My last post apparently attracted the attention of some people on a certain forum site you may be aware of (traffic source stats are a wonderful thing). The discussion is actually perfectly reasonable for the most part, but I was intrigued by the post I pasted in above.
"Bog standard capitalism" is here defined as "setting the retail price of your product at the upper end of what your customers would be willing to pay but not so high that they don't cough up". I would quibble that this is not exactly what I wrote in the post. And I would also quibble that this is an accurate definition of "bog standard capitalism" - it sounds more like a description of "bog standard pricing in circumstances of oligopolistic competition" to me. But then what do I know? Noisms' thoughts on the OSR publishing as oligopoly will have to wait for another day.
The reason why this post intrigued me is what it says about modern geekdom and its "intensely relaxed" attitude to what Habermas would probably call the colonisation of their lifeworld by market rationality.
Let me put it in less pretentious terms. A hobby is a deeply human experience of shared communal values and respect for craftsmanship and skill. It is the endeavour of amateurs who do what they do for the love of it and out of a desire to collaborate with peers who feel the same way. When it is subject to the forces of "bog standard capitalism" much is gained but much is also lost. Its hobbyish nature is denuded and is replaced by price-based considerations which distort existing relationships forever.
It is hypocritical of me to complain about this for many reasons. First, I am in the lucky position of having gainful employment which pays me comparatively well and gives me quite a bit of free time to write stuff about elf games. Second, I have released RPG materials for money. Third, I did that in such a way that, it seemed to me, reflected a fair approach to pricing - a luxury I would not necessarily have been able to afford if I was doing it professionally.
But be that as it may, none of us is without sin. My desire is only to point out that it's good that people can now make money and support themselves independently as professional producers of amazing stuff. Yet it has its downsides. Just look at what has happened to "the OSR" in the period 2008-2019 if you don't believe me.
Imagine blaming the system by which you can get what you want for a price you’re willing to pay for things costing money
ReplyDeleteI have tried, but I can't understand what you mean by this comment.
DeleteScott what the fuck does this sentence mean?
DeleteI may be wrong, and Scott please correct me if I am, but it is sarcasm. It says people complain about the way things are even if the way things are works and is generally viewed as perfectly acceptable. Humans will still find a way to find fault with things.
DeleteIt went right over my head!
DeleteNot to get completely off track but... in the process of formulating a reply to this post, I went to DriveThru to see what the PDF cost of Yoon-Suin is. I noticed you had previously offered up a module to anyone who had bought both the print and PDF versions. Is that offer still good? If so, how do I reach out to you?
ReplyDeleteYes, still good. You can reach me at jean dot delumeau at gmail.
DeleteI don't even understand that post. Is there a problem in suggesting that market forces might have lead to a non-ideal outcome from a certain perspective?
ReplyDeleteMaybe they only read the title and thought you were complaining about people being fairly compensated for their work rather than the fact that high production values don't substantially increase the utility of a game book, but increase the price just the same.
I have no idea - I suspect there is a lot of bad faith reading of things there like everywhere else.
DeleteIt could be the tend for some folks to have an absolutist view. You said some books were overpriced, and they took it as ALL books. It isn't what you said, but it's what/how they read it.
DeleteSA has been an unfunny nightmare zone since 2010 at least.
ReplyDeleteThat has nothing to do with the topic at hand, I just don't want you to get caught up in meaningless B.S. like you did when Tao of D&D was on your case a few months ago.
DeleteThanks, but no worries on that front. I never read SA unless I start getting traffic from a link there.
Delete???
ReplyDeleteWhat happened to "the OSR?"
It has become monetised and commodified and professionalised to a significant degree, which is good for some reasons but has made it lose a lot of its charm and sense of comraderie and willingness to share and create for free. In my view anyway.
DeleteDon't worry, at some point some gamers will rediscover the joys of non-commercial, DIY hobby culture. These things go in cycles. Given the dominance of market-thinking it's surprising it remained an amateur thing as long as it did.
DeleteMaybe you aren't looking at the right places? 2 weeks ago we were doing curses as a class - got over a dozen entries. Mine was ok, some entries were *excellent*. All free. The GLOG encourages hacking, bolting on...
DeleteMaybe I am out of the loop!
DeleteIf I were to hazard a guess at the state of the industry, and the pricing:
ReplyDeleteOne of the things you brought up in the last post was that this sort of pricing makes it harder for kids and new blood to get into the hobby. While I don't think this is intentional, I also don't think that there's an intention to appeal to new people, either. Most of the higher-priced books don't seem to be aimed so much at newcomers, as to people who are already entrenched in the hobby, and are putting their disposable income into it. The pricing itself, I think, is being dictated heavily based off of what WotC, Paizo, and other larger publishers are able to support.
The distinction, of course, is that something like WotC has brand name recognition, a marketing budget, and an extensive base of active players in local game shops. To get a new kid in, they don't need to sell the book; they just need to hope someone in the store can loan one until the kid can wring a little cash out. Or even just pirate a PDF - no loss of sales for WotC, and just free marketing from a new player.
Ideally we'd see a market with more competition, with lower prices and higher volume of sales across more product lines. But the behavior is very much closer, I think, to how you describe it - closer to the market behavior of an oligopoly.
But the other side of that is, imagine you've created a wonderful introductory RPG product for the new player--Red Box BX 2020, with streamlined mechanics, three-four levels of spells, GM advice, monsters, a five-page dungeon adventure or two.
DeleteHow do you market that to REACH an introductory roleplayer? D&D has the brand name to reach moms and dads who maybe played once, who think their kids might like it better than they did. Pathfinder has the scale to maybe put something on Walmart/Target/Barnes-and-Nobles shelves. You don't and I don't. So I agree, Red Box 2020 is a holy grail, but I don't see how a DIY creator gets that Red Box in front of anyone but friends-and-family, and hardcore gamers who prowl DrivethruRPG.
It is a tough one. For me it would be a matter of trying to get it into toy shops, kids' bookshops and the toy departments of department stores, and in a way that breaks it out of the SF/Fantasy ghetto. You can actually find quite a few D&D books for sale in mainstream shops, but always in either the "Graphic Art" or the SF/Fantasy bit.
DeleteNot to be a dick but I think I saw a product that purported to be exactly that on my FLGS' shelves the other day. I will ask my brother if he remembers the name of it.
DeleteThat WotC, Paizo, et al have no interest in appealing to new players must be perfectly obvious to anyone who has ever had to guide a new player through the process of creating a character in one of their games.
Delete5ed isn't too bad. But yeah still more than ideal.
DeleteI think Paizo and WOTC *want* to market to new players. The Pathfinder Beginner Box, the D&D Basic Set are products, roughly in line with the quality of other Pathfinder and D&D products.
DeleteBut it's a challenge to purge your mind, to reach a state of empathy with people who don't share your near-lifetime cultural gaming background. Experienced 3X players (which includes pretty much all developers) look at 5E and say "wow how simple, how intuitive!", because compared to 3X or 4E, it is.
But that "streamlined" 5th edition character sheet has, by my count, 50 numbers on the first page. (Ability, bonus, saving throws, 18 skill modifiers, passive checks, AC HP hd proficiency speed, couple of attacks).
That's not beginner-friendly. But, to RPG veterans, it looks and seems beginner-friendly.
ALthough maybe Lemarc is right--they can't have interest in appealing to new players, because they don't understand who they are.
I think partly they are resting on their laurels and that's become their institutional culture - especially for Paizo, which basically was born to cater to existing 3rd edition fans who didn't like 4th edition.
DeleteTrue, but I haven't seen people rating the Beginner Box as being kind of crap compared to Ultimate/Advanced/Unchained Combat/Magic/Adventures/Race/Class whatever.
DeleteIf the designers were letting their negative feelings about new players show, I think you'd see that in the New Player Content being bad compared to the Advanced Player Content, that I do think they want to do a good job at.
And I don't think the WOTC 5E Basic Box is at a different level of mediocrity or acceptability than the annual splatbooks.
It's not that they don't WANT to do a good intro-to-RPG RPG, it's that they lack any concept of what a genuine RPG virgin is going to see when starting out.
(I tried to give my homebrew Red Box 2020 a shot with my kids, and my 11 year old son mentally noped out when I had him choose 3 Fighting Styles from a list of 10-12. He chose, but I saw the loss of interest, so I knew I had to retool because chargen was still taking too long.)
Who says beginners want simple, streamlined rules? I actually have the impression it's the other way round, they want big games with lots of rules and finicky details & extra supplements. They haven't played enough to know what really matters and assume more (in every way: complexity, page count,...) is automatically better. Especially when it comes in shiny packaging.
DeleteMy personal experience, chargen with new players is daunting. and then, even in 5E, options paralysis is a thing. Being overwhelmed with the amount of stuff to remember in order to play your character halfway tactically well is a thing.
DeleteWith my 3rd edition super-homebrewed campaigns, I had the system mastery to hold everyone's hand at the same time. With my 5th edition campaign, a lot of that broke down because I didn't have system mastery in the new system, so I realize things later that the wild magic sorceress was NEVER rolling on the wild magic table.
You have a good point--as purchasers, more looks better. Sitting at the table, less is more playable.
Anything that can be (mis)construed as an attack on the Holy Capitalism will provoke certain types. Capitalism (like gun ownership, immigration, ethics in video games journalism etc) seems to be one of a set of ideas that trigger an almost Pavlovian reaction.
ReplyDeleteSome are always very quick to come to the defence of an abstract idea that no one was attacking.
Also, here's to the romantic fancy of capitalism being reducible to "the system by which you can get what you want for a price you’re willing to pay".
It's weird. I am broadly a classical liberal on most economic issues. But there is a real hard core streak of cornflake-box anarcho-capitalism in online nerd-dom that I find very simplistic.
Delete"Just look at what has happened to "the OSR" in the period 2008-2019 if you don't believe me."
ReplyDeleteI've noticed a similar pattern in other hobby stuff online...
Looking across Youtube I saw a number of hobbyist channels switch to 'monetized' formats, and that altered their content... especially as they increased output to generate more cash.
Many of my favorites slowly burned out or just disappeared, some of them because their creators were receiving government assistance and risked losing that if they made YouTube money... so they just shut down their channels altogether.
What's left of my favorites are the ones who resisted the gold ring, who had stable employment outside of YouTube, and who had no interest in mixing hobby and business.
Not that there aren't still people there making a living off of hobby channels... but I think they're the ones who approached it as a business right from the start.
I think in many ways it's a very old story that you can see especially in the music business with what happened to grunge, punk, hip-hop, disco, blue, yadda yadda yadda. There's nothing new under the sun I suppose.
DeleteI guess that's why we now have unboxing videos instead of proper reviews.
Delete"I guess that's why we now have unboxing videos instead of proper reviews."
DeleteReal reviews take time and effort.
When I was a kid, there were lots of movie reviews on TV and in newspapers... now they just report how much money the thing made opening weekend.
Who knew the term Enlightened Centrist could ever sound so scornful, eh?
ReplyDeletePresumably the proper solution would be Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism. Guillotine all ~centrists~ (a.k.a. "the Fash").
DeleteHAH! This one unleashed my hyena-like cackling on the whole food court!
DeleteWhenever I see Yoon-Suin being discussed on, say, reddit or SA or such sites, it's not uncommon for somebody to pipe up castigating me for failing to pick sides in the brainless culture wars they're involved in. It's like, "Yeah, he writes good stuff, but only if he wasn't so disappointingly reasonable...:
DeleteJurgen Habermas would comment on how bourgeois customs influenced purchasing patterns in a hobby which started as a hobby soon transformed into a professional construct to attain credibility and sustainability. In turn, the private sphere of norms within the hobby would influence the public sphere and thus games with high production values would be perceived as the artificial norm. And perhaps comment on how the vast majority of these RPGs with high production values end up at deep discount either online or in the clearance bin at the FLGS and ask what does exactly that signify? Or something like that...
ReplyDeleteHa! Nice.
DeleteI hope no one takes this comment as abrasive. It is honestly not meant to be, nor is it directed at any particular person(s). I simply wish to share four observations:
ReplyDelete1. I still see a lot of free RPG stuff on dragonsfoot and on blogs.
2. If selling RPG things indicates a loss of innocence, then the Fall occurred in January 1974 with the sale of the original D&D boxed set for $10 (which is $52 in 2019 dollars).
3. The heroes of Appendix N wrote their books and stories in exchange for money: Lovecraft, REH, Tolkien, Leiber, etc.
4. Harlan Ellison was always mystified by the notion that, while people recognize that all other sorts of employment are rightfully compensated with money, a number of people think that writing (alone of all employments) should be done for free. Serving tables, mowing a lawn, shoveling snow, etc. all get payment. But Tolkien should have written The Lord of the Rings for nary a cent? I think this notion shaved some years off of poor Harlan Ellison's life.
I miss Ellison. IMHO, the world needs a few more sci-fi writers who aren't afraid to throw hands from time to time.
DeleteI have seen all those Harlan Ellison videos...I think the man had something wrong with him.
DeleteYes, professionals should be paid for what they do, but the idea that other professionals never do anything for free, or don't see the value in doing their work gratis from time to time, is nuts.
The more general point is that yes, professionalisation has its virtues, but so does amateurism, and one can crowd out the other.
Well, in response to point 4... not everything needs to be a job or bring in money. Some people seem to think money is the ultimate bottom line, it only really matters if you get paid for it, and that's kind of sad. As anyone who ever shared anything with strangers without narrow economic considerations would now.
ReplyDeleteAnd it's not about the loss of innocence either, as if only naive idiots would not try to make a buck out of their creativity.
You're right. Not everything needs to be a job or bring in money, thank goodness. I think about the countless hours I have spent over the last 40 years creating stuff for RPGs without thought for making a penny, and it has all been very rewarding.
DeleteWhat I do not find rewarding is the process of preparing RPG stuff for sale. The formatting, the second-guessing, editing, proof-reading, endlessly dealing with computers and programs and websites that never seem to work right, staying up late with burning eyes trying to meet deadlines (when you would much rather be in bed), acquiring shipping materials, packing the stuff, taking it to the post office, etc, ad nauseam. In contrast with the joys of creativity mentioned in my first paragraph, this sort of thing is simply dreadful. I would never crucify myself thus without pay.
Because of the joyless drudgery that is preparing a RPG thing for publication, I can say that there was never any prospect of any of my for-sale books being released for free. It was either for-sale or not at all. I would not have spent a single minute on the drudgery. Instead, I would have spent all of that time on the joy of creativity instead.
You almost make it sound as if we should be grateful that the possibility of monetary compensation pushed you to go through all that joyless drudgery :-)
DeleteHa! Not at all! :)
DeleteRather, I'm thinking back years ago to a fellow who once rather indignantly asked me why I had the effrontery to charge for my first book (which he liked). He had the romantic notion that all RPG things should be free. I could only tell him that I am far, far too lazy to do all that work for free.
In other words, I charge not because I'm under the delusion of thinking myself a Homer, but rather because I know that I'm lazy. :)
So you're lazy and you hate "work", but money will compensate for it and that is why you turned your hobby partially into a dayjob-type thing. And somehow you think this is sensible. Hopefully at least the money's good and you can comfortably live off it.
DeleteGeoffrey, you make that point cogently, but I think it's an argument in favour of charging SOMETHING for what you're making, not one in favour of charging an arm and a leg for it!
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ReplyDeleteHi there, can't be arsed to log into my regular account, would you be alright with someone making a The Fantasy Trip conversation of Yoon Suin? Not for money.
ReplyDeleteGo for it.
Delete