9. Level 2 - Electric Bugaloo

bryce0lynch

i fucking hate writing ...
Staff member
I present level 2. It was everything I could do to keep from naming it EB. "It's too much!", "someone will know it's you!" Plus, the random dungeon level namer returned something like Chambers of the Wraith King, so Wraith King it was. But, there's still a very large part of me that thinks the second of EVERYTHING should be called Electric Bugaloo.

My only other insight for this post was that Marketing feels dirty. And then combine that with midwestern "How dare you think what you do is of any worth and anyone would pay for it!" My daughter says its because I'm old and don't understand anymore how the world works. Maybe I'll stick a line in some reviews to point this Patreons existence. Still feels like wrong though. Stupid self worth!
 

Gus L.

A FreshHell to Contend With
One thing I like about you Bryce is your midwestern sense of "How dare you think what you do is of any worth and anyone would pay for it!" I have the same impulse, also recognize its basic baddness, but I also like the idea of people producing stuff that's dramatically better then 90% of the crap (not hard 70% of it is shovelware) and giving it away for free.
 

bryce0lynch

i fucking hate writing ...
Staff member
Yeah, there's a good chance I'm going to make them PWYW from now on.

I'm trying to figure out the groundwork for a little income during retirement. Free levels/content and then Kick something physical with higher production values, maybe? I don't think you can make any real money at DriveThru, as an individual publisher, but maybe @Malrex has other thoughts on that?
 

Malrex

So ... slow work day? Every day?
Let's break these posts down for a second....I haven't had my coffee yet so there is going to be some rambling and maybe some swearing...and....well you are lucky, because once in awhile I hear the voice of Prince in my head who says my emails are tooooo long, so I just deleted a shitload from this post (but its still long?!)....

Marketing--I hate fucking marketing. I suck at it, it makes me feel dumb, I hate it...and I really fucking hate it. It's the one thing I despise about this hobby I've gotten myself into. To be honest, I don't plan to market anymore except for my MM places where people who see it WANT to see it. I need to find/make a marketing friend. So I agree 100% it feels dirty....its not my style either.

PWYW--ugh. I want it to work. I really do. I like the idea of giving back to the community. I was talking to someone about PWYW and they totally shut it down...people just downloading your product, but never reading it because they don't value it...because they got it for free. I can see that point, but still wanted it to work because our hobby can get expensive and its nice to be thrown a bone.

But here is what you might run into...and my 2 reasons why I won't do PWYW ever again: 1. the assholes who throw 5-10 cents at you. Jesus. Take it for free...trying to be nice here and they want to be insulting by throwing you a nickel? I know this happens to other publishers as well as its a constant bitch, and 2. This opens you up to bad ratings. They throw you a nickel and slam down a 2 or 3 star rating. Look, I love feedback, even if it's bad feedback, because I want to improve--so whoever is out there, feel free to dish it out, but throwing a nickel and giving a 2 or 3 star rating down and not having the balls to tell me why or to warn others why you didn't like it?...fuck off. So, a few bad apples sorta ruined PWYW for me.

Can you make money....REAL money at Drivethrurpg? That's probably a great topic for my next blog post...the big taboo question that no publisher wants to talk about. I think it really depends on: 1. if you have a following/reputation... 2. if you are good at marketing and can get exposure...and 3. can learn to really manipulate the tools that Drivethrurpg has. I believe there are some really successful publishers out there who hit gold (i.e. Mr. Zweihander). But for the regular Joe, like me, who just wants to write adventure modules and has 0 skills/interest in the marketing stuff--you aren't going to make much (my experience...may be different for others), and most times you are breaking even with art/editors/splitting profits/etc. #1 and #2 above also relates to Patreons as well--you can do amazing shit, but if you don't have #1 or #2 you just aren't going to make much. I haven't tried the Kickstarter angle yet as I want all my ducks in a row, but plan to try it soon as I really want to commission some original art for a few projects, and its the least risky path for a publisher to try to get art that isn't stock art. Didn't fund? then no contract with a artist..the no risk is super attractive.

For now, I'll just say that I'm usually happy to break even or being able to buy a 6-12 pack for the D&D group, or maybe a tank of gas for the month, or on a very rare occasion--where I can take my wife to a fancy dinner and drone on about Khazra and the Bull God. But when it stops being fun, I don't see a real reason to continue on Drivethrurpg. After two years, I've got to the point though that my stock art buying habits is waning and got a healthy amount, my map and layout program are paid for (i.e. the 'company' (?? lol) is balancing out), and if my store had more exposure that I could avoid the 35% cut that Drivethru takes, I might be whistling a different tune. But I think most publishers do it for the love and passion for the hobby or, in my case, enjoy putting stuff together, so there is some hidden, non-monetary value as well.
 

DangerousPuhson

Should be playing D&D instead
Don't feel frustrated by it Malrex - I have a degree in Advertising with a concentration in Marketing, and even I'm not quite sure how to make OSR marketing work. There's just no real base for any of it. At best, it's a customer base cannibalized from D&D (but only the folks who have been playing long enough to be jaded by D&D); at worst, it's super niche grognard blogging circles with only a few hundred viewers.

The upside though is that my degree work taught me Photoshop, which has proven to be invaluable for adventure design (since I can make my own maps and art and shit, even though I'm super far from what you'd call an "artistic person" with "skills" and "talent" and "a reason to wake up every day").
 

Melan

*eyeroll*
As I see it, there are two ways about these things: give it away for free, or ask real money for it. The middle road does not work. Speaking from personal experience,
1) Free used to work ten years ago, but doesn't work anymore. I released the best damn adventure I ever made for free, and nobody even noticed. People don't value free things anymore. So I put a price on my stuff and now it gets bought, read, and even played.
2) My zine sells decently enough to let me fund forthcoming titles from the profits (after Hungary's 57% tax wedge). That's nice, for a hobby.
3) This is mostly about print. PDF only is a scary market. I have a hunch people don't really value virtual things that much either. I fully agree. I print my PDFs and love taking envelopes of stuff to the post. I printed all those Black Maw installments, too, and put them in a folder.
4) G+'s shutdown seems to have slashed the buying market by about 30%. Ouch.
5) As a researcher who has studied the concept far too long, my going advice is "Don't stake your livelihood on the Creative Economy; it is a sham, and you will regret it. Run."
 

Malrex

So ... slow work day? Every day?
Don't feel frustrated by it Malrex - I have a degree in Advertising with a concentration in Marketing, and even I'm not quite sure how to make OSR marketing work. There's just no real base for any of it. At best, it's a customer base cannibalized from D&D (but only the folks who have been playing long enough to be jaded by D&D); at worst, it's super niche grognard blogging circles with only a few hundred viewers.

The upside though is that my degree work taught me Photoshop, which has proven to be invaluable for adventure design (since I can make my own maps and art and shit, even though I'm super far from what you'd call an "artistic person" with "skills" and "talent" and "a reason to wake up every day").
Thanks DangerousPuhson...haha, that makes me feel better!! Advertising and Marketing is far away from my real job and if I had to rely on it, I would be dead, but it's been sorta fun to mess around with Drivethrurpg tools (comparing how many people click a title compared to another..and trying to figure out why...title? color of cover? cover art?) Putting out an adventure better on a Wednesday or the weekend?

Wanted to touch on Melan's #3. I think some people value PDF's these days because 1. they use a laptop while they play, and 2. they don't want to clutter their house. Personally, I value a hard copy much more...more apt to read it, so I agree, but from lurking on forums, seems like a lot of people still like the pdfs.
 

DangerousPuhson

Should be playing D&D instead
I can make some baseline Marketing assumptions here, but again, it's a tough nut to bust crack:

1) Free things will be collected, held, and then never used by the majority of people. This is a value equation thing - there is no compulsion to run something if there was no investment to get it, because there's no nagging thought in the back of the mind saying "you paid for this, so you'd better get your money's worth". However, if you give out an adventure for free, you can bet that people who know about it are going to download it. People love hoarding, especially something they "may use in the future, someday, possibly... or at least poach some ideas from, probably...", and especially if there are comparable products out there that aren't free.

2) In terms of when to drop your adventure: weekdays, for sure - gets them thinking about setting up something for a weekend (games require prep, after all - it needs time to be digested and to get excited about). Evenings are preferable if it's something free, because odds are good that they'll stumble across it during the workday if you release and run hype morning or midday, but they won't be able to download it until they get home, at which point they'll likely have forgotten it exists by then (because it's free, so they don't value it as much - they'll put it in the back of their mind).

3) The baseline audience for serious OSR products is most likely thirty-something professionals. They buy products on cost, practicality, and what they think their group will enjoy. The audience for artsy OSR products is most likely twenty-something hipsters (or people trying to be one). They buy products mostly as showpieces, hipster-cred, and for reading themselves. Both groups have money to spend on products, but the former group are less likely to make impulse buys than the latter (and OSR products are most assuredly impulse buys). The groups aren't necessarily exclusive buys of each genre, but are the most likely buyers. Marketing plans should be skewed accordingly.

4) The OSR field is oversaturated. Too many niche systems. Too many shovelware modules. Too many developers. Paid products have to be really fucking enticing (ie. mucho content, sweet looks, and good reviews) to do well. Free modules just have to be noticed (again, people will collect them but rarely use them - too many options to choose from, and each is a serious time investment).

5) People will crack into material immediately after they've bought it, but often won't if they got it for free (they'll open it, take a quick look, and file it away instead). If they paid money for it, they'll give it a much deeper scan than if they didn't. Deeper scans mean it's more likely they'll run it if they get excited by the ideas they see. For free products to have a comparable effect, your audience needs to see something super-duper exciting in that brief moment they flip across the pages - artwork is the easiest way to accomplish this (draws the eye better). If you release something that's free and too text-heavy, it'll likely never get used at a table, even if the ideas are good.

6) PDFs are less likely to get used than booklets. There's a bigger draw to make use of something tangible than intangible, especially if that something is always sitting around in view/taking up space on a shelf. It's way easier to forget about a PDF nested away under a subfolder on a PC than it is to forget about a physical booklet. Don't assume that more people use PDFs at a table than booklets - not everyone has easy access to tablets/laptops/roll20, but literally everyone can carry around a booklet.

7) Making your product free will move more copies, but will do little for your brand (unless what you've written is paradigm-changing) and even less for your wallet. While you think it may help grow your brand through spreading awareness, it actually harms future sales, because people don't want to pay for things they've gotten free in the past. Charging even a dollar for your product will discourage most of your potential customers (because buying shit online is a hassle, and even a little hassle can turn away a sale), but will greatly increase your product actually getting used at the table. If the product is good, your brand will grow and people will buy more in the future - if it's bad (even mediocre), they'll never buy from you again.

8) Bundled PDFs are less likely to be used overall, even if the customer paid for them. They'll focus on the best thing in the bundle and the rest will fall to the wayside - in the customer's mind, when they buy a bundle they get their money's worth from the best thing and then peace of mind in owning the rest (even though they won't use any of it). If the bundle has many good things (especially critically-acclaimed things), they'll focus exclusively on those and literally never give a second thought to any of the other stuff. On the whole though, when someone buys a bundle, they do it for the comfort of grabbing a dozen things at once for a good deal, not for an actual desire to use any of the products.
 
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Slick

*eyeroll*
I can't help but wonder if part of the apparent decline from the "good old days" of the OSR is due to the shift towards selling things rather than sharing them freely (it's the spirit of DIY, after all). Some good content still gets posted around the blogosphere, but the cynical part of me feels like there must be some pressure for the major players in the scene to "hold back" their juiciest ideas for their paid products. Besides the fact that I find marketing and advertisement among the most execrable industries in the modern world (no offense, Puhson), it's my perception that the free trade of ideas encourages a more cooperative and intimate social space, or at least that's what the vibe seemed to be ~5 years or so ago.

Besides especially grandiose projects like Stonehell or whatever, I'm generally not a fan of locking things behind the DriveThruRPG paywall unless it's for physical media. I see the argument for valuing items more when you pay real money for them, but that feels really artificial; you don't value it because the content is good so much as you just don't want to feel like you're wasting money.

Admittedly, many of my close friends are Linux guys who pray at the altar of Open Source, so I realize my bias about stuff like this.
 
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DangerousPuhson

Should be playing D&D instead
Besides the fact that I find marketing and advertisement among the most execrable industries in the modern world (no offense, Puhson)
I don't actually work in Advertising/Marketing, I just went to school for it.

But hey, wait... fuck you anyway buddy! :)
 

bryce0lynch

i fucking hate writing ...
Staff member
Some people get up at the break of day
Gotta go to work before it gets too late
Sitting in a car and driving down the road
It ain't the way it has to be
But that's what you do to earn your daily wage
That's the kind of world that we live in today
But isn't where you wanna be
And isn't what you wanna be
 

The1True

My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
Damn! Thanks guys for one of the most insightful threads in ages. All tucked away in this weird corner of the forum. It felt like a real privilege to be a fly on the wall for this conversation.

As a consumer who has picked up most of the Best-Of's from Tenfootpole and Age of Dusk, I'd like to offer maybe some useful perspectives:
-Definitely freebies end up in a folder somewhere. I bump into them and go over them from time to time when I'm cleaning up, but when I'm looking to throw something together for play, I'm pulling something off the actual bookshelf. In the rare case where a free or PWYW pdf was truly awesome (a lot of Gus and Dyson's stuff) I've printed it out and put it in a decent binder.
-Preferred format is Print + PDF. Then I've got something to hold plus I've got digital content I can modify to make Player maps, Handout sheets, cheat sheets etc. It is a huge pain in the ass when the hard copy is on Lulu and the digital is on Drivethru (I usually end up choosing the Print version). And that planned scarcity thing they pulled with the print version of Blue Medusa was some filthy bullshit (but hey, good for the creators I guess).
-Preferred print format is classic TSR binding so it can go on the shelf with everything else. I <3 the Hydra Cooperative books, but that digest size is hard to keep open to the page behind the screen.
-I really liked those old DCC 3rd Party adventures for 3.5 back in the day (don't hate). They had slick production and they made about a million of them, so they must have been making money at it? Is that not possible here? Could old school adventures not be made with stripped down 5e rules or in a rules-agnostic way and presented in a similarly well-marketed fashion by a collective? There's some really creative stuff coming out of this niche niche movement (still) that deserves significantly better artwork and production!
 
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