The RPG hobby is nearly 100% self-published. This makes sense on itch.io and when talking about the many solo designers with DBAs like ‘Sine Nomine Publishing’ or ‘Bastionland Press’, but it extends across the whole hobby. At no point did Mike Pondsmith submit Mekton to a publisher; he formed his own company, R. Talsorian Games (and had investors in his company, somewhat unusual then and much rarer now). Steve Jackson Games was formed, unsurprisingly, by Steve Jackson. Even TSR was just designers trying to get their games out into the world.

This dearth of publishers creates a problem for aspiring RPG designers: A complete lack of support services. You can hire an editor, artists, even a marketing consultant, but that’s money out of your pocket and a severe constraint for most designers who haven’t yet sold a game. That’s the reason the publisher model is so appealing: For a promise of future revenue, a publisher will provide a designer with all the resources they need to succeed. All the designer needs to do is bring them a game that all parties agree is good.

It works great for fiction, it’s been used much less often in the RPG world. Some designers who extend into publishing, companies like Evil Hat Productions, typically represent games by designers they’re already familiar with as a way to reduce downside risk. It’s a reasonable business strategy but it greatly diminishes the number of new games that can be elevated if fewer risks are taken to discover them. Others, like Indie Press Revolution, do a great service getting games into print and distributed but, once again, they’re curating existing games and designers more than discovering new ones. It all begs one question: Is there an effective business model to discover promising game designers and give them the resources they need to stand toe to toe with the big guys?

Services to game designers

Publishing as an industry has been disrupted by software and, to a lesser extent, the laser printer. Typesetting, layout, and printing were once capital-intensive processes, requiring either expensive machines or large workforces. This is no longer true; anybody can lay out a document, and digital printing means that the cost of the actual printers has gone down significantly while the cost to make a set of printing plates is, effectively, zero (not literally, but if someone is telling you you need an offset print run they probably own an offset printer). This disruption has eroded the value of publishers across media; if taken together the entire book publishing industry wouldn’t make it into the top 100 largest companies.

The ultimate conflict with this disruption is that publishers provide other services besides literally printing books. Publishers provide sales and marketing support to authors who would otherwise have little effective way of accessing them. Publishers help connect authors to editors and other textual support services within their network. And, at least in the categories which demand it, publishers help with document design, layout, and art clearance, leveraging a full-time staff and large budget to get it done. While this isn’t a huge deal for your average fiction writer, it can be immensely helpful for authors of textbooks and technical manuals. Incidentally, it would be pretty helpful to RPG designers as well.

Art and layout are incredibly important for selling role-playing games (much as we are loath to admit that), and as it turns out the average game designer is neither good at document design nor art direction. For every Mothership (a layout tour de force) there are five thousand Google Docs masquerading as games on itch.io, and the fatigue of reading through that many Google free fonts is discouraging even relatively dedicated indie game scrollers. It doesn’t particularly say anything bad about the designers, either; they’re game designers, not artists. It’s not their job to make their document anything other than understandable and clear, and usually they know just as well as you or I that the result would be better if they could afford to hire someone.

On the other side of the table, if you’re a layout editor or an artist, you want to work and, if you pay rent like most of us, you want to work consistently. If there was a company that would bring you on for a paycheck, with benefits, and they’d do so in order to have you help make games, you’d probably sign up. From my experiences in the industry few people are doing freelance because they truly love freelancing, but rather because it’s the only practical way to do the work and get paid. If you think freelance RPG designer is a precarious gig, you haven’t tried to make it as a freelance RPG editor.

Publishers were easy to understand when they existed to socialize the costs of printing presses and bulk paper orders. Now, though, publishers still socialize costs across a pool of authors, but the soft costs people can easily ignore. When you get to RPGs it’s even worse; the tradition of self-publishing in RPGs extends all the way back to 1974 and at no point was it a good thing. While TSR clearly hit a gold mine with Dungeons and Dragons, the company is synonymous with mismanagement; Jon Peterson’s Game Wizards details the Gygax era in sordid detail. TSR was so poorly managed that it was acquired by a company that was best known for Magic: The Gathering and creating a company culture so toxic it could be a Harvard MBA case study on what ‘hostile work environment’ means.

While RPG companies did get to the point where they were able to finance like traditional publishers, the lack of diversified publishing in the hobby is one reason it’s become so concentrated. Right now, the only time capital flows into gaming companies is when the parent of D&D screws up. Mismanagement of AD&D 2e got us White Wolf, Fourth Edition got us Paizo, and the current Hasbro travails are getting us just the littlest bit of that mythical trickle-down. This is clearly bad for game designers, but it’s bad for game consumers as well. The overwhelming dominance of D&D makes a lot more sense when you categorize the industry as D&D up top, some secondary titles in the middle, and a river of crap at the bottom. As uncharitable as that sounds, it is exactly how an untrained observer views things.

Services to game consumers

There is a degree of resentment towards ‘tastemakers’, towards those who have a say in what media is easily and widely consumed. At the same time, in sectors where the floodgates were flung open, it’s never that long until the public cries out for more ‘curation’, for someone to tell them where to start when it comes to finding something that’s worth reading, or watching, or playing. There must be a happy medium, and indeed it’s being found, slowly but surely, in incumbent media like books and music.

Music is a great example of media where both open access and curation are available readily, but it’s due in large part to the dimensions of the medium. Since the early 2000s, record labels have held less and less power over the discovery of music. This isn’t to say record labels are irrelevant quite yet, and certain genres, like country, are dramatically affected by corporate stranglehold. Still, you can go on Spotify right now and find a staggering variety of music. When I was a teenager there was a period in time where I was finding new and weird music through mp3 blogs, and the vast majority of the titles I found back in the mid 2000s I was able to go and find on Spotify, even if they were extremely obscure (bands like Automato and Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound). I don’t necessarily know if Spotify would have helped me discover these bands again, but I also don’t know if I would have discovered all the new music I’ve found in the last five years without it (just ask Seamus, he’s at the whims of my playlists at least annually [why were there so many clowns!? – Ed.).

The reason music is a fairly easy medium to strike the balance in is that most pop songs are around three minutes long. Even if you get up to symphony length compositions, the point still remains that songs take less time to absorb and judge than many other pieces of media. In fact, you can see the balance gets more and more skewed as the time to absorb media gets longer. Video illustrates this continuum well; Youtube helped the short-form video explode in popularity as creating three minute videos tended to be cost prohibitive prior to digital cameras and the internet. Video sharing has also helped elevate video essayists who are able to disrupt documentarians with hour-plus pieces. Doing something more complex than that, though, requires more investment, inevitably handing the reins back to a more traditional model. In books, as we go further down the continuum, there are hundreds if not thousands of authors fighting for their slice of attention, but only a scant few publishing houses that are paying people to read through and vet submissions to ensure quality. The alternative is self-publishing, and the sane choice by a casual reader would be to wholly avoid self-published works unless they have a pre-existing recommendation.

In RPGs, reading a game may give you a sense for how it works and if it’s doing something interesting, but it also requires a keen eye. Art and layout are key for selling RPGs and if one was to employ a ‘slush pile’ technique to find promising RPGs for publication, they’d have to be able to read past amateurish or absent art and layout to scrutinize the game underneath. This is the point where a publisher’s offer to a game designer and game consumer begin to overlap; reading past the art, design, and layout choices of a game designer and seeing the game underneath not only allows good games to be brought out to consumer attention, but doing so also means that the publisher can now use their art department to bring the game up to consumer expectations and make them happier with their purchase. It’s only going to increase the number of good games on the market if game designers don’t have to be artists; the same dynamic is equally true about being marketers, accountants, and project managers as well.

There are publishers in the RPG world, but pretty much all of them use an ad hoc model. The publisher will find game designers who already have a reputation within the publisher’s network, and then ink deals with them on a per-game basis. While none of these deals have disclosed financials, it’s easy to assume that by mitigating the portfolio risk through working with established games and designers, the financial risk of a straight royalty deal is pretty much left alone. If I were to start an RPG publisher, I’d take a different approach. Portfolio risk management will come from editors and submission readers. Games will be evaluated on mechanical merit, though there’d be an expectation that a submitted game may still need a round of developmental editing. If a game is accepted the designer would be paid an advance and the game would see further development with editorial and the art department. When the final game is released, the designer would see royalties after they earned out their advance. Sound familiar? It should, because it’s the exact model that fiction publishers use and have been using for decades. The main reason such a model hasn’t caught on in the RPG world is that it’s expensive; the fiction world is built on a model where one bestseller pays for the several hundred underperformers that came in its wake, and in RPGs the volumes are much smaller. In order to make this model viable there would have to be significant fiscal discipline, as well as some way to get the hit rate much higher than it is in fiction.

When you start looking at the economics, it makes sense that most RPGs come from design houses that focus on a constrained number of either game lines or lead designers. Finding new designers, especially before they have an existing reputation, is incredibly risky, and making it up on volume is tough. The model would have to be adapted to make numbers pencil out in the long term. And this is the rub, really. I’m not sure of the answer to ‘how do you become an RPG publisher’, at least insofar as I’m not sure how best to bring a real full-service publishing model into RPG design. You could constrain your portfolio to proven or vetted designers, but that’s really only one step away from just being a design house. You could just do printing and distribution, but the value-add there is limited. Actually bringing the traditional publishing model could bring a lot of value to designers and consumers alike, but there’s an x-factor missing that would enable you to do it without losing your shirt. Indeed, the one traditional publisher who tried to represent RPGs, Andrews McMeel, bowed out in 2023 after only a few years.

Even if it turns out traditional publishing isn’t the answer, there are still many possibilities to help designers socialize the cost of external services like logistics, marketing, and art. Design collectives have popped up, but unless other elements of the process are welcomed into the organization then a collective is just a design house with a nice mission statement. Many design houses are becoming successful at insourcing support functions, but typically the only ones truly making enough money to do this are stuck within the D&D ecosystem. Ultimately, becoming an RPG publisher is not an easy feat, especially if you go in with the sole intent to publish other people’s work. That said, if one truly believes that there’s value in the business model, it should be able to find a niche. I’m going to keep thinking about it.

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