DungeonADay.com Closing Down

[Morrus]

Dungeon A Day, the site set up a couple of years ago by Monte Cook, is closing down. Monte quit day-to-day work on the site back in 2010, and Super Genius Games took over the daily running of the operation. As of today, SGG state that they're not covering expenses and have ceased accepting new subscriptions; the site will remain running until at least April 2012.

For more info, click here.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

This might be a silly question, but what expenses? Obviously, webhosting isn't free, especially when you get up to crazy-popular levels, but I wasn't under the impression that Dungeon A Day was at those levels. Shopping carts aren't that expensive, and surely getting someone to draw up 30 great dungeon rooms a month isn't super-expensive, is it?

I could see it not being commercial enough to be worth continuing to pursue -- that time being better spent on something more profitable -- but not covering expenses makes me confused.

 

[Qwillion]

We are talking about authors who would garner a minimum of 0.05+ cents a word work on something other than this, plus the cost of ed bournelle crafted maps, and art by eric lofgren, they put all of these in to PDFs so there is layout costs.

just because the format is not a book does not meant he creation costs are any different from a book.

 

[Mark CMG]

(. . .) surely getting someone to draw up 30 great dungeon rooms a month isn't super-expensive, is it?

Creation time and effort for writing, art, and layout (as Qwillion points out), plus the prorated costs of software and equipment dedicated during that creation time. If you're doing it for a living, you have to work out the lifecycles of software and equipment and figure it into any job as overhead costs. Those guys are not just doodling on graph paper and adding some notes on the side based on random dungeon tables afterall.