RPG Evolution: Making It in the RPG Industry

Can you make a living in the tabletop role-playing industry as your sole source of income? Unless you work for one of the major game publishers, the odds are against you. But there’s another way, and it revolves around the Thousand Fan theory.

The Thousand Fan Theory​

As I noted in a previous article, the Thousand Fan Theory (TFT) posits that a creator can make a living off of 1,000 superfans paying $100 year, with few middlemen and low additional fees. This approach changes a creator’s goals from simply creating product to creating relationships. It is more important in the TFT to have subscriptions than it is to make one great product.

Applying the TFT to the tabletop role-playing game industry, this means it’s not enough to simply make one tabletop game. In fact, it’s more lucrative to create many products over an extended period of time as incentive to keep superfans coming back for more. So while a core game may provide a temporary boost to income, it’s subsequent supplements, accessories, and adventures are key to supporting a creator.

This shift in focus from one large product to many products over time means that individual creators need to create constantly. Certain mediums lend themselves to this, like web comics, podcasts, and video streams. This is why great podcasters (Russ’ podcast being one example) record so frequently. You can’t create a fan base without a steady stream of content.

Conversely, a loyal fan base does not come quickly. It can take years to launch, which means that the TFT is not feasible for someone who needs the money immediately. Ideally, a creator planning to use the TFT needs to start creating before they graduate from whatever education they’re pursuing. They’ll need at least four years to build that fan base and create a content stream.

For most adults going without income for four years is simply not feasible, so achieving the TFT means having a full-time job or a partner who pays for other expenses in the meantime. Raising a family complicates this calculation; a spouse may be able to help with expenses, but costs increase accordingly to support a family.

It’s daunting, but achieving the TFT is possible. And we know this because there are creators out there doing it. Here’s how.

Patreon​

Of all the income streams, Patreon has the clearest path to the TFT. To achieve $100,000 year in come, you would need to make about $112,000 (Patreon takes up to 10%, but this can vary based on your legacy membership with the platform). This assumes you have a tier of $10/month or a flat contribution of $120 that members contribute yearly.

In terms of RPG content, a creator will likely need to bolster their Patreon with updates frequently, if not on a daily basis. Fortunately, RPGs lend themselves to this. One monster, artifact, species, or class a day is entirely feasible.

DMDave is an example of a RPG creator clearing the $10K/month mark. At the time this article was written, DMDave ranks 16th in the games category. Interestingly enough, there are higher-ranked Patreon RPG creators but those affiliated with tabletop play are all mapmakers. DMDave’s Patreon went from just 12 patrons in November 2018 to 3,563 patrons in June 2020, earning $15,835 month or $4.45 per patron.

DriveThruRPG​

After Patreon, DriveThruRPG is probably the single-most likely distribution channel that an individual creator can use to achieve the TFT. DriveThruRPG takes 35% of the sale of each product, so you would need to sell $153,846 worth of product a year or make $12,820/month (updated thanks to JohnnyZemo). If the average product sells 10 copies a month and retails for $10, you need 128 products in circulation, selling well (most products sell a lot initially, and then level off to a trickle).

It’s worth noting that DriveThruRPG’s algorithm favors new products over old ones. Appearing on the front page of DriveThruRPG is key to driving sales. This means that to keep a content top-of-mind for consumers amid the massive amount of content on DriveThruRPG, a creator needs to produce products monthly if not weekly.

The adamantine list currently has 74 products in good company, ranging from R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk Red to Hero Kids to ZWEIHANDER to FATE. We know that if a product is on the adamantine list it's sold over 5,000 copies, but that's no guarantee of steady income. The product has to both sell at a certain price and frequently enough per year to achieve the $153,846 mark. I plan to reach out to the creators on the list to see if they can achieve this level of steady sales enough to support themselves with the income.

YouTube​

Many kids these days want to be YouTube stars, but it’s a lot of work to get there. More production tends to be involved with video, which means successful YouTube stars are actually teams rather than individuals, segmenting the overall income stream. Additionally, YouTube scale is variable depending on a lot of factors, which makes it difficult to accurately estimate how much any one YouTuber makes a year. We can make some educated guesses, however.

Google pays 68% of their AdSense revenue, but advertiser rates vary between 10-and 30 cents per view. On average, a YouTube channel receives $18 per 1,000 views with advertising, or $4 per 1,000 views total. The calculator at Influencer Marketing Hub gives us an idea of what it takes to achieve the TFT.

That's 18 million views per year on YouTube, to reach the upper end ($104K). That implies an engagement rate of 81%, which is highly engaged. To reach that, you'll need subscribers. Your average subscriber can contribute around 200 views. You'll need at least 100,000 subscribers to reach that. For an example of a video channel that achieves this, see the Critical Role YouTube channel with 957,000 subscribers.

Kickstarter​

Kickstarter takes 5% of any revenue with an additional processing fee of up to 5%, which means to achieve TFT you’ll need to make $112,000. According to The Hustle, games (including video, card, miniature, and tabletop games) make up 10% of all Kickstarters, are successful 38% of the time, and of those successful Kickstarters they tend to have goals around the $13K range. For games, 76% of the most successful were in the $1K to $9K range. Despite these challenges, successful game Kickstarters net on average $54,635, for a grand total of $879 million in total since 2009.

To achieve the TFT plateau of self-sufficiency, you would need to launch 11 successful Kickstarters a year with goals of $10K. The more successful you are with each Kickstarter in exceeding those goals, the less additional Kickstarters you would need for self-sufficiency. Given that almost all the highest earning Kickstarters in the game category were video or board games, this can seem daunting for tabletop gamers, but it’s not impossible. Matt Colville’s Strongholds & Streaming made $2,121,465.

Adding This All Up​

Any one of these sales channels alone is probably not enough to sustain an individual. Even if they did, there's no guarantee an income stream one year will be the same the next year. Patrons leave, subscribers quit, and pandemics happen. And none of these estimates take into account advertising, marketing, development, licensing, and other production or distribution costs. This thought experiment also doesn't assume you hire anyone else -- teams of people are necessary to make great products, so if you only use your own talent, you're going to be doing a LOT of work up front.

Conversely, effort put into one channel can bolster the others; Colville's YouTube channel was a massive boost to his Kickstarter, which created a virtuous cycle of fans generating income multiple times through different streams.

Can you make a living creating RPGs? Absolutely. But it will take a lot of effort, a lot of time, and more than just writing; creating includes editing, art, layout, design, marketing, and sales. If you’re planning to make a living from the industry, you’d better get started now!

 

[Morrus]

Time and hard work doing what?

Making and selling products. Your customer base grows from there. Each product sells a little more as a percentage of the previous customers comes back.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Time and hard work doing what? Posting on forums? Spamming your Facebook friends? Getting a booth at conventions? Putting up a flier at the FLGS? Some of these things are going to be effective at finding your customers, others less so. A lot of it is figuring out where people actually are, so I guess another way to put it is:

Where do gamers congregate these days where you can effectively reach them with news of a new gaming product?

Here's a secret: you're asking your competitors on how to better challenge their market share.

But Morrus' advice is solid: do more. Keep doing more. Then do even more. And lather some more on top of that.

Over the coming years, it might be enough, if you are any good.

One adventure isn't going to cut it; you need multiple entries, all of high quality, to start attracting a fan base. And you need to keep them coming, because if you can't deliver a steady supply, there's no point in following you.

Look at that thousand-yard-stare in Morrus' avatar: there's a man who has paid his dues. When you see that in the mirror, you should be getting close.

 

[dchart]

What Morrus said. You need to make products, and keep making products, and then advertise them on your website, and mention each new product on social media, and in appropriate forums. (Probably best to mention each new product once.) You should be aiming to get one product out every month, at least, if you want to build momentum. You are not going to get paid anything significant for the first year's products, at least.

It's important to bear in mind that, in many industries, you can make a decent living if you have some talent, work hard, and avoid terribly bad luck. In RPGs, you need exceptionally good luck to make a decent living. Talent, hard work, and persistence will get you people who respect and enjoy your work, and a reliable source of pocket money if you keep working (assuming you avoid terribly bad luck). That's nothing to be sneezed at, but you should go into this knowing that you are unlikely to ever make a living at it.

 

[Von Ether]

Here's a secret: you're asking your competitors on how to better challenge their market share.

Here's another secret, it's a small pond and a LOT of your "competition" believes that a rising tide lifts all ships. So while you should always be alert to the bad apples, there are many more who don't mind answering questions and welcome you to play along.

Just also know that D&D is the lion's share of what's going on, so you will always be that shadow. And there are plenty of gamers who will try will actually be smug that they are playing D&D and not your "whatever." It will be much more likely that some gamer -- who will never be your customer -- will say something hurtful.

So to answer your question about PWYW; it's a bit of an ongoing discussion. Some say that it's better to either just go free or put a price tag on it.

The Freebies faction usually suggest that your core book or a streamlined core book is free and then offer up expansions/adventures with a price tag.

The Price Tag faction simply states that if you don't put a value on your work, no one else will.

My main thought on spending a ton of money on advertising in this industry (I wish I could), basically turns your business into a very expensive hobby. Though, it would be a tax break for the first few years.

 

[philreed]

Making and selling products.

Agreed 100%. There is no real shortcut to success. Even spending tens of thousands of dollars to raise awareness is worthless if you aren't making something that people enjoy.

Practice. Practice. Practice.

 

[aramis erak]

Why would you expect a person lacking skills and favourable circumstances to be successful at something?

I've seen a number of people with significant lack of certain key skills succeed in the industry. The best example is Kevin Siembieda.
He's a lousy editor - typos galore.
He's not a great game designer - several other games from a similar time to his own core design from 1979-1981 are both smoother to play and written better, while taking a similar approach to skills. The Arcanum has the d20 roll-high, simplified combat mechanics, d100 skills, skills by class, reduced hit point gains by comparison to D&D, a magic system that does away with the «daily memorization to cast, forget when cast» process of Vancian magic, but retains many other aspects of vancian magic...
He's not a great businessman - constantly behind schedule, has had multiple financial crises of great import on his company... and a huge embezzelment that he missed for years...
If you listen to the various freelancers who have worked for him, and they describe the work experience, one begins to wonder if he even passes as a decent human being...
And there are a lot of people he's had negative interactions with at conventions.
He also sent out a lot of cease and desist letters - it it mentioned game and Palladium, he sent a C&D. My page about the element and working it into FRPGs got a C&D for trademark and copyright infringement... despite not even mentioning him, his games, nor his company. And it got him a nastygram from my Uni's lawyers.
He's a decent artist - his own art in The Mechanoid Invasion is actually pretty good - but he's not selling art, at least in theory.
He is a pretty good setting designer - Mechanoids, Palladium Fantasy, Robotech... all show his abilities.

(And yes, while Robotech was licensed, Kevin's expansion of the setting for the RPG was adopted and expanded only a little for the novels. It's largely consistent. At least, as long as you ignore the typos... And it's a good expansion.)

But what about Rifts? Largely, not his writing. And wildly inconsistent.

He really seems to believe his game engine is one of the best. And he's had a 40 year and counting business turning a profit and feeding him and his family... despite himself. Was it his worldbuilding? Is that enough?

 

[TheSword]

I've seen a number of people with significant lack of certain key skills succeed in the industry. The best example is Kevin Siembieda.
He's a lousy editor - typos galore.
He's not a great game designer - several other games from a similar time to his own core design from 1979-1981 are both smoother to play and written better, while taking a similar approach to skills. The Arcanum has the d20 roll-high, simplified combat mechanics, d100 skills, skills by class, reduced hit point gains by comparison to D&D, a magic system that does away with the «daily memorization to cast, forget when cast» process of Vancian magic, but retains many other aspects of vancian magic...
He's not a great businessman - constantly behind schedule, has had multiple financial crises of great import on his company... and a huge embezzelment that he missed for years...
If you listen to the various freelancers who have worked for him, and they describe the work experience, one begins to wonder if he even passes as a decent human being...
And there are a lot of people he's had negative interactions with at conventions.
He also sent out a lot of cease and desist letters - it it mentioned game and Palladium, he sent a C&D. My page about the element and working it into FRPGs got a C&D for trademark and copyright infringement... despite not even mentioning him, his games, nor his company. And it got him a nastygram from my Uni's lawyers.
He's a decent artist - his own art in The Mechanoid Invasion is actually pretty good - but he's not selling art, at least in theory.
He is a pretty good setting designer - Mechanoids, Palladium Fantasy, Robotech... all show his abilities.

(And yes, while Robotech was licensed, Kevin's expansion of the setting for the RPG was adopted and expanded only a little for the novels. It's largely consistent. At least, as long as you ignore the typos... And it's a good expansion.)

But what about Rifts? Largely, not his writing. And wildly inconsistent.

He really seems to believe his game engine is one of the best. And he's had a 40 year and counting business turning a profit and feeding him and his family... despite himself. Was it his worldbuilding? Is that enough?

I don’t know the guy and don’t know the work. However your post reads like the sour grapes, whether you intended it or not. I suspect he would disagree with you.

Nevertheless, the existence of success by a person without skills doesn’t make me assume that people without skills will be successful.

 

[aramis erak]

Very true. The first generation of gamers are graying.

Most are rapidly approaching the average age of male death in the US: 76.

Most of the initial uptake were guys in their 20's and 30's... and it's been 46 years.

 

[aramis erak]

I don’t know the guy and don’t know the work. However your post reads like the sour grapes, whether you intended it or not. I suspect he would disagree with you.

Nevertheless, the existence of success by a person without skills doesn’t make me assume that people without skills will be successful.

Kevin points out his own lack of editorial capability in his early works. And left it in in the Mechanoids Trilogy.

 

[Jd Smith1]

...snip...

He really seems to believe his game engine is one of the best. And he's had a 40 year and counting business turning a profit and feeding him and his family... despite himself. Was it his worldbuilding? Is that enough?

I can answer this question, because I was around: He was at the right place at the right time with the right idea.

The industry was in its infancy. Consumer expectations were low, enthusiasm was high, and he came in on the ground floor and grabbed a loyal fanbase, and that fanbase recruited others.

I don't like his work, but a lot of people do, and they have not just stayed loyal over the years, but recruited. And they don't regard his antics as important.

But his methods would not work today. Today, the consumer base expects polish and quality, and is a lot more fickle because they have far more choice.