thread: 2012-03-13 : Indie POV pt 2: Does It Pay?
On 2012-03-16, Troy_Costisick wrote:
@Meserach: Luke makes way more money at his games than Vincent. It's just that his costs are also way higher. If you re-read the end of Luke's post, you'll see where he explains the discrepancy between his bottom line and Vincent's.
"@ Vincent:I'd love to hear from other creator-publishers than me."
When I did DL Quarterly back in 2005, I net $1012 (that's after taxes, website, printing, shipping, etc). Total, there were about 25,000 words in all four books, so that works out to $.04 per word. On average what a freelancer gets.
BUT, I put very little time into those games. Much to my shame, I regretfully playtested these games only a little. Maybe two sessions each. Holmes had 4. The layout was super fast and simple on my Adobe Pagemaker. It probably took me two hours to do each game. Three of the games were part of the Ronnies competition and so the rough draft was written in less than 24 hours. I probably put 6 full hours into each of those. Holmes was an Iron Chef game, so I probably put 20 hours into it at most. I'm not bragging. I hate myself for the careless way I published these things. But I think my experience is worth contributing.
So all told, I probably put in a pitiful 150 hours total into into writing, testing, revising, and publishing my games. That's about nineteen 8 hour working days. So that figures into about $53.26 per day NET seven years ago. That would be approaching $60 per day in 2012 dollars.
I am a very unskilled and hapless game designer, so put me on the opposite end of the spectrum of Vincent. Almost every person associated with the indie RPG movement is a better designer and publisher than I am. So, I figure I'm a decent minimum baseline for comparison while Vincent or Luke would be near the top.
Peace,
-Troy
