I heard somewhere — I forget exactly where, so I am sure this account is somewhat mangled — that once someone sold an online PDF entitled How to Start Your Own Tabletop Games Business. It was a lavishly pure-white single-page document that said, in large, friendly letters: DON’T.
Frankly, after reading Robert J. Schwalb’s Crapping on your Dream and having some discussions with Keith Baker, I am surprised that anybody makes a living from the gaming business at all. Indeed, my takeaway had been that you can’t make a living from the gaming business at all, unless you’re on the payroll of one of the mainstream gaming companies.
This was pretty much the frame of mind that I had when I attended the innocuously named panel “Designing and Publishing a Tabletop Roleplaying Game” during Penny Arcade Expo 2011, which turned out secretly to be about you personally designing and publishing a game, i.e. it had a very strong indie focus. This was backed up by such esteemed panelists as:
- Nora Last, the moderator
- Ben Lehman
- Vincent Baker
- John Harper
- Jake Richmond
To whom I am thankful for explaining to me the one thing that has always bewildered me about the indie RPG revolution: How, exactly, do you guys make any money?
The core of the answer to this turned out to be a lot simpler than I thought, if a lot more complex in execution. On some level it is similar to the Jonathan Coulton model of self-marketing, which is to find an online community that already is interested in the kind of stuff that you are planning to write. (The Forge is the premier example of this, of course.) After you have an actual game, you bootstrap your way up to profitability by the key tenet of never spending any of your own money. You start with PDF sales; then, you use the money to create a small print run; then, you use that money to create a large print run.
Perhaps someone asks you for a book early on: you simply go to the printer, ask them to print one (1) copy of your book, and sell it to the early adopter, pocketing the margin.
Perhaps you don’t have an actual storefront: you simply set up a website with Paypal.
Perhaps you get enough capital to finance a print run: you start mailing the books from your own living room!
The key tenet is, again, never spending any of your own money. When you also don’t have to deal with middlemen, it turns out, you also get a significantly larger cut of the profit. Vincent Baker, at the panel, suggested that his profit margins were enough to put him at a similar level as a third-tier games publisher, but without the overhead. Which certainly sounds very impressive!
After the panel, I caught up with Jake Richmond, since I had written a post (on this very blog!) about his game G X B, which gave me a non-awkward way to introduce myself.* (I am terrible at saying hello to people I like and admire.)
We talked a bit more about the business side of indie RPGs, which I outlined above, but then Jake went on to say that he also had a third important tenet.
“Um,” he said.
“Hang on,” he said.
I waited a bit.
“You know, I have no idea why I can’t remember this. It’s one of my key principles,” he said.
I waited a bit more.
“Ah! It’s this. Don’t sell to roleplayers.”
“You mean don’t sell to people who typically roleplay?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. ”We are living in a period where there are a ton of untapped genres that haven’t had RPGs made about them. That’s a built-in audience for your game that doesn’t know it yet.”
“That’s like the Wii,” I noted. ”The Blue Ocean strategy. You create a new piece of the market for gaming, which means you’re the first one there and you make things better for the market as a whole by expanding the consumer base.”
“Right, exactly,” he said.
The takeaway I got from all this was that the RPG market, at least so far, is pretty wide-open in terms of things to say. Which is to say: There’s room for a lot more voices in the market, because there are a lot of people out there who would be terribly interested in buying the game that is just right for them.
There is, it turns out, a bit of money in that.
* Later I found out that one of my coworkers from upstate New York apparently knows Vincent Baker in a vague Kevin Bacon-y sense.
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Pretty good advice. I mean really, you can’t go wrong with that panel of designers.
But Jake’s advice doesn’t work for me. I can’t *not* sell to roleplayers because, frankly, I am *that* roleplayer. My disappointment in the industry isn’t with the genres being tackled, it’s the approach taken to them. But I love those genres, and the one piece of advice that should go before all others is to write what you love. That said, there are lots of people who love these genres who aren’t playing games, and there’s room to grow if a designer can tap into the things they themselves really love (that’s sort of a paraphrasing of something Ron Edwards once said, and it may be my favorite thing to ever come from him).
Hey Amy, who’s your coworker from upstate New York?
I love to talk about the indie business model. I’ve found making games extremely rewarding, both as an artistic endeavor and a commercial one. Making games isn’t my day job, but it’s a wicked profitable and fulfilling small business I own.
Anyway I’d be happy to answer any followup questions you’ve got, or anybody!
(Oh, and I agree with Renee, of course.)
Hi, Vincent! My coworker’s name is Jon Phillips, if you know him.
Certainly I am all about making the game you love, because that sort of thing is going to show in your finished product. I think Jake’s point is mostly that there are a lot of people who are already roleplaying via other channels (e.g. journal RP), or who tried roleplaying before but didn’t stick with it for certain reasons, or who know nothing about the hobby at all, who could constitute a low-competition target audience.
Here’s a follow-up question, if anyone’s got the time and inclination: What is the timeframe for getting from “writing feverishly in your bedroom” to “success”? For, you know, some value of success.
Jon Phillips. I’m not sure if I do know him, no.
It occured to me that I wrote a bit about indie game publishing on my blog for someone after PAX East: 2011-03-17: My First-time Publishing Advice. Readers here might find it interesting.
The time question is a good one. I’ve been selling my games since 2002. They’ve never made me enough money to quit my day job, but then I’m a husband and father with health insurance and a retirement and a mortgage and crap. If my wife were the breadwinner, or if I were single, I could have jumped over to full-time game design long ago. Maybe as early as 2005.
So, years, or maybe never. I wouldn’t recommend indie game publishing over a job to someone who needed to pay this month’s bills. But since your game company’s always in the black, it can just hum happily along as a side gig, absorbing as much free time as you have for it and returning cash at its own pace.
(Looks like maybe I messed up my html there. Can somebody fix it?)
It sounds related to Yog’s law for publishing – Money always flows towards the writer. In this case, as a self publisher, you need to wear two hats. As the game designer you create the game for love – because you want to (or have to). So all the time and effort on that side is a hobby.
Meanwhile as the publisher you’re in business, and that business is to make money. Initially the money is invested into the business, but hopefully it turns a profit eventually. At that point you can pay the game designer, who is thrilled that the hardnosed publisher can pay them for their hobby.
Obviously these overlap, especially in marketing the game, as the publisher who’s looking for money and the designer who wants to show off their cool shiney game are the same person doing the same job. Does thinking of them as two jobs done by one person make sense or is it just useful to me?