and thousands of others get bupkis. The same goes with these "creators." I don't think the RPG hobby can support more than a couple of the Critical Role-type shows, but it WILL reward you if you have a superior product and you can possibly replace Critical Role if you're good enough. They're not good enough.

I'm not sure if quality is the deciding factor, but you're certainly right about everything else.

Quote from: HappyDaze;1120988Aren't these some of the same people that have told sections of the gamer community that they "literally don't want your money? "

Not necessarily, and we should avoid lumping them together, which I know I've been guilty of myself.

Quote from: Haffrung;1121000They really think they're going to earn a living from this?

To be fair the idea of playing videogames for a living was an idiotic idea not too long ago. The difference is that's cheap. These folks want multiple actors and studio level production values to play a tabletop RPG.

Quote from: hedgehobbit;1120979The tweet that started it all. The important thing to realize is that she isn't talking about writing game material like rules or adventures, she's talking about making D&D livestreams. That's why she's using terms like "creators" and is talking about D&D as a "medium".

https://twitter.com/dreamwisp/status/1219793872844292098

Another #Tweet that would have been simple to include in the vid, but why bother when people like you will do all the hard work?

Quote from: Cloyer Bulse;1121184The main reason why Hitler lost WW2, and why he felt compelled to start it in the first place, is because he was fundamentally ignorant about economics and believed essentially the same thing.

He was right about everything vis-a-vis the Soviet Union -- right about the invasion, going south, dividing his forces in the south believing that the Soviet Union was beaten, and so on. There was however one critical factor about which he was wrong, and could not have anticipated due to his ignorance, and that was the power of the United States. While they denied it publicly, both Stalin (according to Khrushchev in a taped interview) and his marshal Zhukov (in a bugged conversation from 1963, released 30 years later) are on record as saying that without America's lend-lease program that the USSR could not have continued the war. The USSR won because they were zipping around in 363,080 American-made trucks, eating 782,973 tons of American SPAM, and communicating using 956,688 miles of telephone wire and 380,135 field telephones provided by America. In 1942, 63.2% of all military supplies came from America [H.D. Hall, North American Supply (London 1955), p. 430; M Harrison, Soviet Planning in War and Peace 1938-1942 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 258-9; H. van Tuyll, Feeding the Bear: American Aid to the Soviet Union 1942-1945 (New York, 1989), pp. 1956-61)].

You'd think that some of these people would crack open a book and read about the epic failures of history so as not to repeat them, or at least learn basic economics, but apparently not.

The more you know.

Quote from: spon;1121196Globalism started off with good intentions

And it might have better results if the people advocating for it were honest about the flaws in their philosophy.

Quote from: David Johansen;1121201Yeah, they raised the minimum wage here in Alberta a bunch.  Talk to all the people who's hours have been cut to the bone, all the kids who can't get a job out of high school, all the small businesses that it pushed over the edge, all the people who saw their food costs double.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee;1121325Pretty much. I mean nowadays a kid can't legally setup a lemonaid stand. Getting to work at a yoing age is in no way inherently bad.

Quote from: Brad;1121328I mowed yards, sold candy, fixed computers, worked in a firework stand, and did countless other things before I was old enough to get a job working as a cashier (16). Willingly. Because I wanted to buy RPGs and comic books.

Quote from: Antiquation!;1121329Which is a fucking tragedy because through tightening the leash on this type of activity, a vital cornerstone of development and education is being removed as an opportunity for young people.

And it's not much better for adults. Unemployment support is an all or nothing affair,  it often costs small businesses more to fire someone that they get from hiring them, and now freelancers in California can't work profitably anymore.

It's almost as if they don't want you to be a productive member of society.

I just hope RPG.net is not in favour of paying a living wage, cos if so it seems to be contradicting itself with this piracy is generally fine thread. (Although the original post is a stand against piracy, most postings seem to support it)

Quote from: ponta1010;1122147I just hope RPG.net is not in favour of paying a living wage, cos if so it seems to be contradicting itself with this piracy is generally fine thread. (Although the original post is a stand against piracy, most postings seem to support it)

Alot of entry level board and RPG game designers over on BGG have for years been pushing that its ok to steal someone elses game. Some even bitch and moan that they cant steal someones design and sell it while the game is still on the shelves.

Theres even a few wastes of oxygen that advocate that its ok for a playtester to steal a design.

Quote from: ponta1010;1122147I just hope RPG.net is not in favour of paying a living wage, cos if so it seems to be contradicting itself with this piracy is generally fine thread. (Although the original post is a stand against piracy, most postings seem to support it)

Not gonna read the drivel, but I'm not surprised they advocate theft.

Quote from: Brad;1122176Not gonna read the drivel, but I'm not surprised they advocate theft.

It's a typical Big Purple circle jerk, complete with complaining there aren't enough black dicks represented properly.

*reads title of thread*

Haha oh yeah, those people. They pop up again and again. I can only roll my eyes at so much idiocy.

Another thing that pops up ever more often are all the entitled minorities/feminists/what-have-you-other-far-left-wing-group who think that now that p&p (or mainly DnD 5e) is popular (and can be made into money) we all need to just hand it over because as it is now it's bad (racist, sexist, ableist, cultural appropriation, colonialist, not enough diversity, not enough POC etc etc bla bla). And of course they all seem to think THEY know how to "fix" that and make it "better" :rolleyes: Or even better, they think that we, the ones who kept it alive all those years, have to enable THEM. After all, they just want to have it like they want, without putting the hard work in.
Fuck off you assholes, we didn't need you 30/20/10 years ago, we don't need you now.
And NO, that is not gate-keeping. If you want to be a part of this hobby, you can be, but stop pretending like you know everything better after being in the hobby for all of "5 minutes". Come in and be a fucking decent human being for a bit.

Quote from: Marchand;1121796I 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.

One of the the paradigm-changing quotes I read stated an evident truth that no one seems to hear: Capitalism is the one economic system where you are rewarded directly proportionately to how much you serve people in the ways they want.

Or have marketing good enough to convince customers they want to be served what you want.