Cheap Labor is Too Expensive

[Username17]

Lots of people want to work in the RPG industry. And there are enough people who want to get a writing credit that you can in fact get people to write on their free time and send that writing in for publication for free. The minimum price you can reliably pay for game writing is something like zero cents a word, you can even intermittently find people who would in all seriousness pay you to see their words in print. The lowest amount you can pay for game writing is actually some negative number. However, the costs of labor this cheap are actually so high that it isn't worth it.

The world was a very different place back in 1977, when Gary Gygax was writing the Monster Manual for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. He got some people to submit monsters and he wrote them up in format and got all the credit. And he was working for nothing but a cut of the profits and everyone else was working for nothing. Because it's the RPG industry, and you can get people to do it for free. But he wasn't able to do that quickly by any means. The three core rule books came out at the rate of one per year (MM 1977, PHB 1978, DMG 1979). Now, obviously you can see that there might be something of a problem releasing a major book 2 years before you release the book with the to-hit tables for the combat system in it. In today's faster paced market, such a game would be lost to time before its core even got to print, which in turn would force the producers to sit on their product for three years so that they could release it all at once.

But of course, that mostly has to do with the inherent difficulties of doing things as a one-man show. I wouldn't suggest that route for anyone, since you're basically looking at making one book a year. You can speed things up by getting more than one person on the project. How much can you speed it up? Well, it varies.

On the one hand, every set of hands is another set of hands that is typing. But it's also another ego at the table. Another vision of how things ought to proceed. Another weak link in the chain who might have an illness, leave the country, quit the hobby, or just plain get a real job that pays better money. In short, the more cooks you have, the more fights you have. Also the more opportunities you have to have someone flake off in the middle of a project and leave you hanging with no draft at all for whatever section they were working on.

Which brings us to the concept of incentives and professionalism. People who work on any project do so for reasons. And some of those reasons are related to vanity. Getting your name in print, getting the rules to look the way you'd want them, whatever. The good news is that those are free to provide. The bad news is that they are not time dependent. Indeed, vanity tends to be unwilling to compromise and has little incentive to stop butting heads against other vanity. You can also get people to write for personal amusement. This is also free. But it's also wildly erratic. People who write because they want to stop writing when they don't want to. They also drift off of projects that no longer interest them. Indeed the motivation that consistently gets people to put their back into it and finish drafts in a timely manner is the mercenary motivation. When people get paid in a sufficiently incentivizing fashion for turning their drafts in on time, they are inclined to do so - and even compromise their own vision with the vision of the developer and the other authors.

A Freelancer who is writing in a reasonably reliable fashion can crank out about 10,000 words a week. How long the book is supposed to be varies a lot. Modern RPGs are a lot longer than the ones in the 70s because they are targeted at audiences who are much better readers. The original PHB is like 100,000 words. An overly long modern book like a White Wolf type book is seriously over 350,000. But the point is that if you have a staff of five writers who are finishing their material and moving forward with their projects, even a ridiculously over-long project like Sin Eaters could have primary writing done in less than 2 months. If they are bickering, slacking, or contributing in their free time you could multiply that by whatever you want. For example: as of this writing there is primary writing going on for fan projects of Princess and Leviathan on RPG.net which has been going on for over a year and it isn't done.

Now, let's talk about finances. A professional wage for freelance writing seriously isn't much. 5 cents per word is something that gets professional turnaround rates. Less than that and you get people writing "for the lulz" and similar chicanery. For our hypothetical 350,000 word project, that means that the difference between getting it cranked out by professionals in two months and getting it hashed out over a year's time for nothing is $17,500.00. That's real money. But take a step back for a moment and consider: that's $17,500 to speed the project up by ten months.

You've got other expenses. You've got editors. You've got artists. You've got layout. And most importantly - you have printers. Some of those people will work for peanuts (and the accompanying delays), and some of them will not. The Printer will not. You're spending about five dollars per book to get each book from the printers to the distributor. And you're getting like 12 bucks for each book you deliver. You can print and sell a couple thousand of these if you have a market. A well selling book like the Indiana Jones Almanac stuff sells about fifteen thousand copies. At 7 dollars of profit per book, that's about one hundred grand in take-home minus production costs.

So here's the deal: if you spend nothing whatever on writing or artists and get one book out per year, that's a hundred grand to pay your editor, your layout, and yourself. If you pay 35 grand a book to get professional writing and art, and bring out 4 books a year - you're actually ahead - you have 260 thousand dollars to pay editors, layout, and yourself. In short: paying writers actually makes money. If you have the capital, cheap or free labor actual costs more potential money than paying professionals costs actual money. And you have an easier time retaining talent that makes a name for themselves. Also keep in mind that many books are actually much shorter than a White Wolf Type Book. In fact, most are. An average source book is more like 140-160,000 words.

Obviously, there is a limit to all of this. Game lines have saturation points. Just two years ago, WotC experimented with bringing out four products a month, and they abandoned the project. Not because they were unable to keep up production, but because they were unable to maintain demand. 48 books a year is clearly too many for a game line. But if you're producing less than one full length book per month, you could probably make more money by increasing production schedules.

TL;DR: Most game companies could increase their revenues by increasing writer and artist pay and accelerating production.

-Username17

[Lokathor]

Things like this always seem really wild to me.

[hogarth]

For our hypothetical 350,000 word project, that means that the difference between getting it cranked out by professionals in two months and getting it hashed out over a year's time for nothing is $17,500.00.

Can you give a real-world example of a 350,000 word project that was written for free but not distributed for free? Are you referring to "Sin Eaters" (whatever that is)?

[Caid]

I know little about freelance writing, but I have some experience in the software industry where the rules of productivity seem to be the same. Better to get 5 excellent engineers than 20 average ones. You reduce collaboration overhead, 5 excellent ideas typically solves much harder problems than than 20 average ones and you normally reduce risks of project members leaving before the project is finished and thereby loose knowledge.

[Username17]

For our hypothetical 350,000 word project, that means that the difference between getting it cranked out by professionals in two months and getting it hashed out over a year's time for nothing is $17,500.00.

Can you give a real-world example of a 350,000 word project that was written for free but not distributed for free? Are you referring to "Sin Eaters" (whatever that is)?

Geist: The Sin Eaters is a real book produced by White Wolf after they stopped caring. A group of Geists is called a "Krewe." I am not making that up. It's really fucking bad, and was written as a total throwaway by people hashing it out for 3 cents a word. An "oh my goodness, why!" review of Geist should be done at some point, but it's kind of off topic for this thread.

In that vein, FATAL is a 350,000 word masterpiece that was penned by free labor. Truly, you get what you pay for. Anecdotally, really long books penned by cheap or free labor tend to suck ass. But I suspect that this has more to do with the fact that mos things suck, and also that no RPG book has any business being longer than 250 thousand words. Seriously. The fucking Iliad gets in at under 160k.



But to bring home the numbers back to something more typical for a moment, chances are pretty good that any book you're thinking about writing won't be defined by the shoddy contracting that allowed some guy to pad their word count by nattering on asking the reader how they felt about experiencing other peoples' memories in order to not age. Chances are that instead you will have some goal oriented book in mind and will be having it written to a specification that will likely have the whole thing come in at 160,000 words or less. Like the Iliad. Or Augmentation (129,000 words), or aWoD (155,000 words). Or whatever. Let's call it 150,000 words. Primary writing ca be done by a team of five in three weeks. Give them a month. During that month, commission artists o do work. Give all of the writers $50 on-time draft bonuses, and then have them spend another month hashing out differences while your editor goes through each of the 30k word drafts. Get your art, pay all of the artists $50 on-time art submission bonuses. Send it for layout, send it to the printers, send out the checks.

What checks are those? Well, you're already out $500 just for sending out on-time draft bonuses. Then you're out $0.05 per word for writing - which is $7500. And you're out $.03 a word for editing - which is $4500. And you're out about $6000 for professional art. And you're out about $3000 for layout. And your production costs are... $21500. And you're going to start making that back at $7 a book if you sell through your print order. A print order of a mere 5000 would thus see a return of $60,000 on a total capitalization of $46500. But remember - that's 4 months, meaning that you can do it again three times over the year. At the end of the year, you'll have turned your $46500 into $10500. A $53500 profit.

Even assuming you could get a similar sell through on your "cheap as free" production values model (a rather optimistic assessment for something with free cover art), you're still only saving that $21500 from the $46500 total - and you're only making and selling one book. So you're looking at turning $25000 into $60000. Which is less money. And it's more dangerous, because people could abandon the project at any time during the year, leaving you with nothing at all.

And perhaps most importantly of all: in the "actually paying people" model, your company has more value. It owns 4 actual books with real production values that it can subsequently print at the same cost that the free production model does with similar returns (save for the fact that it can do it four times as often and has better looking products that will probably sell better). With more printings, the relative cost of the paying people model goes down (because production costs are one-time), and the increased profits go up (because the extra sales are going to be on a per-book basis until your game line saturates the market).

-Username17

[Gelare]

That sounds totally sweet. Being able to do something you love while simultaneously turning money into bigger money would be a great time. So I guess the follow-up questions are:

1) Why aren't we doing that?

2) How do we do that?

3) What are the risks? (Anecdotes of horrible failures other than 4E would be appropriate here.)

[Leress]

That sounds totally sweet. Being able to do something you love while simultaneously turning money into bigger money would be a great time. So I guess the follow-up questions are:

1) Why aren't we doing that?

2) How do we do that?

3) What are the risks? (Anecdotes of horrible failures other than 4E would be appropriate here.)

1 - Who would pay us? And as shown during the TNE creation phase there are a lot of egos. A lot of things pretty much ground to a halt. You would need someone bring in the initial capital to invest.

2 - I would assume like any other business.

3 - I point too Guardians of Order for that one.

[hogarth]

In that vein, FATAL is a 350,000 word masterpiece that was penned by free labor.

Good point; I forgot vanity projects. But that's not quite the same as being contracted by someone else to write something for no money.

[Username17]

In that vein, FATAL is a 350,000 word masterpiece that was penned by free labor.

Good point; I forgot vanity projects. But that's not quite the same as being contracted by someone else to write something for no money.

Sure it is. FATAL has like four or five authors. Of which one is a primary author and developer. That's what free labor will get you. Or of course, the original AD&D core, which is collectively like 350,000 words. It took like 4 years to write, is full of holes, and would be actually laughed at if it was released today - but it was totally completed as free labor.

3 - I point to Guardians of Order for that one.

Guardians of Order is an interesting case. They made a decent run f it as companies go - going for 10 years and having 19 man years of permanent staff other than the owner. Going through their history, I can kind of see where they went wrong:

• Licensing Sailor Moon was a great deal for them, and made them very big. Unfortunately they went out and licensed products that no one has heard of outside obscure anime nerd groups. I Like El-Hazard, but when I make references to it, people stare at me like I am full of crickets. Similarly: Ghost Dog was way too obscure. Taking licenses that were not "big with the kids" was a big problem, and you'll notice that they stopped doing that.
• Flaking off. Licensing products and not delivering product - like Amber Diceless - is just like spending money and not getting anything in return. Because you are spending money and not getting anything in return.

Hard to say what the take home message is there. Make products people want? Don't pay money for licenses that are't worth anything outside of an incredibly obscure market? Really don't buy licenses and then sit on them hemorrhaging funds while you don't produce salable product?

-Username17

[Zinegata]

So... all you're saying is that you should use paid labor instead of freeloaders, because people who are paid will actually do their jobs on-time (or be fired) and thus result in a more consistent release schedule and consequently assured sales/revenues as long as the market is not saturated the the book topic is not retarded?

I think most people already know this. That's why most "Open Source" projects almost never get finished.

Moreover, it has to be noted that the reason why some companies resort to using free labor is that they simply don't have the capital.

[CatharzGodfoot]

I think most people already know this. That's why most "Open Source" projects almost never get finished.

Or why the most successful open source projects often employ paid developers.

[Zinegata]

I think most people already know this. That's why most "Open Source" projects almost never get finished.

Or why the most successful open source projects often employ paid developers.

Yep.

[Aktariel]

Funny, this is why the Tome PDF is having such trouble. We have three people who contribute, but they all have different abilities and goals and visions, so it's not going anywhere fast.

Plus, I really am working 50+ hours a week, so I don't have a whole lot of time for it anymore unfortunately.

/offtopic

Thanks, Frank.

[Quantumboost]

Funny, this is why the Tome PDF is having such trouble. We have three people who contribute, but they all have different abilities and goals and visions, so it's not going anywhere fast.

I thought it was the general lack of content, besides Koumei's inhuman class generation rate... or is that what we're supposed to be working on?

[Lokathor]

Uh, if it's stalled and needs more stuff put in I can help out. Is it just supposed to end up as a complete and self-contained game pdf?

[hogarth]

In that vein, FATAL is a 350,000 word masterpiece that was penned by free labor.

Good point; I forgot vanity projects. But that's not quite the same as being contracted by someone else to write something for no money.

Sure it is. FATAL has like four or five authors. Of which one is a primary author and developer. That's what free labor will get you.

If you can't figure out the difference between "F.A.T.A.L., the RPG" from We-Print-Anything-For-A-Dollar Press and "F.A.T.A.L., the Official Vampire: the Masquerade (tm) Supplement" from White Wolf, you're either a moron or pretending to be one.

[Username17]

If you can't figure out the difference between "F.A.T.A.L., the RPG" from We-Print-Anything-For-A-Dollar Press and "F.A.T.A.L., the Official Vampire: the Masquerade (tm) Supplement" from White Wolf, you're either a moron or pretending to be one.

I genuinely don't know what you are getting at. Please, enlighten us. And use small words.

White Wolf is a publisher, but they are not a printer. They still get their books printed at "we print anything for a dollar press." When Catalyst wants to print a book, they email a pdf to a printer in Canada and pay them money.

The difference is that with some capital behind you, you can hire out some fucking artists. And you get taken seriously by a real printer and print up a few thousand books for a few dollars a book instead of a few hundred for 10 or more dollars a book. But if a group of dudes worked in their free time and made a book layout and sent it into a real printer to be printed, they'd be just as legitimate as White Wolf is.

White Wolf doesn't do anything magical except have a recognizable name and a deal with distributors.

-Username17

[mean_liar]

Frank, where do you get your confidence regarding sales quantities? I was under the impression that indie games typically sell much more poorly than your few thousand hard copies.

Also, considering the scope of discussion being on "spend money to make money" do you have any figures for advertising and marketing?

[Lago PARANOIA]

I've always wondered...

Considering how absurdly profitable it can be to make tabletop games (even though the actual ceiling for these games are low) I've always wondered why some multimillionaire type with a wad of Benjamins to burn doesn't try to finance a system from scratch. I mean, sure, if you're Hasbro you wouldn't even wipe your ass with Wizards of the Coast but if you were some guy who had about 2 million dollars to burn why wouldn't you hire a group of top-shelf artists, contact some ultra-nerds, and even do some focus group research to see what your audience would like in an RPG and then produce that? The risk is low and the payoff is pretty large. You could even do something swanky like produce leatherbound books that actually look like tomes and fill up every page with ridiculously detailed artwork.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Frank, where do you get your confidence regarding sales quantities? I was under the impression that indie games typically sell much more poorly than your few thousand hard copies.

I'm almost positive it has something to do with production values.

I remember back in 2000 what convinced me to pick up the 3rd Edition rulebooks for the first time was the fact that they were printed on glossy pages packed to the brim with artwork and had an interesting layout.

A lot of non-fans don't pick up gaming rulebooks because they look cheap as hell. We all know that Shadowrun 4th Edition kicks ass, but seriously, have you tried looking at that shit from the perspective of a non-Shadowrun player? Or worse, a non-gamer? That book looks cheap as fuck for something you're supposed to spend 35 buckaroos on.

The other part is name recognition. If you were able to get a license to Avatar: The Last Airbender or Naruto that would solve the other problem.
Name recognition is a huge thing. Remember, One Piece is currently the highest-selling manga of all time, even dethroning Dragonball, despite the fact that people can read it for free on the Internet. People are standing by to translate Naruto manga two days at the most when it's released. Which means that the stuff you see in the store is months behind. Regardless, the Naruto manga in the States is pretty much a license to print money.

If you don't want to sell the fuck out and release a Heroes or Star Trek tabletop RPG, just having high production values for your book can easily get your books into the thousands of sales. If nothing else, people will pick up your books for the pretty pictures and Frank's snark about sahugin.

[RandomCasualty2]

I've always wondered...

Considering how absurdly profitable it can be to make tabletop games (even though the actual ceiling for these games are low) I've always wondered why some multimillionaire type with a wad of Benjamins to burn doesn't try to finance a system from scratch. I mean, sure, if you're Hasbro you wouldn't even wipe your ass with Wizards of the Coast but if you were some guy who had about 2 million dollars to burn why wouldn't you hire a group of top-shelf artists, contact some ultra-nerds, and even do some focus group research to see what your audience would like in an RPG and then produce that? The risk is low and the payoff is pretty large. You could even do something swanky like produce leatherbound books that actually look like tomes and fill up every page with ridiculously detailed artwork.

It's really not ridiculously profitable by any means. If you don't have name recognition, it's actually hard as hell to sell a new game.

Getting your group to learn a whole new system is hard. Not so much because learning the system is hard, but because everyone probably already has a favorite system and you have to go through the trouble of convincing them why they should switch.

[Lokathor]

So d20 has the OGL and people can make new OGL stuff and you don't have to learn as much of a new system. Would new games be easier if someone just made a few other mechanical system frameworks and put them out under the OGL or as public domain?

[ggroy]

[Lago PARANOIA]

There should totally be a Final Fantasy RPG. Like, one with a lot of money and playtesting and artwork behind it.

I have seen like three serious attempts to make a FFRPG, just in d20 and just attempts that go for more than 50 pages. Hell, I think Frank wrote one at one point. I know there's a demand for one. Final Fantasy is also a system people think they're familiar with and a system casual gamers can recognize.

And seriously, if we can get a license for Star Wars there's no reason why someone can't get a license for Final Fantasy.

[Maxus]

Seconded.

There was that FFX d20 which was...complete. And had some good bits. More good bits than I could say for Legend of Zelda d20.