Hard Numbers for a Rogue Genius Games Product Over More Than A Decade (Patreon)

(This is the free version of this article. Paying Patrons can get the full version here.)

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 version of this article for Paying Patrons has more abbreviated data for a dozen more products, covering a range of release years, page counts, and game systems. Upgrade now for more data!)