# So, what do you want to sell? tags: #thoughts Sometimes you just run into content on social media that makes you, compels you, to write a response. I've been involved with the tabletop RPG industry long enough to have some significant feelings and thoughts about how it functions. It was inevitable that I would have to respond to this. > **How can a company avoid "supplement creep" followed by a new edition and remain profitable?** > > It seems that all game systems go through the same cycle: > > Write A Game → Release Supplements → Supplement Creep → Release A New Edition to "simplify" the rules. > > From what little research I did, supplements sell WAY BETTER than adventures do, since they're bought by both players and GMs. Adventures are only bought by GMs, usually. > > I'm sure at some point, a game will hit a certain level of market saturation, and supplements are needed to keep revenue coming in. > > But is there a better business model? Instead of supplement creep, can you make another game? > k > -- [From Reddit: *How can a company avoid "supplement creep" followed by a new edition and remain profitable?*](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/15cgckb/how_can_a_company_avoid_supplement_creep_followed/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) Let's put this in the simplest, most straightforward way possible. You become profitable by selling something people want. You sustain profitability by continuing to sell more things that people want. That's it. That's the whole thing. What you attempt to be trying to figure out is how to make profit without actually selling something people want – which you can't do. It's a requirement of the system of life that if you don't have something to trade for what I have that you want, you don't get it. So if you want to produce a game and then make money in an ongoing way, you have to have something in an ongoing sense that other people want. Thus supplements. Eventually, hopefully, you know more than you did when you published the first edition of your game as well as have a bunch of content from the supplements that you think probably could and should be folded into the main text. You'd also like to get new players involved and they definitely don't want to drop hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dollars on getting into your game. So you put out a new edition, incorporating all you've learned enfolding in the good bits of the stuff you've made. Now, along the way you've probably created some merchandising opportunities if people actually really liked what you did – but you can't sell that forever. Only a few properties survive for very long without regular infusions of content to remind people they exists. You probably won't get lucky. So you take your new edition and start writing supplements for it because you have a car payment to make and a mortgage and one day you'd like to put your kids through college. Maybe. Along the way you figure out that the RPG industry is, in its better moments, a glorified vanity press and most products see a maximum circulation of a couple of hundred and think themselves blessed for doing so. Maybe a couple of thousand if you get lucky, catch a social media wave at the right moment, and relentlessly pimp yourself. At least digital distribution means you're not paying for warehouse space, right? Or having to park out in the driveway because your garage is full of books you can't move. Maybe you catch some inspiration, again if you're very lucky, and make a new game. You probably trade on the name you've already made with the old one and explore a similar design space. If you're really bold you risk it all and put out an entirely new game, hoping your reputation will help get some traction. Most of the time this will fail. Sometimes you'll get lucky. Even more rarely you actually have real talent for game design and enough discipline to be consistent. Now you have two separate games which you can release supplements for. Of course, that means that either the first one gets half your attention and production for both goes way down over what your audience expected for the first or you double down and spend even less time with your family and doing the things that you would like in your life in order to keep pushing out stuff that pays for the car, mortgage, and your kid's college. Funny how that works. Maybe you hire some people to help you along the way – which means that your overhead goes up, now you really have to move more product, and more than just your own wallet is on the line. Congratulations, you are now a proper small business owner. Welcome to Hell. All of the major game lines that you know the name of went through this at some point. What you've never seen is the number of game lines you've never heard of who died in the process. For good reason. So I ask you, kid. What do you want to sell? ## Update 2023-08-01 14:11 Surprisingly the discussion continued and isn't entirely a garbage fire. If you're interested in how things really work in [[the RPG industry]] – for reasons which remain mysterious but are clearly your own, you might want to read it.