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November 10 Update: Long Term Careers
🕑 Added 2024-11-10 18:00:10 +0000 UTCAs 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.
Comments
Sierra Lee
I didn't mean it as a reprimand! I especially don't want patrons to think they need to be that careful when commenting. If my post wasn't clear enough, I'm plenty skeptical about the "safety" of corporate work and I'm grateful for my current stability (which is substantially higher than a conventional job). In the fantasy scenario where someone like CDProjekt showed up with an offer, I'd have to consider it, but honestly I don't think even far smaller companies would give me the time of day. Collaborations would be more likely to be with one of the indie studios that focus on retro RPGs, the type with a handful of employees. (FYI, I saw your message but it'll take me a while to get back to Discord.)
Ark Tolei
I apologize for coming off as overly critical of the idea of collaboration on other people's projects. I usually go through more drafts, but I was in a hurry and hit post instead of delete. You're 100% correct on all counts. The only concern I had was tied to a common belief freelance artists can fall into that company work is more stable, which might have been true 30 years ago, but I don't think is the case anymore for people who are already established. I've seen a lot of artists disappear into corporate hierarchies only to be unceremoniously fired within a few years, after significant damage to their personal brand, and I expect that trend to escalate.
Sierra Lee
To be clear, I wouldn't bet 100% of my career on another project in the same way I wouldn't bet it all on one of my own. That said, I think I do need to take risks to move forward, and while investing my time into a project someone else controls is definitely a risk, investing my money into my own project is also one. This is all hypothetical without real collaborators inviting me, of course.
Ark Tolei
For someone who has been able to survive making an eclectic combination of creative work for as long as you have, I feel like hitching your cart to someone else's horse is likely more dangerous than keeping control of the business aspect yourself, excepting mitigating rationale I'm unaware of. The internet age has largely been the age of venture capitalists purchasing and demolishing small, medium, and large businesses alike, especially in digital media, and hitching yourself to an existing team runs the risk of a new world computing, smosh, penny arcade, etc. style collapse because the person in charge signs the wrong contract. It doesn't matter how good the product you're making is if the owner is embezzling all the money, or simply throwing it away on crypto like square-enix did recently. The modern economy seems to mostly run on converting legitimate businesses into scams.
Lord Forte
As someone with a lot of ties to the publishing industry, my feeling on why people are so prone to undervalue writing is basically this: everyone thinks they can write. E V E R Y O N E. AI notwithstanding, non-artists rarely think they can be an artist or treat it as a common skill. But writing? Ask random guy on the street if he think he could write a decent novel and he'll probably say "yes, if I had the time." This is, of course, utter nonsense. But since my mother is a freelance trade book editor, I've had a back seat a lot of my life to watching her try to convince people their writing is not good and needs a lot of help, and most people need some convincing. So, if I had to guess, I'd say that writing isn't valued as a skill in the game industry because every project lead assumes they're some grand visionary who can handle the writing as well as any fancy writer. (or, if not, still sees it as a common skill that some other team member can multitask). ...and this is why I can tolerate so little of the crap people put out these days. :X The gatekeepers falling by the wayside has obviously had some advantages, especially for people like us, but I do think that we lost something in terms of quality control. I'm sure these same ideas are prevalent in old institutions, but also, institutions do accrue knowledge. In this more free for all environment, there's less chance of a collective learning of this lesson. Still, it's not all downside. Everyone thinks they can write, but for those who care about quality at all, the difference between the wheat and the chaff is night and day. If anything, think of it as a competitive advantage against those who aren't writers and don't value good writing. Your relative success speaks to the fact that quality writing does actually create a lot of value.
Nathan Phoenix
It really is a damn shame. Games like Veilguard, Dustborn and concord get all the money they want just to burn it to the ground. Meanwhile genuine good writing gets broomed aside as soon as the awards are given out. Persona, 13 Sentinels, and BG3 are about the only things I payed for outside of Patreon anymore.
Sierra Lee
Without getting too deep into the politics of it, I don't think that an abrupt porn ban would be an easy thing to accomplish. I'm more concerned about the ongoing pressure leading to deaths by inches.
Sierra Lee
Appreciate your support! DStP is indeed still in progress; I'm waiting on work from the programmer and primary artist, unfortunately.
Sierra Lee
Haha, I somehow got mentioned on Hacker News? I'd seen Reddit mentions, but not that.
SantaTheHutt
It irks me to no end that good writing isn't valued more in game development. So many potentially good games just flop for me because the story writing is atrociously bad.
Mycroft
what make you think that a full ban of NSFW from the USA (where you live if I'm not mistaken) is unlikely ? Project 2025 is clear on the subject, it want to jail porn creator. I hope that you stay safe, but currently, things seams to be quite worying for NSFW creator.
Dark Art
Yup, Spiderweb Software guys were a shining beacon of indie devving, even before it became a mainstream :D Take it for what it is, but I dont see game devving as anything super niche - its your standard SDLC, marketing and then product support. You dont really need to be a seer to see that some people are good at those things and some are not. Thats all to it, really. Looks like you are good at it, so as long as you dont bite too much, properly plan and stick to your guns, you'll do well. So please dont bite too much, plan properly and stick to your guns :)
AnythingAtAll
I think one of the most valuable things I've learned by simply consuming online content for practically my whole life is just how hard it is to make a living on any creative field. The more books I've read, the more games I've played - the more I realize why any creator I follow who's managed to reach that point keep emphasizing how grateful they are for it. I think you're the only one I know who makes a living off of both SFW books and NSFW games, but I follow others who've made a living by focusing on one of them. I don't think there's a magic sauce there, it really does just seem like a confluence of many factors. And although that rarity is as discouraging as seeing how unstable the gaming industry can be, like your examples have shown, it's also shown what a creative can accomplish by building a not-large but very loyal audience. I remember coming across TLS through word of mouth in random forum posts and Reddit threads, with one of the main draws being that, unlike other NSFW games, this one actually gets big updates regularly. Given how nichè TLS seemed on a first impression though, I remember thinking wow, must be a very driven creator to do all this work without doing it full-time. But apparently you do! Along with other sources of income, of course. To take it to your progression fantasy field, I watched this John Bierce interview where he mentions being inspired to write Mage Errant when Will Wight proved that you actually can make a living as an indie author with his Cradle Series. I think coming across TLS and your body of work is my version of that moment. That super rare moment where you genuinely go, "Wait, you can do that??" I've only been here for one and a half years, so practically a baby compared to those who've been here since even the Third Arclent War or since Chasmfall, but I've had so much fun following your work ever since. I know I'll be here for the next 1.5 years, so instead, here's to 10 more fruitful years of your work - be they games, books, or what have you!
Promenade
Pitching in with my two thoughts here - you're my favorite creator amongst every NSFW game I've played, and TLS is one of my top games ever of any genre. I've said it in an earlier comment, but I really appreciate how much love and thought goes into every character and every event. I, too, often lament the current direction a lot of games are forced to take. Too often does writing fall by the wayside for just a quick buck of a rehashed idea, and a rush to use "modern" engines and tech. I fancy myself a decent writer, but have lacked my own spark for creation, and even threw my hat in the programming ring (I found it hateful at best). It's a really tough world there. To not ramble and say what I want to say: I think your success, even if it's smaller than many others, is best attributed to your clear dedication to quality and completeness. You've survived where countless others of your peers have abandoned projects, and yet your quality of work has only increased. I think that's worth a ton in any industry, so don't sell yourself short by failing to acknowledge that. It's a shitshow in EVERY industry, not even just the creatives. I think building on your base slowly is not only the smart move, but also the proven one that has worked for you. I look forward to your future projects!
Argo The Ratfolk
Nice to hear your thoughts! As others have said, I for one am determined and happy to continue supporting you for years to come, for as long as I can! You have more than earned my trust and I want to help you by funding your future works! Even if some of the games like the Don't save the princess game(I think that's still in development? Never paid much attention to it honestly since it wasn't my style of game) aren't high on my list to personally play.
R
While your work may not have set the internet on fire, I'll let you know it has lit a fire in our hearts I rarely see TLS mentioned, but it looks like it gets high praise whenever it does get mentioned. I gave it a try in the first place due to seeing a couple of very positive comments on Hacker News and Reddit Getting properly rewarded in a creative field does seem to be a bitch in comparison to "boring" career paths, even when the stuff one puts out is absolute gold
Sierra Lee
Thanks! What you'll see is a period of overlap where I finish and polish TLS while working on some shorter projects. Hopefully by the time those are out I'll have a stronger foundation and be able to make key decisions about a spiritual successor like the science fiction epic.
Sierra Lee
I'm familiar with the projects, though I don't know how open they are to collaboration considering their current work. Worth considering!
Sierra Lee
Not exactly, because it's dependent on other variables like finding good collaborators. That said, you can look forward to some posts in the upcoming months about current WIP projects that will hopefully be steps forward!
Sierra Lee
I took it as encouraging over condescending. ^-^ While a job like this is far from secure, the support of everyone here has helped me reach a point where I'm confident I can continue this as a career, even if I don't know what form that career will take.
Darthjake
I've already decided whatever project you're running I'll throw money at you, be it patron, subscribestar or however it needs to be done, I may not do it at the level I've supported TLS, but we'll see once you've started your next project. Best of luck in all that you do!
Abso Haram
Ya, Jeffs Geneforge games are a treat. He's (slowly) rereleasing them all which is something to look forward to over the next 50 years ha. Might be worth reaching out to Memory of Eternity. They're in the same boat as you kinda: indie, works in RPG Maker, makes adult games (Memoirs of a Battle Brothel, Baldr Squid, upcoming Vampires of Moonfall, all on Steam.)
Jamie Wahls
Is there any sort of pitchbook available for what projects you would do at what funding?
LordBurch
I just wanted to say I really admire your drive and work ethic; and how much thought you put into your career and future. I hope this doesn’t come across as condescending, but I work in a field that’s very safe career-wise and while I enjoy it, I’m certainly not as passionate as you seem to be. I cannot imagine the uncertainty you must have faced, and I think it’s admirable you keep moving forward.
Johnbowethejoker
I remember the gene forge games being shilled on Gaia Online of all places. Amazing they're still around.
