I've done what I swore an oath to God twenty-eight years ago to never do again.
Okay, so that’s dramatic.
Ultimately I stand by every criticism of Kickstarter I’ve ever made: that it creates and promotes a self-fulfilling and vicious boom-bust cycle of FOMO-fueled consumerism in the TTRPG industry; that it actively works to keep publishers particularly small ones from developing valuable infrastructure, particularly with regard to marketing; that it is a mug’s game of corporate publishers with ad revenue and parasocial followings giving the appearance of an equal playing field; that the heads of games Kickstarter in particular never answered for dabbling in crypto OR the horrendous snafu that was Luke Crane trying to smuggle an abuser into a project without informing any of the other contributors (and slapping a “projects we love” badge on his own project while head of games). These are all things I believe. I had hoped I would never have to run another Kickstarter; I didn’t particularly enjoy the first one, and haven’t enjoyed setting up this second.
I’m a frequent and outspoken critic of TTRPG awards and I have an armload of nominations for those (and actually a surprising number of wins?). The publishing industry is complicated! So is capitalism. My operative motto has largely been “do the least amount of harm” but with the intentional torpedoing of what is essentially The TTRPG Marketing App (Twitter), altered algorithms for all Meta projects, and Reddit largely being, well, Reddit - it’s hard out there for a self publisher. My pre-sale numbers for new projects has gone down from 170 pre-sales for Chalice to 7 pre-sales for Beecher’s Bibles. So, here we are, making ethical compromises to stay afloat. Such is publishing.
This isn’t to garner sympathy or even justify using a platform I’ve previously derided - Explaining Is Losing, after all - but a sort of airing of grievances towards an industry that is rigged from the top to the bottom to maintain a status quo and ensure that the top stays the top (through predatory fee structures and digital landlordism) and the bottom stays the bottom (by restricted access to financing, warehousing, printing, shipping, and collaboration). This is Year 6 of making any money in this industry,Year 3 for Monkey’s Paw Games, and Year 1 of doing it full time, and while I’d obviously like to be Doing Better, I am doing Not Bad with the prospect of doing Okay in the hopefully not-so-distant future.
I suppose I just wish the thing I was breaking my vow with God to never do again was something cooler, like making swords, rather than having to participate in additional capitalism.