I’m not stating anything particularly controversial when I say it’s tough to be a game designer. The tabletop RPG market is an economics nightmare; demand is low and supply is incredibly high. Demand is low because this is a niche hobby whose marketing to the public at large is, essentially, Hasbro screaming so loud that nobody else is heard. Supply is driven by the fact that, at a functional level, thanks to crowdfunding Kickstarter, itch.io, and DriveThruRPG, basically anyone can make a TTRPG and get it on sale. TTRPGs and self-published fiction are very much the same, and everyone’s looking for the solution to the fact that 90% of everything in the market is utter crap.

Imagine, if you will, that you’re a good game designer. You’ve made something that’s captured the attention of part of the audience and, after you run some numbers, you realize that you could make a living on this. If you’ve done those numbers correctly, you’re still looking at a difficult life, one filled with a lot of hustle, a lot of compromises on your creative vision, and, most discouragingly, precarity. Precarity is, in essence, the amount of time you spend one decision away from ruin. It’s the constant enemy of anyone who doesn’t earn a constant and consistent income, and when your precarious income is game design instead of, say, insurance sales, there’s no relief from it, either. The only avenues to some meager financial security are to release a game that honestly gets famous, book dozens of hours of freelance work over and above your own design work, or simply have a day job.

This is important because precarity is bad for game design. It’s bad for designers on a mental health level, sure, but it’s bad for game design because it forces designers to make decisions based on money instead of anything else. It’s bad for game design because a lot of the longer game lifecycles that we grew up loving (you know, the ones where games get supported with supplements) can only happen with a level of financial risk that many designers simply can’t take. It’s bad for game design because it means that the resources necessary to create truly expansive and accessible games are only available to the incumbents, churning out versions of D&D and basically nothing else.

I don’t have any answers for this, not systematic ones at least. But by reflecting on how one actually makes a living designing TTRPGs, I hope I’m able to give a sense of appreciation for the mid-tier designers and publishers who are still making it and still able to hire people and cut paychecks. Only by turning precarity into security do we get bigger and more ambitious games, the exact sorts of games which simply aren’t coming out of single designer operations.

How to make a living designing TTRPGs

Let’s say you want to design a TTRPG. For argument’s sake, you want to design a game, not ‘do game design’; the freelance ecosystem is a huge contributor to professional game design, but putting hours down on someone else’s design (which is derived from D&D, Call of Cthulhu, or the World of Darkness 99% of the time) isn’t moving the needle on your personal vision (or the hobby as a whole, but I digress). You want to, at the very least, be lead designer on a game product, write what you want to write, and get it out into the world. So, for argument’s sake, you’ve designed a game. How can that earn you a living, pay your rent?

The way most designers start is by themselves, first designing their game and then pulling it together into a document they can sell. This might start on itch or DriveThruRPG; it may go straight to crowdfunding but the vast majority of designers who attempt to crowdfund their very first game will fail. If the game finds an audience at all (i.e. more than a hundred people buy or back it), the designer will receive a typically one-time cash infusion of a few hundred dollars. If they did all the work themselves and put it up on itch for their minimal share, it might even creep up past a thousand dollars. So, if you’re committed and have a few ideas up your sleeve, you do it again. And again. And again. Assuming you haven’t quit at this point, you just might be making minimum wage against the hours invested in your games; this is assuming that your initial encouraging audience starts to grow as you release more and more, and your earlier games provide a tail of incremental income. Maybe now you start crowdfunding; your costs go up but so does your potential audience.

To be clear, after we get past these three stages (make game, make several more games, make game and increase art and layout quality by crowdfunding), we’ve already gotten 85% of aspiring designers to quit. Getting even a hundred people (a silver tier badge on DriveThruRPG) to buy your game is no mean feat; it also isn’t anywhere near enough for you to make a living. Designing games by yourself is also not spending all that much time on design, because if these games are going to sell you’re also doing your layout, your editing, your marketing, and if you’re lucky, your accounting. You’re also paying yourself well below market for all of these things.

Maybe you have some like-minded game designer friends, and all of you are trying to design games for a living. You start a company. This gets you two things: First, with your friends you can now socialize costs in exchange for socializing income, and second, you have a legal entity which protects you personally from going broke. Most fledgling game companies won’t be able to afford corporate debt, but that LLC is the first step in building up some security while you work on games. You also have more leverage for those secondary tasks; sure, you’re not big enough to actually hire an editor but if you have more guaranteed work you may have an easier time getting a freelance one to take your projects.

Forming a company starts to bring you away from your game design visions as a leading priority, and it’s not just because you’re sharing resources with others. The more you grow, the more you contract out and the more you hire, the more that other people are dependent on your success. You have more resources, sure, but you also have a responsibility to ensure that the people you employ can keep getting paid, keep doing what they’re doing. It takes a lot of growth to get to the point where you have enough money and enough recurring income to start taking risks that you couldn’t otherwise afford. Once you have that security, though, you can do essentially whatever you want.

What security gets us

GURPS doesn’t really make Steve Jackson Games much money. I know that because Phil Reed and others in the leadership of the company have been saying as much for years in the text of the Steve Jackson Games ‘Report to the Stakeholders’. While Steve Jackson Games is a modestly successful game publisher, most of that lies at the feet of their board and card game products, specifically Munchkin. Many roll their eyes at Munchkin now, a massive product line full of gimmick and licensed expansions that gives Monopoly a run for its money, but it likely subsidizes all of the product development that goes on down in Austin, including GURPS development that’s still ongoing.

This is an important example because GURPS is arguably the most popular trad generic system and is also one of the most popular rules-heavy systems being sold today, with only Pathfinder clearly beating it. A good rules-heavy system is development-heavy; while GURPS is an extreme example the game’s supplements demand a high level of research and expertise from their authors, leading to GURPS retaining its title as the gold standard of high crunch twenty years after its last new edition was released. Most game design companies can’t do that. In our current market, if we want someone to develop the next incredible high-crunch game, we need to be looking to game designers who are already making a ton of money without doing much. It’s going to be a publisher; even the most successful solo designers, people like Chris McDowall and Kevin Crawford, basically can’t stop writing if they want to keep earning. Taking the time to build out something large and complex would be a huge risk (putting aside whether or not either of those designers would even be interested in such a thing). As it is, most mid-tier publishers are already risking their incomes by focusing on deepening their game lines; actually building a supplement library for your games is a risk many solo designers can’t afford to take. Definitionally, supplements sell less than the main game; this should be obvious because the market for a supplement only consists of people who’ve already bought the main game. That said, investing in supplements can have a significant return because buyers tend to be attracted to games with a higher level of pre-existing support. Once you factor in incremental purchases of both the new supplement and the original, as well as the (hopefully) smaller development costs of a supplement, building out a supplement library is often a good business decision, and one that’s easier to make if you’re selling enough that the supplement will at least break even.

That’s a big if at the end there, isn’t it. It is remarkably difficult to get big enough to afford to write many supplements, even if doing so may ensure your game’s survival. This is one big reason that crowdfunding campaigns still have so many stretch goals; if a designer has no real hope of funding a supplement after the game is released, using extra money from a crowdfunding campaign is both a relatively safe way to fund as well as a free inducement for people to pledge more. What we see time and time again, though, is that crowdfunded games don’t sustain a product tail; once the Kickstarter marketing support stops so too does all momentum for the game. There are certainly success stories out there that were carried along by crowdfunding, but the perennial bestsellers in the space come from companies who focus their mission on games they can support.

Wizards of the Coast and Paizo are the top two TTRPG publishers in North America. Within the DriveThruRPG environment (the largest players who don’t sell on DriveThruRPG are the two I just mentioned) the top selling slots are held consistently between a handful of midtier publishers, including Modiphius, Free League, Chaosium, FFG/Edge, R. Talsorian, Mongoose Publishing, Onyx Path Publishing, and Cubicle 7 (the current licensee for Games Workshop in the RPG space). If you look at the games, what you see are legacy products. Onyx Path supports many World of Darkness lines, Mongoose is the current publisher of Traveller, and Talsorian’s only active product at the moment is the 35+ year old Cyberpunk (The Witcher RPG is on hiatus pending a CD Projekt Red lore update). Among those companies are also some of the largest full-time workforces in TTRPGs, Wizards and Paizo obviously but also Chaosium and Mongoose. I certainly could bemoan the amount of resources shifted towards supporting old game lines, but the economics rationalize it fairly well: only the oldest, most developed brands in the TTRPG space move enough product to justify full-time workforces. And though I’m going to try to avoid going too hard into politics, it’s hard not to notice that the newest of these companies, Free League and Modiphius, are (along with Mongoose and Cubicle 7) based in either the UK or the EU and have access to tax-supported healthcare, which makes their cost of doing business significantly lower than it would be in the United States.

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If RPG designers have no job security, if they’re fully dependent on the success of their next project, those projects will be small or at least economical (read: based on existing mechanics), have the largest addressable market possible (read: no supplements), and will be wrapped up quickly so the next project can start (read: no errata, simplified rules development, and seriously, no supplements). A game designer could certainly do this in their free time; I’d venture that that’s a significant portion (if not the majority) of indie designers. However, working forty hours a week (should you be so lucky as to work that little) and then trying to stack in ten to twenty hours of game design a week on top of that is a very different calculus than being hired to do game design forty hours a week. Precarity of time is just as real as precarity of money, and spending one quarter the time on game design (if you have the discipline to do that, even) that you do on your day job results in disproportionately more mental effort and therefore disproportionately less productivity.

The question I asked myself which led to considering the reality of doing game design for pay was ‘will we ever see another GURPS?’ The answer, at least considering the current reality of the game design landscape and the world economy, is no. No matter the composition of your workforce or your cashflow, building a game of the level of complexity of GURPS takes so much time and requires such a large library that few are willing to take the business risk it would require. The companies with the resources necessary to build a large and complex game, companies like Paizo, have already built ‘their’ large and complex games and are investing everything they have into their continued success. Though Free League and Modiphius spread their resources around (and can do so thanks to their House System approach), if either of these companies had a bonafide hit we’d likely see them close ranks, product-wise.

And so it goes with big trad games. With higher development costs and a similar price point to their tighter cousins, we’re not really in a position to see the sorts of games that came out in the 80s and 90s in the 2020s and 2030s. The shift towards lighter and tighter rulesets may be explained by player preference, though I’d wager it isn’t. Instead, economics demands discipline around how much game can be produced in a given amount of time for a given amount of money. Seeing RPGs tighten and shrink is the Baumol Effect in action, and I don’t know if there’s really an answer.

The ‘answer’ for how to reduce precarity for RPG designers is the same as the ‘answer’ to the Baumol Effect: Growth. When the hobby grows and more games sell more copies, more of the design world gets to ascend into, if not exactly wealth, at least basic financial security afforded to them by a job with a paycheck and benefits. More money also means better games; most skills needed to design a TTRPG or lay out a game book are completely transferable to other industries, and passion for the hobby only gets you so far. Of course, ‘growth’ isn’t a magic word and the hobby as a whole recently stopped growing as it had been during the pandemic, meaning things are about to get even tougher unless we see some fragmentation. It’s important for consumers to remember the realities that drive this hobby; in such a niche environment it’s hard to grow and it’s hard to commit resources to larger projects. There aren’t any easy answers, but the best thing you can do is to keep pushing to make the hobby as multi-faceted, diverse, and accessible as possible. Growth isn’t guaranteed for any hobby, so the only thing we can do is make it easier for new folks to grab a seat at our table.

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