There is no RPG industry. Industries can pay living wages.
There is no RPG market. Markets have supply and demand.
There's folk, telling stories and rolling dice with each other.
There's folk, having conversations with each other.
There's folk who are the absolute best to have these conversations with.
There's folk who alter and change the conversation the rest of us have.
There's folk who give a space for us to tell our games together.
There's folk who make it easier to send money to help support other folk.
Ain't nobody making real money. There's no salary that a hundred grand, and more than a few operate on a let's-pay-for-expenses-only model. There's no lobbying of congress,
That's not an industry. That's a hobby.
There's no real supply and demand, either. Or, given that the prices are too low to support capital investment, it's collapsed -- the supply continues to exist, even though there's essentially no demand.
To address the 10,000 pound elephant, dungeons and dragons?
That has little enough to do with table RPGs. Hasbro knows that the brand is worth more than what they make from selling RPG books, and does what they need to do maintain that brand. That's not about roleplaying games, that's about leveraging into real industries.
This is not a bad thing! This is a great thing! It means:
-- Ignore anyone who says you need fancy-fucking computers to make an RPG. You need paper and dice, maybe access to Google's office products. The public library is your friend.
-- Ignore anyone who claims to represent Indie RPGs as a whole. No they don't.
-- Make the games you want!
-- Have the conversations you want!
-- Pay attention to the game designers that speak to you!
-- If you want to pay for something, do so!
-- If you want to release your game for free, do so!
-- You can know that you aren't going to make real money off this, so don't let anyone tell you you must make a certain product for the industry. That's bogus junk!
-- Go to whatever conventions you can, knowing full well that it's just folk. Some with status, sure, but what you are doing is as interesting and novel to them as what they are doing is to you!
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And, to be clear, I for sure support RPG. Of course I do. You shouldn't feel you have to in order to be a part of the conversation, that's for sure.
ReplyDeleteI must say I do love how you invalidate the work people do and the time they put into it with your sweeping decrees. "Only pay people for their work if you want to! There's no demand for it anyway!" "Make your own shit and give it away for free! No one is going to make a living wage!"
ReplyDeleteThere's no invalidation!
ReplyDeleteSpend the time you want making games! Games are great! Don't expect to be paid for it, the market is too small!
Something does not have to have economic value to have value. That's part of the idea!
ReplyDeleteNo, it's not required to have economic value. But in order to have the time to make games most people are going to have to take time away from something else that they might be doing that could earn money. Is that the way I want the world to work? No. Is that the way the world does work? Yes. Should people do everything for free? Is it not worth paying people for their work so they can have a chance to do more of it?
ReplyDeleteI think that's some conflation here. We've had this argument before.
ReplyDeleteShould I send money to folks who develop awesome games, as I am able? Sure. It enables them to live lives outside of poverty, and to dedicate more time to games.
That is contingent on my ability to do so, of course. In the absence of a strong market, the analogy to capitalism doesn't work well; capitalism isn't a moral claim (quite the opposite), and that's exactly the sort of argument you've made.
I should, and I _do, send money to all sorts of causes. One of those is awesome folk making awesome games. But, I don't conflate that with paying for the economic output of those games.
I liked how salaries below six figures aren’t real salaries. By that rubric, every job I’ve ever had has been a hobby.
ReplyDeleteBasically, you’re justifying the abuse of creators as mere hobbyists, even if that’s not what YOU take from your words. If no one should expect to get paid enough to live on, the obvious follow-on is that pirating content isn’t REALLY hurting anyone.
It’s strange to me that you’d even make this argument, at a time when it’s less true with every passing year. WotC and Hasbro probably feel pretty good about getting a non-core-rulebook to #1 on the WSJ nonfiction bestseller list. There are groups that track the growth of sales numbers in the not-an-industry, and the amount of money flowing through it is growing at an incredible rate as D&D reaches new heights of mainstream cultural penetration and lays the foundation for other games to thrive as well.
> I liked how salaries below six figures aren’t real salaries.
ReplyDeleteThat's not what I said. I said that an industry that cannot support those is not a real industry. The two are crucially different; in an industry, somebody is being paid big bucks of management and responsibility. Somebody somewhere is.
Brandes Stoddard What I said was industries can pay living wages. While that varies, let's call it $20 / hour. Are you making $20 / hour from all your work on RPGs?
ReplyDeleteI'll be really surprised if the answer even approaches yes.
It's a cottage industry. It's like being a bee keeper or a farmer's market seller. A few manage a decent living and can raise a million dollars to produce a big product (ala John Wick) but there are way too many of the folks involved are part time or amateurs (like artisan brewers).
ReplyDelete$20 an hour is what a really big industry pays with a corporate world behind it. And that's only in some states, be a little more reasonable.
As a PCA (medical personal Care Assistant) I am hovering around $15 an hour, and that's with a Union that has negotiated for the 50,000 people in my state that are covered by them.
Retail pays even less, and food service even worse (sub-minimum wage in many states). I've known store owners who's personal income was just slightly more than what their retail clerks were (as in about $2 an hour more).
So you have to work on your rules of thumb of wages.
That standard STILL invalidates the larger number of jobs in the country. No, I don’t make $20 an hour, but then my full-time job - caregiver - pays $0 per annum.
ReplyDeleteJoseph Teller Maybe. Granting the premise for the sake of argument, do you think that folks in RPGs are making $15 / hour?
ReplyDeleteThat is, is this a difference that makes a difference to the conclusion?
I think I get what you’re trying to say- it sounds like, “don’t worry about legitimacy, gatekeepers, or money, just do what you love, and don’t be intimidated,” but you chose an incredibly insulting and yeah, invalidating way to say that. And I say that as someone who now makes 6 figures.
ReplyDeleteRabbit Stoddard Can you tell me why it is insulting?
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid I'm with Misha B on this one. I reject your simplistic definition of industry as based solely on a living wage + someone making six figures (and congressional lobbying, which appears to be an addendum) as an unsupported claim (even if I restrict the applicability of your claim to the US). You'll need to actually build a foundation of support for those claims.
ReplyDeleteWhat's interesting is that whether or not there is an industry is pretty much irrelevant to the second half of what you're talking about: "This is a hobby, therefore...."
But whether it's a hobby or an industry doesn't especially matter, does it? The things you say to do (have the conversations you want, spend your money as you please, make the products that please you, etc) are things folks are already doing. Some of those folks think there is an industry and act accordingly. Some of those folks believe it's all a glorified hobby and act accordingly. Some of those folks reject the dichotomy entirely and... Well, you get the picture. There's nothing "freeing" about viewing the state of rpg economics as an industry or a hobby.
Do I make $15 an hour full time? no. I work in bursts and yeah, when I'm having a productive morning and bang out 2k words @ 5 or 6 cents a word it's $25-30 an hour.
ReplyDeleteIn addition to my own game publishing (which is just on the self-sustaining side), I also work for a mid-tier RPG company that pays me sufficient hourly to make it possible for this to be my full-time job.
ReplyDeleteWhen I contract people for my own small-print projects, I pay them real wages for art and writing. I don't have a lot of business to offer those creators, but I know that there are people cobbling together enough of those types of gigs to sustain themselves. I have a friend (who I won't name but you can easily guess) who is literally living on Patreon wages for a podcast about playing RPGs.
It can be hard sometimes to tell the difference between the hobbyists and the industry folks, but there are enough industry folks that I would say there's an industry in there somewhere.
I gotta go to an airport and will be largely incommunicado for the next ... I don't know .. .forever? It'll seem that way. There's an industry that leverages a lot of human misery.
ReplyDeleteSo. Hate to cause a fracas and run. I really do. This is, as per usual, a response to a thread where folks were asking the wrong question based on a poor understanding. I don't expect it to expand quite this much.
I adore essentially everyone who has posted, and thank you for doing so. I'll be thinking while I travel, and hope to have some thoughts when I am recovered from the plane ride.
(Sidenote: if you are assuming a proper industry had folks being paid six figures to manage etc, then you have assumed that, to be an industry, you have to have conglomerates of folk working under the same umbrella such that at least one person needs to be paid six figures to manage all that. In other words, your definition of industry requires stable corporations.
ReplyDeleteAnd then you "No true Scotsman" Hasbro. That's not sound reasoning.)
William Nichols I think the way to find your answer is to ask them, what kind of hourly equiv are they getting paid for their work. Talk to them directly before making assumptions.
ReplyDeleteI can't tell you what they make or pay for designers, writers and artists. My convention days have been over for a fairly long time when I used to have access or sit on panels with these sorts of folks annually. The only ones I know now are the few here on Googleplus that get involved in discussions from time to time and the up and coming folks here.
I remember the older argument from the 80s in this regard, when the SFWA basically was telling its members NOT to write for RPGs or to hire out their settings/characters for such because they paid writers less than 5 cents per word (the standard their association considered the minimum for writing) for freelance work, and declared them not to be a legitimate business but a bunch of hobbyists, amateurs and exploiters. But of course they didn't consider what Staff writers for the companies were making....
Note, I've had to thru necessity reduce my RPG spending the past few years thanks to financial complications in my own life. My spending in the past year for RPG related stuff was limited to about $100, mostly in the form of ebooks.
ReplyDeleteWilliam Nichols yes. You are forgetting that some people you’re talking to have to answer to people other than themselves- like family, either spouses and children, or parents. Your framing opens the door for complaints that one is wasting one’s time on a hobby and one must put other priorities first. For lower income folks, or those who are financially supported by others, this can be a death knell to actually doing anything. But yeah, this insults people for whom justification is necessary to maintain their family and social relationships, and who need to see value in their work according to our societies current rules in order to continue to function.
ReplyDeleteAlso, some of us can’t go to cons unless we can expense it. Which means legitimizing our work to the IRS.
ReplyDeleteSo... do you see how belittling it sounds to say "folks were asking the wrong question based on a poor understanding". I mean, really? You just said "You people don't understand this subject, let me tell you what it really means and then also say that those of you that consider yourselves professionals aren't really".
ReplyDeleteBetter statement: they weren't having the conversation I was interested in
ReplyDeleteSo. I'm gonna be the cranky killjoy, because that's my job.
ReplyDeleteI feel like it's important that the people providing strongest pushback against your arguments are marginalized folks - women and PoC. Because white dudes convincing women and others that their work isn't worth anything is, like, a huge thing that happens in the games industry or whatever the fuck you want to call it.
And yes the margins are terrible, and yes gamers are too fucking cheap to pay what a game is worth, and yes D&D is a weird elephant in the room. AND YET. None of that changes the fact that you are making proscriptive decrees that invalidate what marginalized creators have been arguing for for years. That their time and work is worth MONEY. That the things they make are WORTHWHILE. That they shouldn't be expected to create things for free for THE COMMON GOOD OF THE COMMUNITY. And that getting paid for something doesn't invalidate its artistic merit.
All of these statements you're making? Are only possible because you're a white dude making a comfortable living who has never had to seriously wrestle with people invalidating either 1) your identity as a creator because you are a marginalized person 2) the worth of your creative works because you are a marginalized person.
And don't get me wrong. Gaming is a fucking toxic dumpster fire and the games industry is full of broken economic models and predatory publishers who make bank on questionable ethical payment models vis a vis freelance content production. But I think you need to reflect on HOW what you are saying reinforces the status quo that invalidates the work and worth of marginalized creators.
Also, since I've been chewing over this. Sometimes the conversation we WANT to have is the conversation that is least productive, and as white folks, it's helpful to recognize and step back from that. We don't always need to talk about the stuff that hurts others.
ReplyDeleteSee: the fucking GoT dudes and their fucking Confederacy show. Not now, dudes. Not now.
Just a seed: if we laud its classification as a hobby, we cosign that only those with disposable leisure time and disposable income will have access to it, and those with a second (or third) shift or who live in a bracket where leisure is necessarily limited for the sake of capital production are denied. Given how economics trend intersectionality, we know what that does right?
ReplyDeleteThe act of accepting it as an an industry doesn't relieve the pressures of those realities, but it doesn't cosign it the same way.
Everyone whose spoken up: Thank you. That is all.
ReplyDeleteFollow up: plus.google.com - In a post a few days ago, I inadvertently caused emotional harm to people I c...
ReplyDelete