Selling RPGs doesn't work
Or, at the very least, I don't think it solves the core problem.
Late stage capitalism sucks. It sucks especially hard for folks who try to make a living through art. By "art" I mean any of its forms—painting, writing, making indie RPGs. As far as I'm aware, there are two mainstream ways to earn money in art:
- Sell unique pieces to people who can afford "fine art". This relies on people who are already very rich finding some value in your work. This in turn relies on a thousand different factors for you to get "noticed".
- Sell relatively cheap art replicas to many people. This relies on the economics of scale, you need a lot of people buying your art regularly.
- (There are actually many more, like licensing, commissions, limited editions, etc. For the scope of this blog post, we will focus on the two above.)
Option (1) is unobtainable for most of us in general, but especially so for indie RPGs. One can make an argument that selling an RPG to a big publisher is very similar to selling it to a wealthy person. That's technically true, but big publishers aren't interested in indie RPGs because they don't sell well enough.
Option (2) is what everyone in indie RPG community seems to be doing. We are selling books, art prints, PDFs through print on demand, Kickstarter and itch.io. And I don't think that works.
I don't have a lot of personal experience with this, so my conclusions are based entirely on my observations of other creators and conversations I had with folks. From what I understand, making a living in indie RPGs is a meme at this point. Most people have a regular job and make RPGs on the side. The few most successful of us work on RPGs for the majority of their time with some side gigs (which may or may not be RPG-related). Absolute legends of the industry with decades of experience get to work on RPGs full-time.
That's what I mean by "selling RPGs doesn't work"—it doesn't provide makers with a way to sustain themselves. Some folks who work on RPGs for a couple of hours a week would greatly prefer to work on them full-time. Yet they cannot afford it because even with Kickstarters and a big audience, the income is extremely spiky, requires lots of upfront investment and can be quickly destroyed by tariffs or other major stuff in the middle of fulfilment.
I think makers need Universal Basic Income. They need to have some level of financial security to stop worrying about money and focus on making stuff. Our governments are decades behind on this, so we will have to work with the next best thing—Patreon model. However, we need to change our attitude towards it as well.
Patreon is commonly used as a way to provide "perks". These are usually finished pieces of content which makers feel the pressure to output every month like they are some kind of factories. This relationship is very similar to selling which once again doesn't work. I think we should shift our mindset from "you pay a monthly fee to get products" to "you support the creator". There is no missing part in that sentence. You support the creator, that's it. Zero expectations.
"But what will stop the makers from just taking the money and not doing anything". I fundamentally do not believe people are lazy bastards trying to steal your money. If the creator doesn't do anything for 3-6 months, well maybe stop supporting them. However, I strongly believe that 99.9% of creators out there won't just take the money and say "thanks". They will share their work in progress, perhaps chat with you once in a while, maybe share failed experiments. You are supporting a person and watching them work and grow. And in the end, you might get a couple of RPGs to play with your friends. Or maybe you will learn from their behind-the-scenes experience and use that in your RPG.
The more people support the creator, the more confident they will be with taking risks, the bigger projects they might tackle. This is fundamentally different from "let's take a huge risk of making a Kickstarter trying to compete with huge publishers on the same field".
I don't really think that these ideas are new. However, I do think that we as buyers have a much, much better way to make sure that there are more indie RPGs out there. And that's not by funding a Kickstarter or buying a book, but by giving money directly to creators and seeing what they make out of it.
Let me know what you think!