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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tyler Do'Urden" data-source="post: 8011653" data-attributes="member: 4601">This is some brutal stuff, but not terribly surprising.I was a professional writer and editor for seven years - I didn't work in game design, I worked in the much larger and more lucrative field of financial publishing - but a lot of this still applies, especially because I was working abroad. Pay was much lower than in other businesses for the same time commitment, which often bordered on investment banker hours to stay afloat. I remember sitting in a friend's apartment one night smoking some spliffs, and he, a photojournalist, looked at me and said "writing for a living... journalism... it's all a mug's game. You can do something better." Several years later, after several more miserably paid gigs and discovering that teaching business English to executives one-on-one could pay ten times what I was making on an hour-per-hour basis, I decided to make a complete exit. I went to business school and never really looked back. Now I'm a wealth manager at a big insurance company - it took me another seven years to get to where I'm at, and a lot of misery and times that I wanted to throw myself off a skyscraper working for terrible managers at unethical banks - but I finally made it to work that I like that pays well. But I still appreciate what writers do, and patronize them generously - too generously at times! When my wife discovered that I had sponsored over 120 RPG kickstarter projects from February to April of this year to a tune of over $3k... she completely flipped. I almost thought my marriage was about to come to an end... even though we could afford it without too much trouble.At times I think "maybe I should start a project... I've got the design skills, the writing ability, the mechanical understanding, and the experience that comes from 30 years of play..." but really, why suffer the abuse and the stress? While I know what it's like to experience the thrill of seeing a product you created in your hands - the only thing that compares to holding a new book you created in your hands is cradling your firstborn! - I just can't get motivated. I can work at a job I like... and DM on the weekends, for people who appreciate what I do for them and always want to come back for more.But it doesn't change the sad state of the business, and many other creative business as well - though this is all part of the "democratization of content production". The barriers to entry have been massively lowered, and we have access to the content creators themselves as never before. This is both good and bad. While I believe that the former outweighs the latter, it does mean we need to negotiate new relationships between audience and creator. We're... not quite there yet.</blockquote>

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