November 10 Update: Long Term Careers

As I come up on ten years of TLS, I find myself thinking increasingly about long term career issues. I'm always inclined to think about the long term, of course, but they're heavier thoughts these days, thinking about decades less as abstractions.

Careers in Gaming

I've been doing some research, both from the outside and just contacting people - it's surprising how many developers will talk to you if you just message them on Reddit or something. Discovered some interesting things, though because those were private conversations, I'll need to be a little vague about the details.

For example, there are some indie developers I thought were healthy and successful studios that are actually broken apart or closed behind the scenes. Sometimes personal or creative conflict, sometimes just financial issues. I don't know how much of a cut publishers take, but some of these studios are outselling me by a lot, so it's shocking to find out they aren't making a living on game creation.

For the most part, other professionals have confirmed my suspicions that writing is not really viewed as a meaningful skill in development. Surprisingly, however, one person was actually contacted by a larger studio to write for a big title. I confess to being a little irked that this person isn't even known for their writing, but they're SFW, don't work in RPG Maker, and outsell my work significantly, so I understand it's not really an equivalence.

On the other end of the spectrum to all the collapses, there are a few outliers like Spiderweb Software. We have a fair number of western RPG fans here, so some of you may know of them. 30+ years making games is no mean feat! It also doesn't necessarily mean expansion or improvement, as they've been a tiny studio targeting a specific niche that entire time.

Then, entirely separate from all of that, there are the people working for big studios. They get actual salaries... but man, it seems like a precarious existence. Even studios like Bioware, which in a long-lost era valued writing foremost, will fire veteran writers in the name of profit. It's grim to find out that people who have written for huge titles are struggling to make a living.

Even though algorithmic environments are winner-take-all, success does not guarantee future success. Hopefully this one will come off as a case study and not talking down another developer, but are you guys familiar with Zeboyd Games? They developed Cthulhu Saves the World, which was a smash hit back in 2011, outselling any of my work by orders of magnitude. Also Cosmic Star Heroine, one of the well-known Chrono Trigger inspired games.

Unfortunately, if you look over their career trajectory, you see that each project has performed worse, culminating in an apparently ill-advised Kickstarter campaign that didn't even hit $5000. The Steam store just gets more and more choked with games, making it harder to get attention even for those with real teams and brand recognition.

Lest this seem too much like boasting, there are many people having far more success. Patrick Weekes is maybe ten years older than me, professionally active through many of the same years, and has ascended to writing for games with budgets in the tens of millions of dollars, plus much greater success with novels. All of my games have turned a profit, but I have never really had a major hit on Steam, so I'm still a small creator reliant on multiple sources of income.

The NSFW Wrench in the Works 

One of the big unknown variables is that governments, payment processors, and Patreon could turn heavily against adult content. Abrupt total bans are unlikely, but we currently have age verification laws kneecapping certain regions' traffic, various sales platforms (mostly art-focused) purging NSFW, and increasing enforcement across platforms.

I have mostly dismissed the waves of panic about Patreon banning everything, but blind confidence would also be naive. Patreon has never enforced its rules consistently and we do occasionally see creators get banned without recourse. I know I've had people maliciously reporting my account, and while it's never come to anything, it's always possible I could get hit.

Honestly, one of my fears is this happening without being able to tell my supporters. I hope you all know I wouldn't just disappear on you, so if things go south, I'll try to be present on my blog, the Discord server, my Steam page, and so on.

Your support over the years has given me a strong foundation, though! Even if I was banned tomorrow, I could still promise the completion of TLS. I'm not really sure if this potential threat will have an impact on my career. I definitely feel justified in diversifying into SFW projects, but I would still like to follow NSFW inspirations as well. Just wish I could do it without worrying. =/

My Career 

So, looking over all this... I feel fortunate to be in my current position. ^-^ My work may never have set the internet on fire, but I'm successful enough to do this for a living, and that's remarkable!

But where does the road go from here? The Spiderweb Software route seems like a very plausible future for me if I can't really expand, and that wouldn't be a bad life, but I admit that I hunger to keep moving forward. Making enough money to eat from my work is extraordinary, but I'm in a creative field because of my drive to keep creating things, and that includes all kinds of dreams.

It's tricky deciding the next steps. Some people mortgage their house and put everything into a dream game, and sometimes they outsell me by orders of magnitude, but more often it doesn't work out, and I'm not the sort of person who takes that kind of gamble. That means moving forward more carefully and incrementally.

At some point to make bigger games you need collaborators, and though I'm not so profitable that I can just fund a studio, I'm much better off than I was ten years ago. Having enough money to pay Annikath every month doesn't just mean sex scene art, it means having an artist who can handle all kinds of different tasks. Anyone remember how Yarra's hair used to be slightly misaligned? Longstanding problem knocked out easily thanks to having someone actually competent with the relevant skills instead of me fumbling around.

I also have to mention the large number of programmers that have helped me over the years: TLS is a better game for their contributions, and in many cases I probably couldn't have hired anyone because coders don't want to work with systems like this. Very thankful for their assistance!

In general, however, finding reliable collaborators  is difficult, and people like Annikath don't just knock on your door every day. If I want to keep working in this retro RPG space, I would need pixel artists, and I don't think I have ever been approached by one of those. They are... probably not looking at games like TLS, honestly.

Another option is to try to join up with others, even if it means subordinating my personal creative visions for a while. I'm pretty confident I could do the work. But when you look at the tiny field of studios hiring writers, it's like a parallel universe where I don't have a work history, and honestly game journalists have a better chance of getting hired as writers than I do.

All of those aside, the other path is to continue on my own and slowly build up money via other ventures. There's a diminishing returns problem with spending on games until you can hit the big time, but books have very high profit margins. The level of funding I can consider a sensible investment is slowly but steadily rising, so maybe that will reach critical mass one day.

Non-Conclusion 

This has been a long ramble without a conclusion, because this isn't the conclusion. I'm not sure which direction my career will go in the future. Hopefully I'll be able to continue improving the work I can produce, but if I continue with the sort of work that has brought me a great deal of happiness over the past ten years, that wouldn't be a bad thing. ^-^ More on this over the coming months, both retrospectives on TLS and more concrete looks into the future.

This has been a long term look, but in the short term, please look forward to a book launch and the TLS epilogue being released. I didn't want them so closely together, but as the holidays are approaching, that's how things fall out.

Huge thanks to everyone, because your support here has made my career possible! I hope that you'll all enjoy the conclusion of TLS and that some of you will stick around with me for the next phases of my journey.