NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alphastream" data-source="post: 7658646" data-attributes="member: 11365">I'm a contractor/freelancer for my real job, and in most fields this is absolutely true. It isn't in publishing and certainly not in RPGs. The core issue is a lack of money in RPGs, even at the highest corporate level. An average story goes like this: An individual starts an RPG company, spends tons of unpaid time writing an RPG, borrows money to pay for printing, prints, gets a good amount (hopefully) of initial sales and perhaps can pay off the loans, needs to publish a supplement to keep interest in the line - therefore borrows more money or uses up the profits, the next book sells less because of diminishing returns (each product will be of interest to an increasingly smaller subset of players), now the person is losing money... if they don't publish interest drops and if they do they still lose money. A way to lessen that model is to hire freelancers to keep costs way down and also to publish more faster. This is especially important if the company is large enough that the work would require hiring someone. You can imagine how brutal it would be for most RPG companies to pay an actual salary in that model. As an example, Dungeon World has shared some figures. For the first 5 months they had costs of $53,000. They had, at the end of it, $34,000 in the bank, which he says, "will be used to pay taxes for 2012 and then a significant part of it will be split between Adam and I." He also says that this would support one full-time employee living somewhere cheap. I'm not sure about that, but it's regardless really lean... and this is an indie RPG company that absolutely knocked it out of the park. We can also look at Evil Hat's numbers, which reflect a mature company that has built up support and following over a decade or so... and they still would have trouble employing a number of people. It is a brutal industry and it leads to hiring cheap freelancers instead of hiring. Absolutely. Even the people that leave Wizards speak fondly of it, almost without exception. Every time I interact with Wizards employees, they have a great comaraderie and the workplace is better than most places I've worked with by far. (I have visited more than 100 different corporate work places since 1996.)Absolutely. From all accounts, the first published outsourced adventure required heavy editing/adjustment, and that's with it coming from an outside company with deep D&D setting knowledge, adventure writing expertise, and 5E experience. As a freelancer, I've always been blown away by the quality of WotC's development and editing staff. They have added incredible value to all of my projects.</blockquote>

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