Selling Out: A Crisis Of Ideals

From the very start of Loreshaper Games I've wanted to deliver quality free tabletop games, hopefully reaching a self-sustaining point.

For a long time I've labored away at making games under a very, very, "open" business model, in the sense that I retained almost no exclusive intellectual property rights to my creations.

And I'm running into a situation where I'm finding it difficult to stick to those ideals.

Image courtesy Pixabay

First, let me make a couple things clear. Hammercalled, the Paradise Incident, and Segira are still going to be available as PWYW products. I've already got some work done on all of these, and I've made promises that they'll be delivered free of charge to consumers. Print editions will still be extra, and I may make a special edition for Patreon patrons.

However, going forward I'm going to try a slightly different business model. I'm going to stick with a SRD style release plan, so the rules and playable material for the games will be available. In fact, I may even go a step further and make simple, but playable, books that are simply the rules laid out in an easily accessible format.

However, my goal is that by the end of the year I'll release what is currently known to the world as Project3 (though my Patreon supporters have a little more detail about it), and it will be a more traditional commercial project available in its completion only to patrons and for purchase on DriveThruRPG.

This has been something that's a long time coming, and it's just a concession to reality. In eight months on DriveThruRPG, Loreshaper Games has managed to "sell" more than 250 products, but our gross earnings are just under $20.
For reference, that's about 1% of what I've poured into Loreshaper Games of my own money just for hiring freelancers, and less than that if you factor in my time investment. I'm making $1/month off of Patreon, which is nice on one hand because there's at least some support, but that's nowhere near enough to get us going in a forward direction. I make most of the "money" Loreshaper Games has acquired on the Steem blockchain, but I don't really have a convenient way to cash it out, and it's not coming from game creation but rather from random writings of the sort I used to put on a personal blog.

I'm a little pained by having to do this. It doesn't feel "right", in the sense of staying true to my convictions and Loreshaper Games' origins, and I think that's part of the reason why I'm starting to really seriously consider it months before it should matter.
On the other hand, I need to be realistic. If I don't have the resources to make games, I'm not going to be able to.