The 5 'Tiers' of TTRPG Publishing

Cannibal Halfling Gaming published an interesting article recently in which they divided tabletop roleplaying game publishers into five tiers, based on annual revenue. Here were their categories, but you should check out the article for a deeper dive.

~$500 million annual: D&D
~$50 million annual: Paizo
~$5 million annual: Steve Jackson Games
~$500K annual: Evil Hat Productions
~Everyone else (up to $100K)

They chose one example publisher per tier; they didn't list every TTRPG publisher. That's why your favourite publisher is not on that list of 4 companies. But feel free to add to the list!

Also, we talked about it in last week's episode of Morrus' Unofficial Tabletop RPG Talk, for those who prefer to absorb their news in video format!

 

[MongooseBella]

Do I understand this that Mongoose makes $14 million?

I wish! But no, it's not accurate.

For UK companies, you can look them up on Companies House: Companies House - GOV.UK which will give you some information into their financial situation.

For ex. you can see our June 2024 accounts on there. It is important to remember it's just a snapshot of whatever was true on that day, though, and the situation can still vary quite a lot.

For ex. on ours you can see tht our motor vehicle assets increased (we bought my car), this will have changed again. Cash in the bank changes daily, so the number we have on there was inaccurate basically as soon as this was filed. Still interesting to see though

 

[Cergorach]

For UK companies, you can look them up on Companies House: Companies House - GOV.UK which will give you some information into their financial situation.

That's kinda scarry! I see people's signatures and with smaller companies that use their home as their business address I see when and where they moved. But those documents only handle assets and possibly profit/losses(?). I saw no numbers for revenue.

Sidenote: Across the channel (Netherlands) we also had some issues as 'freelancers' that have registered our home addresses as the location of our business (quite common) with the government leaking our private information via a government affiliated website. That recently (finally!) changed a bit, but for most the 'damage' has been done.

 

[Morrus]

That's kinda scarry! I see people's signatures and with smaller companies that use their home as their business address I see when and where they moved. But those documents only handle assets and possibly profit/losses(?). I saw no numbers for revenue.

I can’t speak for others, but our registered address is our accountant’s office, which is a service they provide. You won’t find my home address by looking up Companies House. I assume that others without a permanent office space or who are based at home do similar. It’s common practice.

 

[Willie the Duck]

Yeah, $100K will pay one decent salary and cover development and overheads for a small book or something equivalent. It’s good benchmark for a small successful single-person businesses.

Does it? Admittedly I live in a country, and work for an industry, with very high burden rates (I may pay as much for benefits as I do for salary, same for software licenses and similar), but that number seems low these days. If you have an employee and they show up on your GL at $100k, what's their take home pay?

 

[Morrus]

Does it? Admittedly I live in a country, and work for an industry, with very high burden rates (I may pay as much for benefits as I do for salary, same for software licenses and similar), but that number seems low these days. If you have an employee and they show up on your GL at $100k, what's their take home pay?

$100K is about £75K—a high salary. The median UK salary is about half that. I don’t really have an insight into other countries.

 

[Koloth]

I can’t speak for others, but our registered address is our accountant’s office, which is a service they provide. You won’t find my home address by looking up Companies House. I assume that others without a permanent office space or who are based at home do similar. It’s common practice.

In the US, a lot of companies use a Post Office Box # as the official address. Both avoids allowing easy discovery of the home address and if the business folds, once the PO box is cancelled, all junk mail gets trashed by the Post Office. Taxing authorities want the actual address but tax records are supposed to be confidential. But the taxing authorities often use PO Boxes themselves as the point of contact for taxpayers to send stuff in.

 

[mamba]

Does it? Admittedly I live in a country, and work for an industry, with very high burden rates (I may pay as much for benefits as I do for salary, same for software licenses and similar), but that number seems low these days. If you have an employee and they show up on your GL at $100k, what's their take home pay?

it’s more than the average American makes

“Median household income was $83,730 in 2024”

Income in the United States: 2024

This report presents data on income, earnings, & income inequality in the United States based on information collected in the 2025 and earlier CPS ASEC.

www.census.gov

and that is household, so frequently more than one income

 

[Micah Sweet]

I find this discussion a bit more useful than the one time a fellow tried to pitch the industry only had two categories, "Professional" which was WotC and Piazo, and "Indie" which was everyone else. If found this bizarre on several different levels, never mind the "Professional' tier was based on two outlier companies or that indie companies lacked professionalism.


For me, system matters when doing Sim. GURPS and BRP are natural fits. To me, every edition of D&D creates extra work when doing Sim and many DMs assume hexcrawl= sim play and thus try to add more square pegs and round holes.

Also I ran GURPS with about five pages of combat rules. SIm doesn't have to be complex.

Fair enough, but to each their own. I like hexcrawls, and subsystems, and I'm fine with complexity if it adds depth. I see abstraction as a thing I have to do sometimes for practical play, not a goal.

 

[Morrus]

In the US, a lot of companies use a Post Office Box # as the official address.

That’s not legal here. You can use that as your public facing mailing address (and we do—see the contact page linked at the bottom of this website), but your registered office must be a physical, traceable address.

 

[Micah Sweet]

shrugs Having grown up in an era when (around here) RPGs, card, board, miniature, etc. games were unpopular I don't really care how other people think of things I like. You do you! But that doesn't mean we have to ignore the realities of the RPG market. Those realities mean that for a company that owns that IP, they need to change to keep functioning in that a particular bracket. WotC couldn't have gotten D&D to these revenue levels if they didn't change with a market that could sustain those revenue levels.

You could argue that something is 'professional' when you earn the majority of your income with it and you could live on that. You could argue a lot more, especially in the margins. But when you pay a bunch of full time employees and a bunch of full time freelancers, 'you're solidly in the 'professional' side of things. That does not mean that everyone acts 'professional' all the time...

And that's not just in the pnp RPG business. The levels of professionalism in a 220k people Enterprise multinational are completely different from a small 5 man business office. It's also the reason why so many small businesses do not survive the transition from a small to a larger company... We tend to see only the ones that do survive.

I grew up in that same era, but at least back then I had a good group of friends who were on board with the same playstyle. It wasn't the community giving my preferences a hard time. And I don't see WotC's enormous revenue stream (relative to the industry) and vast popularity over other RPG publishers as good for anyone but Hasbro's top brass.