Something I’ve said for years and it’s coming around on social discourse.

Okay, slight suspension of disbelief first. Forget Hasbro and Games Workshop exist, along with the handful of Hasbro’s pawns. (Paizo, Kobold Press, Renegade Game Studios, Ghostfire Gaming, and about half the stuff on D&D Beyond.) Let’s also disregard Chaosium (Call of Cthulhu.) Most of the rest of the TTRPG “Industry” as much as I hate to admit it, is often a lone operator or a small crew of people putting out a game line or two.

I now contend it’s more of a craft industry, at least from where I’m standing. It’s on me to create the product, edit it, lay it out, find/make art for it, and eventually take my product to market. DriveThruRPG is the only sort of middle agent involved. Then I have to market, advertise, pray, and possibly pay taxes. Fortunately I haven’t generated enough revenue to worry about the last part.

A true cottage industry has multiple households creating goods for a receiving agent as they did prior to the days of industrialization. We still see some situations like that today where people work freelance from home on various TTRPG offerings, usually for DMsGuild or even a game company from what we hear. The line between freelancer and independent artisan are blurry sometimes.

The next step up is similar to gainful employment.

There are a few people out there in the TTRPG industry who do creative work for a bona fide game company. It might still be run out of someone’s living room or garage, but it’s more of a legitimate endeavor. I’m thinking along the lines of people who have enjoyed hundreds of thousands of dollars or more on Kickstarter, but don’t have the office space or warehouse for their products.

Then from there I imagine the dream is a working office/warehouse space with something resembling a staff possibly. I don’t know if anyone would call it “living the dream,” but it is how a lot of TTRPG companies grew from a photocopy of the rules to full on production. The only difference nowadays is digital products and print-on-demand have made life slightly easier.

“You’ll never get rich selling games, kid.”

I’ve talked about this before and I think it’s starting to become clearer to me. Maybe there is some truth to it. Maybe my dream of making a comfortable living or at least steadily paying for my hobby using what I bring in on my own meager offerings is just that: a dream. I don’t know any more. I know a lot of the “greats” in the industry are still just barely getting by or minimally not living solely based on their TTRPG income.

The same can be said about YouTube. The creators who are making money, especially on the TTRPG end, are channels with 100K+ followers across multiple platforms. I noticed that Chimp-Peck-You maps or whatever the name is won’t touch anyone under 10K subscribers or 35K consistent views. (Yes I know what the real name is and who their talent agency is, too.) No one is breaking down my door to drop off a $5,000 custom wooden gaming table, either. But I’m not bitter…

YouTube is only going to get harder next year when the monetization requirements go from 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours to 8,000 watch hours. I’ll be surprised if they don’t up the subscriber counts eventually. It’s the age-old tale of the rich get richer, and the poor get screwed on YouTube.

The TTRPG industry as it is really isn’t much better than YouTube. Small independent creators only have so many options without getting rich on their own (Arcane Library) or getting picked up by one of the big companies like Hasbro. A lucky few might get to cut a deal with a small company like Monte Cook Games or Chaosium. Even then such deals are few and far between especially with the economy in shambles.

When does it go back to just being a hobby?

I’ve asked myself that question a couple of times recently. I don’t think I can ever go back to just being a GM for fun. I’m always going to want to tinker with rules; publish an add-on; make a new monster for people to tinker with; write an article; make a video; and so on. I don’t know if I can ever stop.

Making money is secondary to all the joy creating things brings me. Or at least that’s what I tell myself to keep going. I don’t think anything outside of my family means quite as much to me as gaming has over the years.

I tried for a while to just write some ICONS solo fiction just for me, but it rapidly grew back into exploring other games and systems. Pretty soon I started looking into opening licensing things again. Hi. Here we are, a dozen years later and I’m back to tinkering.

It’s just in my blood; I guess.

A project I started clear back in my D&D 3.5 era has been dragged through two editions of D&D and several other games. Now I’m working on a version of it for Dragonbane. At the rate we’re going I’ll be releasing it for Ruttigers or something. Who knows? It’s one of a handful of titles that I’ve been creating for years or at least conceptualizing this whole time.

Before that it was some things I had come up with for Big Eyes, Small Mouth that I never got to print. I’d also like to be the guy to resurrect Marauder 2107 and Roadstriker 2, but it probably won’t ever happen. Yes, I’m openly a sad little otaku who is more into the TTRPG end of anime. A guy can dream; I guess.

I can dream.

There have been a couple of content creators that I look up to on YouTube lately who have stated what a shitshow the industry and even the hobby itself has become lately. I’m not giving up on the blog, YouTube, DriveThruRPG, or the hobby any time soon. Just because one well-known, overly hyped game is going down the tubes fast, doesn’t mean the rest of us aren’t still out here in the struggle.

Sure, the YouTube algorithm is only favoring the Ginny Di’s of the world. Sure, Hasbro/WotC and all their puppet companies are “at the top” of the industry right now. We don’t need them. We never really did.

As long as I can still be a kid with a game, a photocopier (or digital these days,) and a dream- then by Universe, I ain’t going anywhere. Maybe I won’t be able to pass a gaming empire on to my kids someday. They’ll understand. I’m still doing what I love and nothing is going to change that.