The Business: A Good Example of How To Fail At Making Tabletop RPGs

No Geek Gab today, so instead here's something timely about how broke tabletop RPGs are as a business sector.

Degenesis was an amazingly well-illustrated RPG set in a dreadfully bleak post-apocalypse Europe. It used a novel but hard to master game system.

SIXMOREVODKA, the publisher, has called it a day – at least from a tabletop RPG point of view.

Unfortunately, due to a consistent and severe drop in sales and donations over the past months, we’ve been forced to make the call to end the Roadmap experiment prematurely. As of today, we are canceling all development of the DEGENESIS IP and bringing the RPG line to its end.

The announcement was made on Discord (shared on the fan Reddit) and notes that the free material will remain and degenesis.com kept live.

If you’ve pre-ordered any of the books, then SIXMOREVOKDA will try, to the best of their ability, to deliver. Donations will be refunded. The art books are shipping as planned.

Okay, it's clear what they did wrong: make a coffee table product for people that don't buy those things (i.e. Normies).

It doesn't help that there is precious little liminal space--and therefore commercial space--for most would-be contenders in tabletop RPGs. Gamma World was the first post-Apocalypse RPG, following Metamorphsis Alpha's psuedo-version in space, and it still holds a dominant influence decades after the fact despite the top title now being Palladium's flagship game RIFTS. (The retroclone version is Mutant Future, by Goblinoid Games, freely available without art here.)

I do not exaggerate that 90% of what you can find out there could be wiped out tomorrow and you would not miss it. It's that much of an also-ran medium, still dominated by products and companies from the founding decade of the 70s, and if not for a Black Swan event that made D&D a fad briefly it would have remained a Midwestern US college fad that went nowhere but spawned far more commercially viable spinoffs (console and PC RPGs, specifically; Ultima and Rogue were early examples).

There's no money to be had here. Therefore there is no reason to make high-cost print products that are not POD, and ebook products are adversely affected by all the extraneous artwork that makes these coffee table products what they are. Therefore there is no point in doing what too many would-be publishers and designers do, which is hire staff and freelancers as one herds cats; better to be more or less a solo act that occasionally hires help as required. Again, Gonnerman's Basic Fantasy is how to make this work today: free PDFs, cheap POD options.

This was a doomed project from the get-go, but it is very typical of people who think there's money to be made here. They think tabletop RPGs are a Boutique Upscale Status-Seeker business category. This is in large part due to the reality of past examples--90s World of Darkness, for example--not getting to them before it's too late and they've lost money; the reality is that this is a cottage industry of one-man bands that occassionally collaborate with someone to cover things they can't do themselves, and a metric fuckton of delusional clout-chasers (see the Seattle clique for examples) who couldn't hack it in comics, videogames, or OldPub.

Don't even bother getting into this sector now unless you are willing to accept that this is, at best, a hobby that pays for itself or you're willing to do what the Pundit did and relocate to a place in the world where you can make what First Worlders see as pitiful income and live well in a Third World country. (Given how well the Pundit is doing, and how well the country he's in is, this is not the dig you may think it is; I've considered following his example.)

(Side note: Tabletop RPGs are not location-dependent businesses; if I somehow gained ownership of D&D, I'd relocate out of Seattle to someplace like the Dakotas for a while and I'd consider going off-shore after that. You can tell who the retards and old-timers are in this business when they insist otherwise.)