Sean K Reynolds on working at Paizo (and other companies)

[Morrus]

I think the sheer number of million dollar Kickstarters we've had this year attests to the fact that there's certainly money to be made in TTRPGs.

 

[Mannahnin]

This is not true (unless you want to quibble that as soon as there's even a single dollar, that's money). The hobby has consistently produced games for fifty years. Only recently has the delusion there's any real money crept in.

Well, there were the fad days of D&D as well, of course.

With the Basic Set carrying In Search of the Unknown now bringing in nearly 100,000 sales per quarter and rising, the 11 cents per copy due to Mike Carr started to amount to real money, especially in pre-1980 dollars. Those quarterly royalties would likely exceed the annual salary of a starting TSR employee, and if Basic Set sales kept growing, it could easily overtake Carr’s own salary. Carr had some difficulty getting the Blume brothers, Gygax’s business partners, to honor the agreement — though eventually, they did. It turned out a module like this would could bring significant income to its author.

It was then that Gygax apparently grasped that, in light of such dramatic sales volumes, maybe he shouldn’t be so concerned about how attractive the Basic Set might look as a legal target to Arneson. In fact, perhaps TSR could try substituting in a different module to the Basic Set — one of Gygax’s own creation, Keep on the Borderlands (B2), which began to ship early in 1980. It’s a classic, beloved module, whose Caves of Chaos owe no particular debt to Carr’s Caverns of Quasqueton, though much of Carr’s enlightening text about the art of dungeon mastering was effectively paraphrased in Gygax’s version.

The history of D&D is full of contingencies like this, influenced as much by business and legal circumstances as by game design and innovation. Because Keep on the Borderlands would ship with the Moldvay Basic Set, at the height of the D&D boom in 1981, it became one of the most widely known modules in D&D history, selling 750,000 copies a year. It might never have served as the gateway to adventure for so many players if it hadn’t been for a certain legal dispute and its consequences.

Mike Carr, with a 2% royalty deal on In Search of the Unknown, with the Holmes Basic set selling 100,000 copies a quarter, with his share being eleven cents a copy, would be making $11,000 per quarter just in royalties, which is almost $42,000 in today's money. Even if he only got that for a year, that's the equivalent of ~ $150,000 in today's dollars for his work on that module, not counting his actual salary. Pretty nice!

Gygax and Arneson, with their 5% each royalty deals on D&D, made some real money in the late 70s into the mid 80s. As I recall Gygax wound up buying a house we could reasonably call a mansion, as well as a few Arabian horses and other amenities. He also employed a driver/personal assistant, in part because he didn't drive.

Not that anyone expects to make that kind of money in tabletop gaming anymore, but there are certainly SOME people who work full-time in the field and can afford houses and to support a family, and I'm sure that was true in the 90s and 2000s as well.

How a pending lawsuit changed the original Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set

Jon Peterson uncovers the hidden history of the Holmes Basic Set

www.polygon.com

 

[Dausuul]

Yeah, the idea that there's no money in RPGs is clearly wrong. Even setting aside D&D (which, to judge by WotC's recent behavior, is making money hand over fist), the industry supports a number of companies with full-time employees. I mean, since we're talking Paizo: Their pay may be pretty low, but they still employ about 80 FTEs. That's a hefty payroll. And apparently they had enough spare cash floating around to chase the MMO dream for a while--which is a whole lot of spare cash; the table stakes to even start to build an MMO are enormous.

Now, what is true is that the ratio of "money in RPGs" to "people who would like to make money in RPGs" is pretty damn small. As with most such markets, you see a modest number of people who are able to turn a profit, and a handful of people who are able to make it a full-time job, and a whole lot of people who try and fail to do either.

 

[TheSword]

Yeah, the idea that there's no money in RPGs is clearly wrong. Even setting aside D&D (which, to judge by WotC's recent behavior, is making money hand over fist), the industry supports a number of companies with full-time employees. I mean, since we're talking Paizo: Their pay may be pretty low, but they still employ about 80 FTEs. That's a hefty payroll. And apparently they had enough spare cash floating around to chase the MMO dream for a while--which is a whole lot of spare cash; the table stakes to even start to build an MMO are enormous.

Now, what is true is that the ratio of "money in RPGs" to "people who would like to make money in RPGs" is pretty damn small. As with most such markets, you see a modest number of people who are able to turn a profit, and a handful of people who are able to make it a full-time job, and a whole lot of people who try and fail to do either.

You can add to the million dollar kickstarters, the number of Patreon’s that are regularly getting $4,000+ a month for providing maps and tokens for VTT.

Sometimes you have to move with the times.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Though you also have to ask whether "I can make some money in RPGs, but the time and skill investment to do so could make me considerably more elsewhere" is relevant.

 

[Porridge]

We know from other statements by Paizo employees that Mona is doing very well financially from his position

Given Mark Seifter's remarks on the financial state of the industry, it's not clear this is true:

As far as I know, Erik Mona, one of the highest people at the company, when he saw that a former coworker was hired by WotC at double Paizo's salary, was like "Wow, that is more than my salary."

Mark states he heard this second hand, so we shouldn't take this as gospel. But my impression is that pretty much everyone at Paizo is making considerably less than their counterparts at WotC.

 

[darjr]

Not to mention the VTT companies themselves. Or DnDBeyond or drive thru. Or the patrons that do stls or heroforge and it’s new competition.

 

[Parmandur]

Given Mark Seifter's remarks on the financial state of the industry, it's not clear this is true:

Mark states he heard this second hand, so we shouldn't take this as gospel. But my impression is that pretty much everyone at Paizo is making considerably less than their counterparts at WotC.

I mean, WotC is doing gangbusters.

 

[Nikosandros]

Given Mark Seifter's remarks on the financial state of the industry, it's not clear this is true:

Mark states he heard this second hand, so we shouldn't take this as gospel. But my impression is that pretty much everyone at Paizo is making considerably less than their counterparts at WotC.

I was unable to make the link work for me, but I'm assuming it is from this Twitter thread. Well, someone was asking earlier about current employee, here's one.

 

[CapnZapp]

Though you also have to ask whether "I can make some money in RPGs, but the time and skill investment to do so could make me considerably more elsewhere" is relevant.

Yes.

The best approach, in my opinion, is for role-players to find their income elsewhere and focus on role-playing games out of love.