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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Von Ether" data-source="post: 8029841" data-attributes="member: 15582">Creating RPGs requires switching among several skill sets, especially if you're a one-person band. Just writing alone jumps between technical writing, aspects of fiction writing and marketing. It's also sitting in your chair and getting. the. darn. thing. finished. And then there's editing, which is a skill related to writing but also different. As well editing. Layout and design is another skill that goes beyond just slapping stuff on a page. There's a balance of white space and the grey wall of text. There is also understanding art direction to enhance the product and sell the zest for wanting to play. There's also the knowledge of the printing processes (CYMK vs RGB), etc. And the majority of this is on the job training, btw. If not also your own money. So if that is new information for some who judges that RPGs need no special skills ... well, we can agree to disagree on K-D then. I think there are two questions here. Why is the pay bad now? And why was the pay bad back then?For both time periods, one of the factors is that creatives are irrational actors working in a system where publishers are gatekeepers.In fiction publishing, it has always be a passive aggressive adversarial. For the longest time, publishers refused to let writers look at the spreadsheets to confirm if their royalties were correct. Also new creatives who don't know what they are worth don't help.(PG-13 video for swear words)[MEDIA=youtube]mj5IV23g-fE[/MEDIA]RPGs are more of being over the map because a talent can become their own publisher.The other universal constant is that our culture doesn't value art, or can't afford, depending on who you talk to. Or they do to some degree but want an added benefit*. Or if it's a pop cultural thing, then the consumer becomes their own irrational actor. It's like you are either Stephen King, a painting that happens to also match the drapes, or "I don't know you, you must suck." Not much middle ground there. Beyond those constants, In the past:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">TSR's principals dropped the ball, leveraging the irrational actor bit to establish a low base line as they tried to turn Waldenbooks (or whoever) into an ATM. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Other companies were so shoestring and/or small shops that profits were sorely meager. </li> </ul>My guesses for today?Owen said it in the post above, there's no solid data for overall sales. (TSR never even ran customer/demographic polls. They just created their product lines on what someone upstairs thought sounded cool that year.) And for those that do have some real data, they are not sharing it.  It is also a very fractured market with lots of smaller private companies that are leery of sharing their data and sales numbers. And thanks to Kickstarter and technology, the bar of hopefuls is much lower -- but it is still learn as you go. With streaming, now the path is "stream until you get a big enough audience, then make your own stuff." So it sort of like when  a graphic designers could make $60k in the corporate world back when Quark Express was a mysterious black box no one but the designer knew how to use (And cost hundreds of dollars to own.) Now InDesign is taught at the community college and the pay is third of what it used to be, which is good because you can barely afford the $60 monthly fee for Creative Suite. (Those names sound new to someone? Hello, K-D)So it is a flooded job market in a small industry that is now probably even more fractured but still is very open to you becoming your own entrepreneur if you can master and juggle several different software programs.If anything, I wouldn't be surprised if the industry is making more money than ever, but the pie is micro-sliced at the same time. So between traditional attitudes towards pay in the field and most smaller companies not seeing as much of a rise as they could, pay is still depressed. Which means the answer is one part culture and one part economic. *I have small press published and self-published fiction and RPG PDFs. The PDFs sell much more because people are more excited to get stuff for their game than a new story. Just my 2 cents. (Dang, I should have just made this a Pateron post.)</blockquote>

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