What does an employee at a large RPG company make compared to a successful small publisher/owner?

[TerraDave]

Maybe the more basic question is: how many rpg game designers can do so full time?

Presumably Modiphius, Free League, Mongoose, Monte Cook, maybe Cubicle 7 have some full time designers. Paizo certainly does.

For a lot of other ones--ones you have heard of--the full time people, if any, are on the business side. At points fairly prominent people in the industry, like Wolfgang Baur and Chris Pramas, have had day jobs. Its not just that Canadian librarian.

 

[dbm]

@Douglas Cole is a small publisher in real terms, having taken the brave step of making that his primary job with his company Gaming Ballistic. He is highly transparent, and has an update for 2021 here.

Looks like the headline is that the company has a turn over of about $165k about a third of that was profit. That would mean he could presumably pay himself up to $55k but I am sure he needs to hold a chunk of that money for reinvestment and of course some will have to be paid in taxes, too.

I feel confident very few people are becoming millionaires by publishing RPGs, even if they have $million Kickstarter campaign as there are production costs, taxes, operational costs and other people’s salaries / fees to pay too.

 

[Jd Smith1]

I feel confident very few people are becoming millionaires by publishing RPGs.

Has anyone become a millionaire publishing TTRPGs in the last decade?

 

[Umbran]

But then you see small publishers make a million bucks on Kickstarter every month.

Correction - you see a handful of small publishers get a million dollars in revenue. They don't get to pocket most of that - it has to go into making the actual product. You have to pay creators, you have to pay printers, you have to pay for warehouse space, you have to pay to ship it from wherever you have it printed to wherever you are doing distribution, and then you have to pay for distribution/fulfillment.

 

[Piratecat]

What Umbran said. For example, Russ has had really successful kickstarters - and those funds are also consumed by freelancers, employees, printers, art, layout, and shipping. My lord, shipping! SO MUCH MONEY GOES INTO SHIPPING.

The smart Kickstarter makes sure to budget a salary for themselves, as well as covering expenses.

 

[Jd Smith1]

I've always heard that if you wanted to end up with a million dollars in the RPG business, start out with three million...

 

[Sacrosanct]

What Umbran said. For example, Russ has had really successful kickstarters - and those funds are also consumed by freelancers, employees, printers, art, layout, and shipping. My lord, shipping! SO MUCH MONEY GOES INTO SHIPPING.

The smart Kickstarter makes sure to budget a salary for themselves, as well as covering expenses.

Yep. Morrus can correct me if I'm misremembering, but I think he spent $40,000 just on advertising for Level UP kickstarter.

My small kickstarter last fall "made" about $11,000. After fees, art, production, advertising, etc, I ended up with a profit of $500. And I did my own writing (which would have been $11,000 at 6 cents a word if I hired someone else).

Obviously each of us Indie publishers have our own goals. Mine isn't to make money because I have a nice regular job, so my priorities are a bit different. None of us make nearly what everyone thinks we make.

IIRC, Reaper, after their first $3 million kickstarter, said they only made about $250,000 on it. I could be misremembering that as well.

 

[Jared Earle]

Hmm. A small successful publisher in the U.K. should pay over minimum wage, with salaries scaling based on seniority.

I’m the only employee of our small RPG publisher that’s not on a full-time wage, due to my other part-time jobs, and we’re not million dollar Kickstarter range. Everyone else we employ is paid a decent salary.

 

[gamerprinter]

Well I'm a retired person, who creates publications for fun and profit, though the profit wouldn't replace a fulltime job, which I don't really want or need anyway. While I've done freelance work for Paizo and other larger publishers, and would be more than willing to do further freelance work for, under no circumstances would I choose to work fulltime for any large publisher, even if invited to do so. Of course, we probably are of different age groups with different needs - you seem to be seeking a career, and deciding whether it's better to work for a big company or being a successful small publisher. I have no needs for a career, except for the one I exist in now. I'm an author, game designer, pro freelance cartographer, page layout artist, graphic designer, 3D illustrator and publisher - I wear all those hats, as I have skills in all of them, and am not seeking someone else to do those many tasks. I don't have the budget to hire out, but am not interested in hiring out anyway. It keeps me busy, which is my only real goal, and a decent income stream (rather than a career income replacement). Also, I don't need nor want to run a Kickstarter. I create inhouse with no funds essentially, and publish - why do I need a Kickstarter? I've never needed funding to create, just time. Plus, I've been doing this small time for about 15 years, it's not like I'm an unknown, even if I'm not a big publisher, nor ever will be one.

 

[Douglas Cole]

@Douglas Cole is a small publisher in real terms, having taken the brave step of making that his primary job with his company Gaming Ballistic. He is highly transparent, and has an update for 2021 here.

Looks like the headline is that the company has a turn over of about $165k about a third of that was profit. That would mean he could presumably pay himself up to $55k but I am sure he needs to hold a chunk of that money for reinvestment and of course some will have to be paid in taxes, too.

I feel confident very few people are becoming millionaires by publishing RPGs, even if they have $million Kickstarter campaign as there are production costs, taxes, operational costs and other people’s salaries / fees to pay too.

For what it's worth, taxes knocked that down by $20,000 in 2021. There are oddities there in terms of me running on a cash basis rather than accrual basis, but I managed to probably eke out $30-40,000 in "transfer to the household" income after all was said and done in 2021.

This is on a typical consumer size that varied from about 350 to about 700; the nature of the business means that if I could push past that into the 1,000 to 1,500 typical sales range (a lofty goal, but an important one), things would get MUCH better in terms of sustainability of income and future product funding, as those first roughly 500 folks tend to more or less cover the development, and the marginal profit past that point is proportionally higher.