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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mongoose_Matt" data-source="post: 8470963" data-attributes="member: 239">Not sure how we would measure that qualification. However, I can say that if you are working full-time in an office with staff doing these games, it certainly feels like an industry. Money comes in, money goes out, people buy stuff we make...This is certainly an issue. I was talking to some people from another gaming company when they let slip how much they were paying their 'freelancers' (next to nothing if any payment was being made at all). I did sort of (very diplomatically) call them out on it, and they responded by saying that if the guys are happy to work for that why would they pay more?It is quite frustrating. Quite aside from the idea of paying peanuts and getting monkeys, it does devalue everything the rest of us do and, more than that, you would hope we could move beyond this way of thinking. You can pay people next to nothing and not update the working space they are in, keeping those extra funds for yourself but, I mean... why would you? Just a few hundred extra Quid in someone's bank account at the end of the month can make a Big difference. Trying not to sound all Marxist here - I am a capitalist, honestly!Well... there is. I mean, obviously there is. You don't need to sell hundreds of thousands of books a year and support a three-figure full-time staff to do well for them or yourself. That there are more lucrative markets out there is beyond doubt but that does not make RPGs a desert. The problem, I suspect, has more to do with where that money goes. If you hear about companies that are paying their staff a miniscule amount and creating poor working conditions, the first thing I would do is take a look at how the people running the company live.Of course, if they also share those conditions, it may be more a case of that company fitting in with your idea of the industry as a whole - that certainly happens too.But otherwise... pay your employees what they are worth. If nothing else, in the long run it will create less problems for you.Because... there is no skill required to create an RPG book? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />The open source idea you cite here is an intriguing one but there are obvious issues, from the overall vision of the project to support after the fact.In a hobby built around imagination and creating your own material, there is a very good reason why RPG companies still exist after all this time.What do you imagine 'video game industry' standard wages to be? That is highly variable and, at the lower end, I believe Mongoose at least exceeds them. Higher end no, and that may never be possible - but we have all heard of the horror stories coming out of the larger video games companies recently with regards to how they treat their staff.There is a middle ground here - pay staff decent wages and treat them right.Also, I would certainly consider Mongoose a 'real' company, and I would cite others too - Modiphius and Cubicle 7 come to mind immediately, for their physical proximity to us if nothing else. And right at the end there, did you just argue that one is the same as zero? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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