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!

 

[macd21]

Yeah, while Rifts looks dated now, at the time it came out it was a big deal. It just hasn't aged well. But for a while it had a large following (by RPG standards). The game has clung to existence for the past 30 years because its original fanbase was so big that even the small percentage that are left are enough to just about keep it going.

But Siembieda is very much an example of what not to do. Rifts was once a hot property in the RPG industry, and the only reason it isn't anymore is because he ran it into the ground. Someone starting in the industry is highly unlikely to start from a position of having a very popular product that they can then live off while alienating their colleagues and customers.

 

[Morrus]

Someone starting in the industry is highly unlikely to start from a position of having a very popular product that they can then live off while alienating their colleagues and customers.

I dunno! There are some big RPG companies which specialise in that!

 

[macd21]

I dunno! There are some big RPG companies which specialise in that!

Ah, but that’s the thing: they’re already big companies. They can afford to do that. You need to build up to the point where you can do that, then you can throw people under the bus.

 

[Von Ether]

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.

He also pulled off one more trick, when those customer expectations started to rise, he billed himself as the cheaper alternative, putting out $25 softback products as the price -- and number of hardback products in the industry -- kept increasing. All those typos and weird artifacts are just part of the discount you're getting; like a scratch and dent sale. That probably gave him another 5 to 8 years before his stuff started to really look it's age.

He may have also been the first to figure out that if he made custom rules for a licence game, he'd better come up with a new RPG so those rules could live on beyond the licence. (TMNT/After the Bomb.)

 

[Jd Smith1]

He also pulled off one more trick, while those customer expectations started to rise, he billed himself as the cheaper alternative, putting out $25 softback products as the price -- and number of hardback products in the industry -- kept increasing. All those typos and weird artifacts are just part of the discount you're getting; like a scratch and dent sale. That probably gave him another 5 to 8 years before his stuff started to really look it's age.

He may have also been the first to figure out that if he made custom rules for a licence game, he'd better come up with a new RPG so those rules could live on beyond the licence. (TMNT/After the Bomb.)

Excellent points.

And while I am not a fan, Rifts had a clean print format that was easy to read and photocopy, something that game producers today still fail to do. They forget that players and GMs need to dredge up facts & stats on the fly.

 

[dragoner]

Was it his worldbuilding? Is that enough?

Pretty much, I think I had ~30 Rifts books before I gave up, and they still linger like candy at GenCon; though the game system is sort of meh. I often have to stop myself from buying them, like "one won't hurt ..." Nope.

Rifts joke:
A Glitter Boy, Baby Dragon, and Vagabond walk into a bar; the Vagabond dies. It was an MDC bar.

 

[aramis erak]

Pretty much, I think I had ~30 Rifts books before I gave up, and they still linger like candy at GenCon; though the game system is sort of meh. I often have to stop myself from buying them, like "one won't hurt ..." Nope.

Rifts joke:
A Glitter Boy, Baby Dragon, and Vagabond walk into a bar; the Vagabond dies. It was an MDC bar.

That's actually a pretty decent rifts joke.

Rifts isn't itself too bad a setting... nor any particular world book, but the combinations and player culture the game has developed make it played far worse than written much of the time.

 

[Von Ether]

That's actually a pretty decent rifts joke.

Rifts isn't itself too bad a setting... nor any particular world book, but the combinations and player culture the game has developed make it played far worse than written much of the time.

While we are digressing, but still behaving. I got the impression that KS assumed, like many game designers of the time, that GMs ran games in a "common sense" way. i.e., the rules were ignored if they didn't make sense.

I heard one story about how a player was bragging to KS about how his Crazy PC would shoot himself in the head with a SDC pistol to intimidate NPCs because the character could ignore the damage. KS said, "No, your PC is dead because you shot yourself in the head."

Just like other games in the '90s that offered power fantasies, people ran games RAW like that because of those loopholes. Regardless, KS seems to be a complicated person who managed to make a go of it in a tough field.

My favorite version of Rifts was a homebrew of Marvel's SAGA cards RPG. I loved it because you could make characters in no time and fights were highly dramatic and quick.

My players hated it. They loved to show off their system mastery of Rifts and also to see how their builds played out.

 

[aramis erak]

While we are digressing, but still behaving. I got the impression that KS assumed, like many game designers of the time, that GMs ran games in a "common sense" way. i.e., the rules were ignored if they didn't make sense.

I heard one story about how a player was bragging to KS about how his Crazy PC would shoot himself in the head with a SDC pistol to intimidate NPCs because the character could ignore the damage. KS said, "No, your PC is dead because you shot yourself in the head."

Just like other games in the '90s that offered power fantasies, people ran games RAW like that because of those loopholes. Regardless, KS seems to be a complicated person who managed to make a go of it in a tough field.

I never said he wasn't complicated...
Complicated doesn't make his apparent incompetence any less problematic.

I also find it interesting that most editions of most of his games give no explanation of how to make percentile rolls. Particularly egregious given his usually low-experience player base.

I'll note also that a pawn shop in Anchorage has a huge rotation of Palladium titles... lots of kids buy book X, play it for a while, sell it back. He's gotten C&Ds from Mr. Siembieda... for noting that he's got Rifts books on the shelves. He posted the C&D letter on the shelf.

Palladium's games are a lower price point, and thus more accessible to many poor kids than D&D books... especially used...

He has had success... despite himself. And, like Dragoner, I've found myself reading more of them than I should be affording. But for me, it's when I see them for $4 in a used book store.

 

[Jd Smith1]

I never said he wasn't complicated...
Complicated doesn't make his apparent incompetence any less problematic.
....snip...

Given that he has made a living+ off his work in a field where even big names can end up impoverished, the accusation of incompetence is undeserved. Particularly since the man's personal assets place him in the millionaire category with money to spare.

There's an old saying: 'if its stupid but it works, it isn't stupid'.

Von Ether said it best: KS seems to be a complicated person who managed to make a go of it in a tough field.

I don't care for Rifts, but it is good to see any game designer make it, because so few actually do. KS is one of the few success stories the industry has. He literally went from a $1500 loan to wealth (and fame: here we are discussing him).