I never said more mainstream publishers with legacy IP and impressive licenses were raking in the dough.
I'm asking why, with so many structural advantages over the littler guy, you aren't.
Smaller or one-man operations have more advantages over mid-tier publishers than disadvantages.
Example 1: If you sell to distributors, they expect you to commit to and hit specific release dates. Miss them and your product is in trouble - orders cancelled or significantly cut back. If you sell direct to gamers, or sell into distribution after getting a product going, you aren't as wedded to specific dates and timelines. You can take more chances because your risk is lower.
That's one of the reasons why Kickstarter has done so well for RPGs.
Example 2: The day-to-day functions of running a mid-tier publisher fall on a small staff. The dude editing an RPG might also unload a shipment, clean the bathroom, fix that balky desktop PC, and answer email queries from distributors and retailers. The dude doing his own thing has bandwidth to network online, develop a 'net presence, and so on. He doesn't deal with the overhead of running an office in an industrial park with multiple employees.
That's one of many reasons why fame in RPGs is mostly non-existant, compared to other geek things like comics or SF and fantasy novels. Most creators spend a lot of time not creating, and definitely not making names for themselves online.
The big advantages of working for a traditional publisher are a regular paycheck, benefits, exposure to the culture of working in a game company (creating is easy; creating to deadline as part of a team is hard and requires practice), access to work on a licensed property, and no need to risk personal funds to publish something (the company pays to print your work). It's a shorter step to better paying work in video games or other media.
Awards draw a lot of static in RPGs because they are, for the staggering majority of people doing this work, the one chance each year they have at recognition and some applause. At Gen Con, most people working for RPG publishers can expect intense physical labor at the show's open (booths and books don't magically arrange themselves), 8 hours of work each day manning a booth or running demos, and then another bout of physical labor.
It's unfortunate the business end of things evolved this way, but it's where things are stuck.
(FWIW, WotC operates on a very different scale. Jobs on the D&D team are comparable in pay and duties to Hasbro as a whole, or Microsoft or Boeing in the Seattle area. There's a lengthy essay one could write on why the gap between the #1 and #2 firms in RPGs is so vast compared to similar divides in other tabletop categories. It essentially comes down to RPGs' requiring a lot more money to develop than a board game, and their design culture taking a steep bend toward complexity while board games took an equally hard turn in the opposite direction. The complexity thing triggers a ton of other structural and player culture issues.)
