Cost vs. Revenue
Bjorn:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on January 19, 2008, 11:08:45 AM
Finally, your post fits well overall into a point which has been made here many times at the Forge: that the definition of success is up to the individual publisher. You might be interested in the idea, usually re-stated in those discussions, that the term "this is my hobby" or "it's just a hobby" aren't very useful. I tend to think in terms of financial success in terms of pure sustainability without external funding, entirely independently of the scale of the operation. By that way of thinking, many of the most well-known RPG companies are not successful; they merely manage to impose the illusion of success via speculator or inheritance-based funding, and many of the smallest RPG companies are remarkably successful.
Just out of curiosity, how do you consider time spent in this "model"? For me I tend to view any self-employed economic activity (this is not restricted to game publishing but also includes things such as SW consulting, becoming a full time poker player etc etc.) where "hourly returns" are significantly below what they could typically get on the open job market to fall short of beeing fully professional endevours. Now I realise that beeing a proffesional and beeing succsesful is not neccesarily the same thing but I'm still curious about how you view this.
I want to point that I have no problem with people designing games as a "semi-pro" (making money but at a non-comercial rate) or even as a hobby (most of what we tend to think of as hobbies cost money) but as a customer and/or outside stakeholder I tend have different expectations of them than if my dime is what's puting food on the table and a roof over their heads.
/Bjorn
Ron Edwards:
Hi Bjorn,
I think that's another individual issue. Here's a very personalized take on it, which I really want to say, I'm not presenting for the purposes of convincing anyone. It is only my little personal notion for my own business.
Time is my most prized possession, or aspect of my life. Managing and devoting it as I see fit, as opposed to obligations from others, is hugely important to me. I see it as something I expend ... and if that expenditure is in service to someone else, I expect to be paid.
That applies quite well to my primary profession. Its key feature is that I manage my own time; I don't punch a clock or account for whether I'm at work or not to anyone. There are specific requirements, and all my employer wants is for me to do them well, not in such-and-such a way or on such-and-such a detailed schedule. All that is great in terms of freedom of management, but as it's a J-O-B job, the time is still an expenditure of my limited store, in service to others. Therefore I do get paid for it. I wouldn't do it for free.
Adept Press isn't my primary profession, and I own it. So as I see it, spending time on Adept Press isn't in service to others; I'm not expending time in the same way as I do in my job. Time spent on it, and here at the Forge, counts as something I want to do, as opposed to a few other things I could be doing. As a prof, the job takes my time (albeit in a less structured way than many jobs); as Adept Press, the activity is where I put my time. The pay for the product is a happy outcome which enables me to continue to do it. However, I don't see my time-spending on Adept Press as anything that someone else owes me for. No one demanded it or required it from me.
If I were a freelancer of any kind, or if I worked for a company called Adept Press or whatever that I did not own, that would be different. Then it'd be just like my regular job, only a little smaller, and I'd be awfully strict about how much time I spent and about getting paid for it.
Well, anyway, I don't expect that to make sense or to be important to others, but perhaps it illustrates at least one independent publisher's view toward the subject. Clearly, another one independent publisher might hold to a more traditional view, in which they count their time-expenditure as an expense with its own expected return, and their view would be no better or worse than mine - it's their business, after all.
Best, Ron
lumpley:
Hey Bjorn.
I'm with Ron, personally - I don't keep track of the time I spend working on games. I can't imagine NOT designing games. However, absolutely don't take that to mean that we aren't making real money at it. Occasionally I like to brag about my game company, so thanks for giving me the opening, here goes!
I'll preface the bragging with this: designing and publishing games doesn't pay a cent while you're doing the work, naturally, but starts to pay when you finish doing the work and keeps paying for who knows how long after. In spring '04, Dogs in the Vineyard paid me $0.00 per hour and $0.00 per word, but now it's been paying me for 3 and a half years. Consequently I don't think that hourly returns is a great way to measure it - whatever your hourly rate winds up to be, your game disburses it to you over the course of its published life, not in biweekly paychecks.
But whatever, how much already? When I make an honest estimate of how much time I spent designing, developing and writing it, plus how much time I spend supporting it ongoing - then double that estimate, just to be sure - Dogs in the Vineyard has paid me at least $40 an hour. Realistically it's over $60, it may be as high as $85. This is after my printing & publication costs and webhosting and stuff. Dogs pays me way better per hour than my day job (but offers, of course, less security).
I think that rate per word is a better measure for RPGs than hourly returns. My game design gig is more like a writer's gig than like a job in an office, in every way I can think of. So I'll brag in those terms too:
Dogs in the Vineyard is creeping up toward $1.50 a word now (again, after my publishing costs). I used to know what The New Yorker pays for short stories - I want to say that it starts at $2.50 per word? I don't really remember. Anyhow Writer's Market would give lumpley games a $$$$ rating, its highest.
In a Wicked Age has paid me, oh, $0.15 a word now, on 23 days' worth of preorders alone. That's already real money for a writer (like, a genre fiction magazine like Asimov's or Fantasy & Science Fiction pays $0.06-$0.09 a word). It's not real money per hour yet, but it will be.
I don't have any investment in whether all this makes me a professional game designer or not. Whatever. Either way, lumpley games isn't my day job, but as Ron says, it's a thriving small business owned by me.
-Vincent
edited to italicize
lumpley:
Crap! Do overs. Don't hold me to that $0.15 a word for In a Wicked Age. It's still under $0.05.
-Vincent
David Artman:
Quote from: lumpley on January 23, 2008, 10:24:48 AM
I don't have any investment in whether all this makes me a professional game designer or not. Whatever. Either way, lumpley games isn't my day job, but as Ron says, it's a thriving small business owned by me.
Well, FWIW, you become "professional" at any activity once you are paid by someone to do it. Prior to that, you're "amateur" (which I suppose could include "hobbyist," for the sake of fitting in the dichotomy rather than making a continuum out of these terms and more).
As for "price per word, after all fixed costs" -- that's a great model for "profit" analysis, in my opinion. Otherwise, one runs into the common writer's situation of trying to determine what "working" means, to determine when one is working so that one can calculate pay per hour. Am I "working" while I'm on the toilet, imagining the interplay of abilities in a game? Am I "working" if I'm sitting at the bar doodling Venn diagrams and charts on napkins, to organize my thinking around needed and complimentary abilities? Am I "working" when I wake up from a dream about a game in progress that gives me a cool idea for a new range of abilities?
In short, writers "work" all the time, if thinking and plotting and scheming count. Hell, for that matter, most folks I know with even slightly stressful jobs are "working" most of their waking day--one buddy of mine talks so much about his job and chemistry and shit that I'd swear he NEVER stops "working"... and as a result only "earns" a fraction--like HALF--of what his paycheck reads for "hourly pay."
But words you can count. And, being independent publishers, those words keep on building value, with each sale (as opposed to a short story writer getting one check and done).
Dude... you're a pro, just accept it and move on.... ;)
David
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