Here's where I stand on the pricing and payment in indie RPGs discourse currently spooling up.

Replies are off. You can RT if you want but know that this is very personal for me and I will block liberally if you're a prick.

Long thread incoming.

When I started Loot The Room in 2016 I had just started my Master's and was working 2 days a week in a pub for minimum wage. I was very, very poor.

I priced my work low because I was led to believe I didn't deserve more when I was starting out.

I remained poor.

Over the couple of years I was active on the DMs Guild I was one of the people who pushed hard for higher prices across the board. I also directly contributed to the Production Values arms race over there, and tried to help people make "professional" products on no budget.

The reason for that was due to the reluctance of consumers to pay well for things that they seemed to be "amateur" or "just homebrew".

I believe people deserve to be paid for their work. I wanted to help people achieve that. I put a lot of effort into supporting the community.

My monthly Best Of The DMs Guild posts drove tens of thousands of dollars of sales to indie creators. My blog posts about doing layout on a budget are still the most popular on my site, 5 years later.

I ultimately left Guild spaces because a group of very well known, well-earning creators there began insisting that other creators didn't deserve to be paid or even credited for their work (because the Guild license says they don't have to be if you reuse Guild work).

I argued from an ethical standpoint. They argued from a purely legal standpoint. And it became clear that they absolutely wanted to keep these new, upstart creators in their place. At the bottom, earning no money, while the top names raked it in.

I pushed back HARD on this, to the extent that I'm still blocked on Twitter and Facebook by many of those big names.

In the meantime prices had risen on the Guild and I was making some money - but they were still very much below-living-wage prices for most people. (I have no idea what the Guild landscape looks like now.)

Unfortunately, I was still very poor. And my ex was no longer working, so I was trying to support us both on £400 a month from my day job and whatever money I could make writing RPG stuff.

I ended up taking a year or more off from basically everything when we split up.

When I came back to RPGs at the beginning of 2020, I was drowning in debt. I had a new job that paid reasonably well, but I couldn't break out of the spiral of debt and interest and charges.

I made the conscious decision to price my work properly. To aggressively market myself. To act as though RPGs were my sole income.

And for the past year, that's paid off in spades.

I am now completely debt free. I have savings, for the first time in my life. I'm potentially going to be able to buy a house in the next 12 months, which will reduce my expenses and make it even more likely that I canake RPGs my sole income for real.

So when I see a take that draws a distinction between "hobbyists" and "professionals" I take it very personally. When I see someone say, "only charge liveable prices if games are your sole income" I feel sick. Because if I'd done that, I'd still be poor.

When you say "only people working full time at games get to charge real prices", what you're saying is that I didn't deserve a chance to write my way out of debt. To literally change my life through games.

You're saying poor people don't get to make a living from art.

Your desire for cheap entertainment does not supersede my right to eat.

Entertainment is a luxury. It is not a right.

I've been poor. I know how much it fucking sucks to not be able to buy the thing you want. One reason I started exploring games that weren't 5e was because I couldn't afford to keep up with the releases, and indies are often cheaper.

I'm grateful to everyone who makes their games available for free, or who prices low. And I try to make sure that all my games have community copies as much as I'm able to.

But we need to change the narrative. Pricing low shouldn't be the default. Free definitely shouldn't be.

The ability to price low, to not care how much money you make, to give your art away for free, is a privilege. Not everybody has it.

The best way to make sure more people are able to do it? Encourage people to price fairly. To charge what they think their work is worth.

The more consumers with money to spend on luxuries like games are willing to actually spend that money on games, the more the creators of those games are able to support themselves, and the more able they are to then support those *without* means to pay full price.

Saying "only this set of people get to charge fair prices" is terrible. You don't know anybody's situation. Who the fuck are you to judge if someone "deserves" to be paid fairly?

There's more I could say but I don't want this to turn into a rant.

Pay artists.

Anyway here's my SoundCloud http://bit.ly/TOTTK