Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="JLowder" data-source="post: 9269423" data-attributes="member: 28003">Indeed. But it only takes a small number of people to poison the market, especially in a segment of publishing where so much of that market is controlled by so few major or mid-tier houses.The majority of the serious issues in tabletop publishing arise when people who own a publisher or platform, or who have positions of authority at a publisher or platform, take advantage of the enthusiasms and passions of the people creating the games or the fans. Sometimes that person with power is malicious or an active scammer. More often they are somewhat or seriously clueless but also unwilling to learn what they need to do to operate their house in a fair, responsible way. This is a problem beyond gaming, of course, and is especially common anywhere art intersects with commerce.It's a particular problem with tabletop publishing--and especially RPGs--because of the extreme financial and contractual mismatches between what creators (staff or freelance) contribute and their stake in the resulting intellectual property. At base, the payout to creators in tabletop markets is quite low, even for publishing or other "content creation" gigs. So you get all the abuses of the general market, the special abuses of the arts market, and very, very limited chances to be paid well for your work or to own a stake in your creations longterm if you do anything other than self-publish. This magnifies problems that would be problems at Amazon corporate or at Microsoft, or any any other company where you might have more stable work for better compensation.Worse still, the imbalances and the conflicts are only getting more common and more extreme because of the (essentially predatory) business philosophies being imported into the market along with the corporate and investor IP mining gold rush money. The market desperately needs more tabletop publishers interested in being tabletop publishers and operating in ways that show they respect the special conditions and landscape of hobby publishing.</blockquote>

Verification