There is a sentence Shannon Appelcline dropped in the middle of our conversation that should be printed on a card and handed to every person who has ever daydreamed about starting a game company.
“The paired problems that have plagued the RPG industry since the beginning are designers trying to run companies when they don’t know what they’re doing, and business people trying to run companies when they don’t understand gaming.”
What Chaosium had was designers. Brilliant ones. The creators of Call of Cthulhu and RuneQuest and Pendragon. But running a business is a different craft than making a game, and the history of this industry is littered with studios that discovered that distinction too late. The inverse is just as ugly: bring in business people who understand revenue and margins and fulfillment pipelines, and they will inevitably sand down whatever made the thing worth buying in the first place.
Designers running things has been the dominant model, and it has occasionally worked and often not. When it has worked, tends to look less like a business plan and more like a set of hard personal limits. Keep the operation lean. Know what you’re building before you take the money. Understand that a Kickstarter is not a revenue model — it’s a fulfillment obligation that will cost more than you think. Gavin Norman, putting out Dolmenwood, pulled in over a million dollars and nearly got wrecked by Brexit and the COVID shipping freeze before that money touched a single backer’s doorstep. He managed it. Not everyone does.
The designers who seem to navigate this best are the ones who treat creative work and business work as two completely separate disciplines, brought to bear in sequence rather than in parallel. You write the thing. Then you figure out how to get it to people. You don’t let the second concern corrupt the first.
It sounds simple. The history of the industry suggests it isn’t.
There is a reason that the people who keep showing up, decade after decade — the ones whose names you still see on new products are almost uniformly the ones who stayed small on purpose. That’s not failure. That’s discipline.
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The video interview is here: https://rpgramblings.substack.com/p/the-rpg-industrys-history-and-current?r=y8obu
My next project is two Hellacious OSE adventure paths, launching alongside Necrotic Gnome’s OSE DEMONS Month. Click the link to get notification https://www.backerkit.com/call_to_action/adfc5b8a-61b0-4b0f-a28e-5f273da8f43d/landing?preview_mode=true
No Sleep Till Brooklyn,
Jeff Jones