Don't think my title is conveying what I'm trying to, I'm brainfarting trying to come up with something better.

The Dwimmermount thread, and some recent comments in regards to advances got me thinking, remembering other discussions from other sites in the past.

I'm curious what ya'll think about how the RPG labor/compensation compares to other markets/industries, and if you think RPGs should be treated the same.

My understanding is that, in regards to RPG writing and art, advances don't get made, work is paid for at a pre-contracted rate (cents-per-word, or dollars-per-art-piece), paid upon completion/approval, no royalties/residuals, etc.

I've seen talk about how the pay in this industry is incredibly low when compared to others (i.e. writing for an RPG vs. writing a novel, etc.).

Any "insider information" regarding my assumptions (i.e. are they pretty accurate, or off-base)?  Thoughts on how the industry is, if it's fine as it is, or if it should shift to something else?

Just curious about some of this.

Disclaimer: I'm only a part-time author and no expert on the business side of the RPG industry. What I've learned so far:

Best way to make a small fortune in the RPG industry: start out with a large fortune in the RPG industry. This business does not pay well, and I have no plans to quit my day job. (I like having health insurance. Groceries are nice, too.) Compared to other businesses: I've written RPGs for as little as $.01 a word. A friend of mine told me he could get up to $.13 a word writing for Penthouse Letters. Writing about elves and wizards and dragons just doesn't bring in the same sales numbers as writing smut, apparently. Go figure.

To paraphrase Dave Sim: They will never pay you more than it will cost them for the lawyers.

It's clear to me that there is money to be made in the industry but it's a hard and risky road and far too many companies die from internal fraud and theft.

Thanks for the input so far!

To clarify, I'm not actually looking for any kind of career in the field, just trying to get a better understanding of things.

I'm interested in word rates, art fees, etc.  One of these days, I'd like to try my hand at publishing something, so I'd like to have more information ahead of time, but it's one of those things that a lot of folks seem to not really discuss.

That said, I've seen some RPG-folks-turned-"traditional"-writer comment on how horribly they were paid when writing RPGs, and I've seen a lot of RPG writers express a desire or end goal to "move up through the ranks" as it were into becoming a "real" writer instead of writing game stuff.

Quote from: kythri;584883I'm interested in word rates, art fees, etc.  One of these days, I'd like to try my hand at publishing something, so I'd like to have more information ahead of time, but it's one of those things that a lot of folks seem to not really discuss.

When i freelanced for Green Ronin i got 4 cents a word. 3 or 4 is fairly common for mid-tier companies. I'm sure better rates are paid (i think WotC pay 7 for hired freelancers), but it's pretty poor unless you are salaried. Even then, i remember Mongoose advertising for an in-house writer expected to churn out 15k words a week for a yearly salary of £14k. Which is basically school leavers money.

Freelance writing for rpgs is low wage. I have worked as a reporter and an editor outside the rpg industry in the past, making decent money. But anything i have done in the rpg industry was done knowing that getting 3 cents a word is about average (and more often than not you get 1-2 cents a word). To me it didn't matter because I love RPGs and enjoy producing game material. If you want to make money as a writer, you are much better off looking into journalism or working in an editorial office for a publisher. If you start your own game company you might manage to make a living at it (or if you are someone like monty cook or mike mearls working for a larger company). But most people who get into the business barey break even if they are lucky.

Payrates are very low:
http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2011/11/rpg-professionals-rude-question-luckily.html

The basic skinny is you can make as much or more money putting out your own thing as you can freelancing at least until you get to be a big name:

http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2011/11/time-to-diy.html

A lot of big company freelancers with recognizable names confirmed these numbers when these blog entries went up.

The full-time big company people make a living wage. Otherwise it's pretty brutal.

That said, pretty much anybody who puts out their own stuff that I've heard about does way better than break even--it's just weighing that against dayjob pay.

Quote from: One Horse Town;584892Even then, i remember Mongoose advertising for an in-house writer expected to churn out 15k words a week for a yearly salary of £14k. Which is basically school leavers money.

Jesus.  I'm a sort-of-school-leaver (took an extended break due to health crap, going back next year), and that's less than half my salary. :eek:

Even non-profit digs will pay more than that for entry-level work (and you'll do more for society in the process...sometimes).

Quote from: kythri;584860I'm curious what ya'll think about how the RPG labor/compensation compares to other markets/industries, and if you think RPGs should be treated the same.

My understanding is that, in regards to RPG writing and art, advances don't get made, work is paid for at a pre-contracted rate (cents-per-word, or dollars-per-art-piece), paid upon completion/approval, no royalties/residuals, etc.

I've seen talk about how the pay in this industry is incredibly low when compared to others (i.e. writing for an RPG vs. writing a novel, etc.).

Some people at larger companies may land a good job writing RPGs, but what I know about the freelancing side is not exactly inviting. You often get paid the equivalent of H.P. Lovecraft (who essentially lived on the Ramen noodles of his day), R.E. Howard (who did odd jobs at oil projects and surveys) and C.A. Smith (who lived in a shed and picked oranges to make ends meet) did at a time when the dollar was several times more valuable than now. The pay per word system itself encourages bloat and continuous churn over inspired, playtested and carefully designed products, so it is also bad for the customer.

There is also an amount of uncertainty there. If you are working on someone else's IP, you are selling to the only buyer in town. No deal? No luck. My only freelancing project was delayed for years and eventually got lost in development hell - and I didn't receive a cent of what amounted to about five months of on and off writing and a whole lot of playtesting. Nobody was to blame, but still. If I were depending on that money, I would have been fucked.

Add to that that most publishers work on a for hire basis - sell the manuscript, get paid, lose ownership and revenues forever. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the God Emperor of shitty deals.

There are better terms out there (larger companies pay more), and there are alternate models: self-publishing, if you are good at it, can be viable. G.M. Skarka, for example, has mentioned making a living through knowing and adapting to his market, and owning his publishing house. And a lot of people make good beer money, if what you want is beer money. But some of the practices in the so-called "industry" are extremely shitty.

Frankly, I don't think there are many people producing anything for the RPG market who are not doing it at least partially for love. Most of the part-time writers I know of are also professionals with families for whom the "income" will never be worthwhile.

Quote from: Melan;584979Add to that that most publishers work on a for hire basis - sell the manuscript, get paid, lose ownership and revenues forever. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the God Emperor of shitty deals.

I disagree that work for hire is a shitty deal. With one proviso, that the author understand what he or she is getting into. There are publishers that pay fairly and there are work for hire contracts worth entering into. I will do the occasional work for hire if it is the right project. And currently doing so now.

What important that thanks to the communication technologies enabled by the internet, the rise of print on demand, and now Kickstarter there are alternatives for an aspiring author.  That now we have a continuum of options that can be used by the first time amateur to a multi-million dollar corporation.

Quote from: kythri;584860I'm curious what ya'll think about how the RPG labor/compensation compares to other markets/industries, and if you think RPGs should be treated the same.

The freelance pay scale is fairly well documented and hasn't improved in 20 years. If anything, I'd say average rates have declined as people raised on the d20 boom compete with newcomers for gigs at mostly smaller shops. Except for SJG and some quasi-creator-owned shops like Raggi it's all straight work-for-hire, no royalty.

Fast or slow, a really driven writer can generate maybe $150 to $250 a day, which is actually minimum wage, but at that level the bottleneck isn't the magical limits of your "creativity" but finding that much work to do. There just aren't enough books to feed all the people, day in and day out.

Hourly and per-word rates are roughly what someone would get in the term paper mills, but while there's more work there, the quality standards are actually higher. (!)

Commercial blogs will cough up anywhere from double to eight times what gaming pays and there's near-infinite demand if you can craft copy to order. That's about what a news network, wire service or trade journal will pay a fairly junior full-time person. This is where someone with a normal work ethic can actually make a full-time living.

Moving up the scale there are still glossy magazines that pay $1 to $5 per word -- about 100 times what game writers earn -- and high-end editorial roles that pay six digits.

On the creator-owned side, deals are generally better. Figure a mid-list paperback novel can still sell 5,000 copies and earn the author a 50% royalty, that's the equivalent of maybe 20 cents a word for the same verbiage that would earn 1 to 5 cents down in the for-hire dungeons. Bigger sales equal bigger payouts but on the whole any stringer at Money or Time or People will still be better paid than the typical mid-list novelist. You see a lot of surprisingly high-profile novelists fight for magazine gigs as a way to make rent. Heck, this is why you see a lot of defrocked TV writer and novelists fighting for comic book gigs.

In gaming the freelance system is mostly irrelevant now except among a few shops and the people who work with them. The less people compare word rates and the more they talk about their overall margins on creator-owned projects, the healthier the "industry" will be.

"It's a shit business.  Glad I'm not in it anymore."

+1 thedungeondelver

Since I am clearly shaping up to be a mouthy person here, it strikes me that a few anecdotes might be useful.

In the mid-1990s, I was chirping along writing for the Wolf. No swine jokes, I've already said my mea culpas and was young, stupid, hungry, crazy, etc. Plus, when I was offered the most menial job available in "straight" publishing, I grabbed with both fists and let the gaming stuff go. The point is that the gap between the bottom of the "straight" publishing ladder and the middle of the work-for-hire gaming ladder was just that big.

Move up a decade, I get offered a contract that wasn't creator-owned but still represented what in gaming was a pretty generous royalty split. I tried to make the math work, but every hour I would've spent on it would have meant turning down work that paid at least 6 times as much, cash up front with benefits, and was still pretty fun. I had to turn it down. They actually couldn't afford me and I am not exactly a superstar or weighed down with a family to support.