It's never been a better time to be a tabletop role-player. The freedom of choice seems limitless, with over a hundred thousand RPG products on DriveThruRPG and DMs Guild combined. A significant percentage of those products can be downloaded at no cost. Does that matter?
Surveying the Product Population
We can make some guesstimates about the total volume of products on both DriveThruRPG and the Dungeon Masters Guild by looking at the metal legend for each. The metals icons are awarded by sales for each product, from copper all the way up to adamantine. Here's how the sales stack up:
This doesn’t take into account the many other places products are distributed, like Amazon or Noble Knight Games, or Free RPG Day, or the many pirated copies of games floating around the Internet. There’s a lot of variety to choose from. And a significant percentage is free.
Did You Say Free?
If the above numbers are accurate, a search for the “Free” on DMs Guild finds nearly 2,000 products available at no cost, or about 10% of the entire product base. It’s the same story on DriveThruRPG, with over 10,600 no cost products on DriveThruRPG, or a slightly higher 11.6% available for free. Or to put it another way, 1 in 10 products on both platforms is available at no cost to the consumer.
Not all products are created equal of course, and it bears noting that “free” encompasses two categories on DMs Guild/DriveThruRPG: products that are actually free, and products that are offered as Pay What You Want (PWYW).
PWYW products aren’t free; or rather, that is the very bare minimum the publisher expects a consumer to pay for it. If they planned to only offer it for free, they would list it as such. We can therefore assume that the publisher is hoping to make more than nothing on a PWYW product. We’ve discussed the psychology of PWYW previously, but there’s likely a psychological effect of bundling PWYW with other free products--it sets an expectation that any contribution will be $0. After all, a consumer searched for “FREE” and PWYW was listed along with it. You can search for PWYW separately, but given that free is a powerful form of advertising, the likelihood of someone finding a product when searching for “FREE” and paying nothing to download it seems high.
In short, PWYW might work in some cases, but the platform itself seems to be literally selling PWYW short. There’s also the question of what it means for the industry when 10% of all products on a major distribution platform are free.
When It’s All Free
A curious side effect of the Open Game License (OGL) movement in tabletop gaming was that it essentially unlocked the rules so that they were available digitally. In theory, the rise of OGLs was meant to help publishers produce their own content, but in practice, if an OGL was available on the web it was available to everyone, including potential consumers.
Releasing an OGL to the public means at least some of the core game is available for free. Some OGLs are more tightly controlled, but in the case of the OGL supporting the latest edition of D&D, much of the game is publicly available at no cost. Moreover, Wizards of the Coast recognized that purchasing the rules can be a barrier to entry and released a “Basic” version of the game to make it easier than ever to play.
This all seems to the good … unless you are trying to make a living off of tabletop gaming. Because many creatives enter the tabletop game industry as a hobby rather than a career, they set their prices below what the market should bear. PWYW is a perfect example of this, where a budding game designer hopes they make money but doesn’t expect to (or worse, doesn’t think their content is good enough to sell). The net result being that a lot of game designers offer their content for PWYW or free.
Why Buy?
With so much free content available, no one who has access to the Internet ever needs to buy another tabletop role-playing game accessory. There is a free variant of nearly every monster, class, race, and magic item for D&D alone. If it can’t be found on DriveThruRPG or DMs Guild, there’s the Unearthed Arcana Reddit. Or the D&D Wiki. Wizards of the Coast has its own listing of free stuff that scrolls for several pages. There are countless blogs and other web sites that offer their own content, EN World’s fabulous Resources section being one example. It may take some converting depending on the game, but chances are if it exists in popular culture, someone made a free version of it.
And yet, people are still buying. Why?
For one, free doesn’t mean good. A lot of content on wikis and blogs are published in raw form; some creators get bored and never return to their half-finished ideas, lingering zombie-like on the Internet long after the passion that spawned them has waned (but still showing up as part of a Google search). Quality, curated content with excellent writing, layout, and art goes a long way in convincing a customer to buy a product.
For another, some consumers are just curious. When a product idea is popular at the time, like zombies or ancient Greece, the product’s relevance might trigger someone to buy it just to see what it’s all about.
And then there are the customers who like to collect products. They may not even use the product in the game, but enjoy purchasing it all the same.
Add all this up and it’s clear there’s still a market for RPG products. But as content creators strive to reach enough sales to make a living in the game industry, the massive amount of free products will always be there, challenging them to do better than what's offered at no cost. As Dr. Richard Forest explained in the intro to The Complete Oracle:
D&D and tabletop gaming in general has always been about creating our own content and sharing it. Whether or not we should pay for it is up to us.
Surveying the Product Population
We can make some guesstimates about the total volume of products on both DriveThruRPG and the Dungeon Masters Guild by looking at the metal legend for each. The metals icons are awarded by sales for each product, from copper all the way up to adamantine. Here's how the sales stack up:
- Copper: 51 units sold
- Silver: 101
- Electrum: 251
- Gold: 501
- Platinum: 1,001
- Mithral: 2,501
- Adamantine: 5,001
This doesn’t take into account the many other places products are distributed, like Amazon or Noble Knight Games, or Free RPG Day, or the many pirated copies of games floating around the Internet. There’s a lot of variety to choose from. And a significant percentage is free.
Did You Say Free?
If the above numbers are accurate, a search for the “Free” on DMs Guild finds nearly 2,000 products available at no cost, or about 10% of the entire product base. It’s the same story on DriveThruRPG, with over 10,600 no cost products on DriveThruRPG, or a slightly higher 11.6% available for free. Or to put it another way, 1 in 10 products on both platforms is available at no cost to the consumer.
Not all products are created equal of course, and it bears noting that “free” encompasses two categories on DMs Guild/DriveThruRPG: products that are actually free, and products that are offered as Pay What You Want (PWYW).
PWYW products aren’t free; or rather, that is the very bare minimum the publisher expects a consumer to pay for it. If they planned to only offer it for free, they would list it as such. We can therefore assume that the publisher is hoping to make more than nothing on a PWYW product. We’ve discussed the psychology of PWYW previously, but there’s likely a psychological effect of bundling PWYW with other free products--it sets an expectation that any contribution will be $0. After all, a consumer searched for “FREE” and PWYW was listed along with it. You can search for PWYW separately, but given that free is a powerful form of advertising, the likelihood of someone finding a product when searching for “FREE” and paying nothing to download it seems high.
In short, PWYW might work in some cases, but the platform itself seems to be literally selling PWYW short. There’s also the question of what it means for the industry when 10% of all products on a major distribution platform are free.
When It’s All Free
A curious side effect of the Open Game License (OGL) movement in tabletop gaming was that it essentially unlocked the rules so that they were available digitally. In theory, the rise of OGLs was meant to help publishers produce their own content, but in practice, if an OGL was available on the web it was available to everyone, including potential consumers.
Releasing an OGL to the public means at least some of the core game is available for free. Some OGLs are more tightly controlled, but in the case of the OGL supporting the latest edition of D&D, much of the game is publicly available at no cost. Moreover, Wizards of the Coast recognized that purchasing the rules can be a barrier to entry and released a “Basic” version of the game to make it easier than ever to play.
This all seems to the good … unless you are trying to make a living off of tabletop gaming. Because many creatives enter the tabletop game industry as a hobby rather than a career, they set their prices below what the market should bear. PWYW is a perfect example of this, where a budding game designer hopes they make money but doesn’t expect to (or worse, doesn’t think their content is good enough to sell). The net result being that a lot of game designers offer their content for PWYW or free.
Why Buy?
With so much free content available, no one who has access to the Internet ever needs to buy another tabletop role-playing game accessory. There is a free variant of nearly every monster, class, race, and magic item for D&D alone. If it can’t be found on DriveThruRPG or DMs Guild, there’s the Unearthed Arcana Reddit. Or the D&D Wiki. Wizards of the Coast has its own listing of free stuff that scrolls for several pages. There are countless blogs and other web sites that offer their own content, EN World’s fabulous Resources section being one example. It may take some converting depending on the game, but chances are if it exists in popular culture, someone made a free version of it.
And yet, people are still buying. Why?
For one, free doesn’t mean good. A lot of content on wikis and blogs are published in raw form; some creators get bored and never return to their half-finished ideas, lingering zombie-like on the Internet long after the passion that spawned them has waned (but still showing up as part of a Google search). Quality, curated content with excellent writing, layout, and art goes a long way in convincing a customer to buy a product.
For another, some consumers are just curious. When a product idea is popular at the time, like zombies or ancient Greece, the product’s relevance might trigger someone to buy it just to see what it’s all about.
And then there are the customers who like to collect products. They may not even use the product in the game, but enjoy purchasing it all the same.
Add all this up and it’s clear there’s still a market for RPG products. But as content creators strive to reach enough sales to make a living in the game industry, the massive amount of free products will always be there, challenging them to do better than what's offered at no cost. As Dr. Richard Forest explained in the intro to The Complete Oracle:
We know what makes Dungeons & Dragons genius. That, at least, is a solved problem. The genius of Dungeons & Dragons is that it is a machine that makes more Dungeons & Dragons, and it does this right at your table. D&D is not in the books. It is at the game table. It is in our scribbled notes. It is in our maps, in our jokes, in our daydreams during dull classes or meetings, in our forum posts from work, in our blogs and tweets and zines. Dungeons & Dragons is the rules for jousting on dragon back that you wrote while you were sitting in church on a Sunday morning. It is the homebrewed minotaur race you made for your brother. It is those wound point rules you added to make combat more realistic. Dungeons & Dragons is the game we build together.
D&D and tabletop gaming in general has always been about creating our own content and sharing it. Whether or not we should pay for it is up to us.
