Cheap Labor is Too Expensive
Posted: Tue Mar 30, 2010 3:59 pm
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
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
