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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zaruthustran" data-source="post: 4515705" data-attributes="member: 1457">Better idea: give someone a relatively complete game for free.This starter set discussion resonates with me because I'm pretty keen on the whole "free to pay" model. That being: give away your content, attract fans, and let those fans pay you as they choose. Easiest example, for me, is Penny Arcade. Others would be cutting-edge music, expert sites like Motley Fool, and so on. Concrete real-world example: the "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" guy. Sure, the book was a bestseller. So what? The big money--as in, order of magnitude bigger than book revenue--is in seminars, newsletter subscriptions, endorsements, licensing, appearances, etc. The fabled "back end."  Simply: don't put a purchase barrier between you and a potential fan. Give them what they need in order to become a fan. And once they become a fan, make it easy for them to satisfy their desire to support you.  For musicians, that'd be giving away all your music for free (as Jonathan Coulton, and others, do). All of it. Then make your money with direct CD sales (some enjoy hard copies and album art), t-shirts & other merch, concerts, donations, and licensing. For D&D, that'd be giving away character creation, early levelup, sample adventures, counters, and good tools, articles, other web content. Make your money by selling miniatures, rulebooks, novels, 3-D cardstock terrain, t-shirts, and other products--including, yes, subscriptions for more robust tools and deeper web content.Right now WotC is doing better at this new paradigm than most companies, especially recently, but it could do a bit more. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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