Hard Numbers for a Rogue Genius Games Product Over More Than A Decade... and a Dozen More RGG Products (Patreon)

In addition to my other hats, I am the publisher and member-manager for Rogue Genius Games (also found HERE), a tiny little game publishing company. RGG launched in late 2013, and it's initial purpose was to be a home for PDFs I and a partner had created for a previous company, Super Genius Games. When we were bought out from SGG it was largely with the full rights to the pdfs we had created for it, and I needed a way to sell those pdfs. We've released a TON of new content since then.

One thing I am always looking for as a publisher is hard data I can use to make my plans for budgets, sales volumes, marketing, and so on. While other publishers have done better jobs of this than I am going to manage, I still hope a look at one or more RGG products over its lifespan-to-date can prove helpful, or at least interesting. DriveThruRPG makes getting reports and analysis for your own products easy, so that's what I'm going to draw from and focus on.

So, let's look at the Feat Reference Document. It's OFFICIAL title is "Campaign Options: Feat Reference Document," because I was really into branding specific lines for Pathfinder First Edition. Internally, however, we tend to call it FReD. This is a 261-page book for Pathfinder First Edition that compiles all the official Paizo-published feats for the game (up to that point) that WEREN'T in Pathfinder hardbacks. Each feat came with any subsystem needed for the feat to actually be used in-game, some fictional context for GMs looking to use them as esoteric knowledge that was less common that core feats, and in a VERY small number of cases (two, I think), a clearly-marked unofficial revision of feats that did not work as written, each presented after the official original feat.

(Cover art by Eric Lofgren. Cover design and layout by Lj Stephens.)

The book was a "hit" for us, in that it did more sales over a longer period of time than usual, though it's about middle-of-the road for books RGG has released of that size. Most of our books are in the 6-26 page range, and on average those simply don't sell as many copies as larger products. So FReD is "typical" for us within its category, it's just not a category we do as often as smaller things.

You can buy it here at the Open Gaming Store, which actually gives me the biggest cut of the sale price (80%), though the number of units is lower than I've generally gotten from DriveThruRPG. FReD is, of course, also available at DriveThru, where I get 65% of sales. If this title was exclusive to DriveThru I'd get 70%, but I make enough from the Open Gaming Store that being exclusive to DriveThru for an extra 5% isn't worth it to me.

However, I'm only going to cover sales through DriveThru in this article, largely because that data is easier for me to access, but also because not everyone does Open Games, and not everyone sells on the Open Gaming Store. Just keep in mind, we got on average 5-10% additional sales from the OGS. (And that's a guesstimate--some products did as well on OGS as DriveThru and with the bigger cut from OGS, it's always been clearly worthwhile to not be exclusive.)

RGG doesn't sell through it's own website, but if we did DriveThru would let us do that and still be considered "exclusive" with them, if we wished.

On the DriveThru page for FReD, you'll see it's a Platinum Best Seller, and it was uploaded on 4/28/2015. That means it's sold between 1,001 and 2,500 copies over 11 years. (Those numbers not counting when it's 'sold' without a price attached to it, such as when I have used it as one of the items in charity bundles designed to raise money for medical bills for myself and others. It has another 600 or so "sales" if we include those.) Of the sales we do count, 128 were in the first 120 days after release. It then sold 5-10 copies a month for several years. It had a severe dropoff when Pathfinder Second Edition came along, which was not shocking.

We put it on discount more than once, such as having it be a Deal of the Day or part of a special sale, often at 70% off. Once a product is 5 or more years old, and selling less than a copy a month, I see no reason not to put it in sales and bundles.

Also, a LOT of those sales are for the softback Print-On-Demand version of FReD, which we priced with only a TINY margin above print costs--less than $1, in fact. That was an intentional, conscious choice to put this product in people's hands at a price gamers could afford, and I consider any lost income from those copies to essentially be a marketing expense for Rogue Genius Games.

Even so, FReD has grossed $7,116.84 on DriveThru over 11 years. Of that, 35% went to DriveThru, leaving $4,625.94. While everyone working on this project (myself and Rogue Genius Games included) took an income share payment plan rather than up-front cost, there was still some hard costs -- stock art (including for the cover) ran about $200. That leaves $4,625.94.

That didn't come evenly over 11 years, but if it had it would work out to about $35/month.

(The free version of this article pretty well ends here. ALL the rest of this is for paying Patrons only. You are my chosen ones!)

I have a few regrets when it comes to FReD. I always meant to do an update, and then an expanded version, and maybe a crowdfunding campaign for a mega-expanded version with third-party feats. But I was working full time at Paizo when we released it, on top of being on contract with Green Ronin Publishing, being the publisher for both Rogue Genius and Rite Publishing, and doing freelance work for a variety of publishers. That all added up to 70-100 hours of work a week, and I just never got back to FReD. Now that no more "official" Paizo feats are being produced for Pathfinder First Edition, I keep thinking I should make a "definitive" FReD, especially as I ponder what a "Revised" PF1 might look like.

Of course ONE product is not representative of a trend, and conditions in the market now are not what they were in 2015. Without going into a MUCH detail, here are the number of units sold to date (not including units moved in bundles with no price attached directly to them) for 11 other RGG products, covering a range of game systems, sizes, and upload dates.

#1 With a Bullet Point: 10 Mage Armor Feats (Full Clip!) -- 1270 units sold, 4 pages, added July 27, 2012

5e Menagerie: Griffmeras -- 27 units sold, 28 pages, added May 21, 2019

Advanced Options: Slayer Talents & Lethalities -- 724 units sold, 10 pages, added Sept 23, 2014

Cardstock Miniatures: Giants--Large and In Charge -- 106 units sold, 14 pages, added Oct 11, 2010

Codex Draconis: Black Lords of the Marsh -- 1286 units sold, 29 pages, added Feb 23, 2011

Genius Adventures: There's Yer Problem -- 602 units sold, 17 pages, added Oct 06, 2014

The Genius Guide to the Wolfshead -- 144 units sold, 13 pages, added Feb 08, 2023

The Skaldwood Blight (Kickstarter fulfillment of 629 backers not included in numbers) -- 200 units sold, 254 pages, added June 30, 2020

Starfarer's Companion -- 1903 units sold, 234 pages, added Aug 19, 2017

Super Powered Legends: Halloween Killer -- 16 units sold, 2 pages, added March 16, 2026

Super Powered Legends Sourcebook II (Kickstarter fulfillment of 131 backers not included in numbers) -- 52 units sold, 336 pages, added Oct 29, 2025

Three Dozen Minor Magic Items -- 18 units sold, 6 pages, added March 10, 2026

Honestly, newer releases are NOT moving as many units as they did in the same timeframe a decade or more ago. There are LOTS of potential reasons for that. One is that big new products are often now first offered on a crowdfunding campaign, so hundreds of customers buy it without their purchases counting as units moved on DriveThru. Second, RGG has not been as consistent with releases in the past 4 years, in no small part due to health issues on my part. I haven't released a pdf of my own content through RGG in quite some time, instead focusing my independent creative efforts. (I think the most recent RGG pdf I wrote was The Genius Guide to the Wolfshead, which was more than 3 years ago and did pretty well.)

But also, it's a different market. Post-covid gamers are more likely to want VTT info for their game purchases, and basically none of our releases do that. I'm personally best known among the 1st-edition Pathfinder and Starfinder crowds, which are still worth marketing to for me but must be acknowledged are shrinking and aging. I also haven't attended a convention or been a creator on-staff for a game company since 2019. Social media, my primary form of marketing, almost universally chokes organic engagement.

As I continue to build mental endurance, I hope to be able to dig in and both adapt to the new realities and release more of my own product through my company... but right now, any spare energy I have goes to freelance gigs to pay the bills. Those bring in more money in the very short term, which I need, but as work-for-hire, have no opportunity for further income down the line.

That's actually one reason I'm going over info on DriveThruRPG. If you look at the various publisher tools, there are all SORTS of things you can learn. For example, another interesting piece of info you can get from DriveThruRPG is what publishers are most often bought by a customer the same time they buy something of yours. Here's what that currently looks like for the FReD.

A lot of those I'd expect, but a few are a real surprise. I know who Seafoot Games are, but I'd NEVER have guessed that their products were more likely than, say, Legendary or Raging Swan to be bought in the same order as an RGG product.

There are things I can potentially do with that data, from looking at what products these companies are putting out (and how they are pricing and marketing them) to reaching out to some of these to propose bundles or ad swaps. That's useful data, and it's painful when I am talking to less experienced small DriveThru publishers who don't even know things like the Title Analysis Report tool exist (it's under "Sales Report" in the publish tools sections).

But that's moving way beyond just hard numbers, so I'm going to call this article here. But if folks want more insights on this behind-the-scenes stuff, let me know.

(This article is not part of the material on this site using the OGL. ©Owen K.C. Stephens, 2026.)