The 5 'Tiers' of TTRPG Publishing

Cannibal Halfling Gaming published an interesting article recently in which they divided tabletop roleplaying game publishers into five tiers, based on annual revenue. Here were their categories, but you should check out the article for a deeper dive.

~$500 million annual: D&D
~$50 million annual: Paizo
~$5 million annual: Steve Jackson Games
~$500K annual: Evil Hat Productions
~Everyone else (up to $100K)

They chose one example publisher per tier; they didn't list every TTRPG publisher. That's why your favourite publisher is not on that list of 4 companies. But feel free to add to the list!

Also, we talked about it in last week's episode of Morrus' Unofficial Tabletop RPG Talk, for those who prefer to absorb their news in video format!

 

[Micah Sweet]

That’s not legal here. You can use that as your public facing mailing address (and we do—see the contact page linked at the bottom of this website), but your registered office must be a physical, traceable address.

That's how it is here in the US too. My wife just started a business and she needed to provide a physical address to the government.

 

[evilhat]

Very interesting. I'd be very curious where PEG, Chaosium, and Onyx Path land. Somewhere around or below Evil Hat, I'd bet.

I would not take that bet, not with all of them at least. Chaosium (and indirectly Onyx Path) had a good 20-ish year lead on us in terms of how long their popular IPs have had to grab mindshare. Evil Hat is smaller fry than many might think.

When the Halfling post first dropped, I dug into some numbers, for those curious:

https://bsky.app/profile/deadlyfredly.bsky.social%2Fpost%2F3meoc7avizc2l

I see later in the thread some folks are talking salaries: I'm Evil Hat's only full-time employee; other core staffers (5) are part time. After 20 years at this Evil Hat pays me under $52k annual (and that's a fairly recent update, I've been trying to keep a little ahead of inflation for all staff's monthlies). No benefits (tho I do have equity as a company founder/owner). I'm not my household's majority breadwinner nor its source of health coverage.

 

[Willie the Duck]

it’s more than the average American makes

“Median household income was $83,730 in 2024”

Income in the United States: 2024

This report presents data on income, earnings, & income inequality in the United States based on information collected in the 2025 and earlier CPS ASEC.

www.census.gov

and that is household, so frequently more than one income

I acknowledge that I probably do not have a great conception of the average American income anymore**, but I think you missed my point. Morris said, "$100K will pay one decent salary," not "$100K is a decent salary." If I (an American business manager) have $100k on my general ledger to spend on an employee, it does not translate to a $100k salary. The burden rate/loaded labor cost is usually 130-140% or more than one's actual salary. In my industry (intersection of healthcare, law, and IT), there is often tens of thousands of dollars of software licenses per employee using a system as well. If I had $100k for an employee, the actual salary would be closer to $50k -- which is above the overall U.S. individual annual income ($45-51k), but below the $63k for full-time, year-round employee.
*Forever grateful and confused by my own situation, which a younger me certainly did not foresee .
**how that differs from 'a decent salary' is a a debate topic I have lots of opinions on, which can be discussed somewhere else.

It does not surprise me that that number is better for Morris. Game development has employee costs (computers, software, possibly office space, etc.), but fewer crazy expensive licenses (although I haven't checked out Adobe Business Suite or whatever else you might use for graphics work lately). More to the point, he has the UK's difference on healthcare, retirement, and so on (again, hard to talk about here).

 

[MongooseBella]

That's kinda scarry! I see people's signatures and with smaller companies that use their home as their business address I see when and where they moved. But those documents only handle assets and possibly profit/losses(?). I saw no numbers for revenue.

Sidenote: Across the channel (Netherlands) we also had some issues as 'freelancers' that have registered our home addresses as the location of our business (quite common) with the government leaking our private information via a government affiliated website. That recently (finally!) changed a bit, but for most the 'damage' has been done.

Ours is our office address which is publicly available, but it used to be the accountants or the legal firms address.

It's pretty common to do that here

 

[MongooseBella]

I will say I do think some of their conclusions are pretty odd (at least to me).

For ex. we make less than Paizo's 50m figure (whether it's accurate or not), and the article states:

'And as we look back up the tiers of revenue, self-capitalization is still a problem. Sure, that problem does go away…around Paizo levels. That only leaves two companies in the entire hobby with enough money to consistently fund their own publication.'

Which is just... not true? We are able to do this, and we do not make anywhere near the 50m number. Obviously this depends on how you do layout, printing, shipping etc. Matt would be able to say more about this.

Also, one of the sites which says it can tell you our revenue also says we have 51-200 people, and another says 25. We have 7. We do have an issue where a company named Mongoose Media exists in Kuala Lumpur and we occasionally get mixed up with them.

 

[Mongoose_Matt]

Something else to consider when putting companies in tiers...

First, as Morrus said, revenue is not profit (revenue is vanity, profit is sanity).

If you see a company relying on licenced products, you can knock off 10% from their revenue straight away.

Second, see if you can find out how many staff they employ. Some of the companies mentioned, I know, have truly eye-watering monthly salary bills. The reason Mongoose can do the cool things is that our core running costs are low, and we have a smaller headcount than usual - all our admin, for example, is either automated or gets spread around the creatives (when you mail customer service, you are talking to one of the designers or graphic artists ).

We do that because the salary of the extra one or two admin people a place of our size would normally employ gets spread around everyone else.

Once you start getting about the 25-30 mark for number of employees and you are not selling as many books as Paizo or WotC, it is kind of like being strapped to the front of a speeding train (speaking from experience) to the point you must release something every month or sink.

And I don't know, I never found that much fun. It is a very easy trap to fall into though because running a company has a lot in common with gaming (all about the min/maxing ). It is easy to get diverted and forget why you are doing this in the first place.

As I say, vanity and sanity. Revenue is not a great measurement of company health, or even position in the market if things are not sustained.

 

[Dalekdad]

Think you are underating most of them, or over estimating Evil Hat

Chaosium, annual sales of $13.6M put them between Steve Jackson and Pazio which seems about right.

PEG is about $5 mil so Steve Jackson Games territory.

Onyx Path is in the Evil Hat range with less than $1 mil.

Modiphus is in the $12 mil range like Chaosium. When you look at a comparison of products released that's really surprising how much turnover Chaosium is getting from so few products.

Free League is under $5 between Evil Hat, and Steve Jackson. Nearer Evil Hat from what I've seen, which seems odd considering the licenses they have grabbed.

I guess I overestimated Evil Hat. Between how big its Fate and Blades lines seemed to be on message boards, I assumed they were one of the bigger players.

Chaosium & Modiphus being about the same makes sense to me. Chaosium may have few products, but a bunch of them are essentially evergreen, especially Call of Cthulhu. CoC's corebook sales alone must be a steady revenue stream.

 

[SlyFlourish]

This topic is fascinating and something I think about a lot. I appreciate the insight folks are offering here so I'll add some of my own.

I think the article is only half the picture and misses the vast majority of published products produced by independent producers who make between $5 and $50,000 a year (or so, lets focus on the zeros and not the leading number).

Here's a ladder I think about on what it takes to "make it" in the industry. These are per-year numbers and, again, don't get too caught up on the "5". It could be 1 to 9 or whatever.

Tier 1 - $5 a year - selling one roughly $5 product a year on itch or DriveThru.
Tier 2 - $50 a year - selling a product roughly once a month.
Tier 3 - $500 a year - selling ten roughly $5 products a month or so. Gives you an allowance to buy other RPG books maybe.
Tier 4 - $5,000 a year - selling roughly one hundred $5 products a month or maybe you've gone up to twenty five $20 products. You can pay your electric bill, maybe! A good allowance and maybe some revenue for expenses.
Tier 5 - $50,000 a year - a thousand $5 products a month roughly or 250 $20 products a month. You probably have a real business now and can form an LLC. You're actually making a healthy profit, hopefully, and can invest in higher quality products, materials, art, or stuff to run your business. Still have a day job though.
Tier 6 - $500,000 a year - equivalent of ten thousand $5 products a month or 2,500 $20 products a month but probably getting income from several sources. A real business. Can maybe go full time if you have access to good health care. Maybe a small company with a couple of folks. This is about when my own company went to off-set print runs and global shipping which is a huge leap.
Tier 7 - $5,000,000 a year - a good-sized RPG business with multiple employees, lots of products, lots of income streams. Definitely doing it full time with a small staff.
Tier 8 - $50,000,000 a year - probably within the top ten RPG companies. Good-sized staff, lots of products and funding lines.
Tier 9 - $500,000,000 - WOTC-level. As big as they come for an RPG company (and I don't think WOTC has this level). Publicly traded.

My wife, Michelle, and I are lucky to be in tier six (between $100k and $900k), both of us part time on it. For us, the biggest jump, by far, was going from tier 5 ($50,000) to tier 6 ($500,000) and that meant doing off-set print runs of books. That was a huge learning curve and not one I'd recommend for most RPG creators. You can go pretty far with products done print on demand (POD) without the hassle of off-set print runs, global shipping, storage, international taxes, and bunches of legal issues. You pay a lot to POD producers when you make POD products but that money goes to all of the things I mentioned.

 

[SlyFlourish]

As a one-man shop, year-by-year I slip over/under the "everyone else" line.

I think the vast majority of RPG creators fall into that category and, as always, thank you so much for your contributions to this whole hobby!!!

One of the reasons I can have this one-man-shop is I live in a country with socialized medicine. Retirement savings... well... until a few years ago my retirement plan was to die in the climate wars.

That's a big one. The Sly Flourish business would normally be enough to cover living expenses with some savings but health care isn't great so keeping a day job for health care is a reality for us.

Just to say, don't rely on AI info for this. I just tested it with my own company and it was embarrassingly wrong. Utter nonsense, as usual. So those above figures? Big old pinch of salt.

View attachment 430243

So what's the actual answer (within an order of magnitude?)

That’s not legal here. You can use that as your public facing mailing address (and we do—see the contact page linked at the bottom of this website), but your registered office must be a physical, traceable address.

We have a rental office sort of deal that we can use as our business address. It's a couple of hundred bucks a year I think. We also have to have a place to receive legal documents which also costs a couple of hundred bucks. And we have to have an EU GPSR lawyer which costs us another couple of hundred bucks.

 

[djotaku]

For anyone else interested in this stuff - definitely check out Wolgang Baur's blog posts on Kobold Press - I think he calls it "state of the ...". He often talks about how things are going in the industry and how KP stays afloat. For KP's business model, it's currently working for them by having most of their products come out as Kickstarters first so they can, essentially, do a preorder to cover production costs of the books and VTT conversions.