Shadowdark Gary con

[Velderan]

I believe Drivethrurpg takes a 30-35% cut of sales, so I can understand why, if you can have your own web presence, you would not want to redirect all your sales through them. Like Arcane Library.

Drivethrurpg, on the other hand, probably would love to be taking a 35% cut on a product line as popular as Shadowdark.

And while I can (sort of) understand the poster's desire to have persistent access to the datastore, without having to email customer service if you lose something, the anger and vitriol is...surprising.

Which makes me wonder (...tinfoil hat ON!) if there's some connection there.

I forget which YouTube interview it was on, but Kelsey specifically said selling stuff on her own storefront was to eliminate the middle man taking a large chunk of her sales. It's also why she doesn't sell stuff on Amazon and other retailers that would massively undercut her. I don't blame her, especially if you're willing to put in the work to constantly be driving traffic to your storefront.

I get the instant gratification thing. But like others have said, I backup my PDFs in multiple locations (desktop computer, external USB drive, Proton Drive cloud) so it's rare I don't have a copy of a digital purchase saved somewhere. I recently realized I was missing a PDF I somehow forgot to backup that I received from an early Kickstarter that used a Dropbox link for distribution that had since expired. I went to their website and used the contact us form to explain the situation, providing my backer number for the campaign to look me up. 24ish hours later I had a reply with PDFs of everything from the campaign attached. It wasn't instant, but I got what I needed and as @Whizbang Dustyboots mentioned Arcane Library will do the same if you need a refreshed link. It really shouldn't be that big of a deal.

 

[Velderan]

They take a 35% cut of my Shadowdark stuff, yes.

Kelsey, and others, have been open about the fact that, once you reach a certain level of success, it makes more sense to run your own web store. She still has the most-downloaded (and I think best-reviewed) adventure on DMs Guild (which takes a 50% cut) to help drive awareness, but when it comes to actual financial transactions -- and even before Shadowdark, I believe she had transitioned to being a full-time game designer -- she handles both the costs of a website and takes all of the proceeds.

Which selling popular 5e stuff on DTRPG builds a mailing list for her to send promotional stuff to, which is really smart.