Freelancing in the Tabletop RPG Industry

There's a lot of stuff on Twitter right now about freelancing in the game industry, and I want to quickly go over it from a perspective of someone who hires freelancers and freelances himself.

For anyone living under a rock, freelancing is a large part of the RPG industry. I don't know exactly what the specifics are, but since sales are low and people generally don't make enough money to support a team (at least, not more than one or two core people), you wind up having to hire freelancers a lot, unless you're a one-person machine.

This is one of the reasons why Kickstarter is so important in the roleplaying game community: love it or hate it, it's a great way to get a lot of attention and money very quickly, which then generally gets used on freelancing.

Sales themselves tend to be awful. Like, literally dirt. I've heard figures of a dozen sales for good work, and I'm actually much luckier than that (I give away stuff for free, though, so my "sales" numbers need to be adjusted equivalently).

If I were to go into DriveThruRPG, and just look at donations on my products for the past year, I see a total of 29 paid "sales" across velotha's flock, the Hammercalled Quick-Start, Waystation Deimos, and Segira: 1985.

Most of those, ironically, are on Waystation Deimos, which I made in 48 hours entirely solo (they also tend to be small, reflecting Waystation Deimos' smaller size).

velotha's flock has a rip-roaring $30 or so in donations, but they've come in over the course of the whole year. Since it's unfinished with major issues, that's actually something of a success.

I contemplated giving numbers of what I paid for some of the work, but I'm not sure if my freelancers would approve. However, the Hammercalled Quick-Start has made back about 0.4% of its budget. Admittedly, a lot of that work is reusable in the finished Hammercalled game, if it ever gets finished. Segira has made back around 1%.

That's gross sales. If we take out DriveThruRPG's cut, the numbers are actually even lower.

The worst part about it is that my freelance artists are underpaid, at least by American standards. I try my best to be as fair as possible, granting full exhibition and portfolio rights (including the rights to sell prints), but I know that it's not something that really has a tangible value at the same time.

A consequence of this is that most of the freelancers I work with are in places with a much lower standard of living, and to my knowledge they typically have day jobs (just as I do).

In my own experience as a freelancer, I'd say that I'm paid fairly for my talent as far as the time and effort I need to invest to get paid, but work opportunities don't jump out of the wood-work either. A lot of the rates suggested by the industry are below what would be considered an "industry standard"; I've worked at and above the industry standard exclusively, but I also don't tend to advertise that I freelance, so people who come to me want me to do it. People who freelance professionally or semi-professionally are probably at a huge disadvantage here; I have a day job and my own projects, so I only work where it interests me and/or the pay attracts me enough to do so.

For comparison, I've had months where I've had reviewer kickbacks on DriveThruRPG rival my own earnings. Writing blogs is more profitable than writing for games, and it's a hardscrabble industry itself.

I don't have solutions or answers. I do what I do for love, not for profit, but that comes with another realization:

At some point, Loreshaper Games, at least as it currently exists, will die. Not just because I can't go on forever, but because there will be a point in my life when I can't afford to put money into passion projects. I think that's true of most of us indies, and maybe even the big pros as well.