It’s Sunday morning, I had coffee, yesterday’s sourdough is in the oven and I’m waiting for bread, and for my wife to wake up. Reading Mastodon and writing stuff.
@dredmorbius and @babelcarp were talking about journalism. It started with reading the news online and being tracked, with tracking being better if you subscribe (since now they have your payment info and perhaps your location, too), and therefore a cultural tax on the one side, and musings of micropayments and the unwillingness to subscribe to every newspaper because in our online world we see a lot of links to multiple newspapers on the other side.
I know the feeling. A cultural tax would be great, if everybody agreed to it, across borders. Fat chance. Too many people are making money as intermediaries!
I think copyright collectives also show how difficult it is to collect this tax fairly and how to distribute the money fairly. I wonder: Why is it not a progressive tax like income tax? Here in Switzerland it’s tied to buying storage media and performing works in public. And the distribution is tricky, too. I’d love to offer a living wage for every artist. But what about unpopular artists? Who gets to decide who’s good enough? Perhaps what I really want is universal basic income (UBI).
I also think that micropayments have been shown not to don’t work. The first time I heard about them was in Scott McCloud’s book, Reinventing Comics (2000). I even got myself an account on one of those services and paid a few cents for one of his comics. I never bought anything else with it.
The thing I find most interesting about the whole discussion is how the role-playing game (RPG) market has had a micro version of the micropayment discussion for years.
With DriveThru RPG and RPG Now (where one eventually bought the other), Lulu, and now with Itch.io, we’ve had marketplaces where users publish products for other users as well as a place where small professional endeavours hand of fulfilment or printing to DriveThru. We have mini-transactions (because the credit card companies, Swipe and PayPal all demand around 30 cents minimum, plus DriveThru also needs money for software development, moderation and bandwidth so they ask for about 30% on top; details of the pricing schemes vary), we also have financing via Kickstarter, we have subscriptions via Patreon, via have donations, “pay what you want” (which is to say: you can get it for free, but you have to sign in and leave your contact info), and so on. It’s been an interesting experience for me, starting in 2006, when I bought my first RPG PDF.
My renewed interested in roleplaying games (RPG) has led me to a few sites, and it’s amazing to see how much material is offered either for download – either free (specially “light” versions of the rules) or for a few dollars. – 2006-11-28 Downloading Books
As for universal solutions, all I can say is that I’ve only seen criminalised ones: The Trove was a website that offered almost everything with a big name, for free. (In Switzerland, making copies for personal use, i.e. downloading something is legal, but making it available is not.) They closed down and maybe they continue to exist somewhere underground, like some of the members-only torrent sites.
There is no legal way to pay a yearly fee and get access to all the material, and even if you did, it’d probably be something like Spotify where you don’t own the copies, they are licensed. You can’t move them out of the system, you can’t be sure that they’ll stay available, they can be changed at any time (”always up to date!”), and they’ll pay a pittance to independent creators and small bands … I mean teams. Perhaps this is where D&D 6 is trying to go?
I think we can also see that the payment options remained unchallenged. Even though DriveThru RPG has a quasi monopoly (with Lulu formerly the better print option and with Itch.io only recently gaining traction as it offers to take a lower margin), they did not establish a credit card payment processing alternative, and when Kickstarter looked for one they stumbled into the blockchain meme black hole and I don’t know what happened. Patreon (the subscription service) was interesting because they offer to pool donations, essentially virtualising them. They tried to change their pricing in order to better reflect actual costs from payment service providers and their customers howled. I’m not sure what the end result is. At the time they backtracked, I think.
Liberapay, which tries to do something similar, implemented as virtual subscriptions that result in very rare payments, has gained no traction in the RPG world.
(I’d love to write more about Kickstarter and Patreon, here. Do you have some good links?)
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OneBlogShelf is the blog for OneBookShelf, the DriveThru RPG parent company. They wrote about pricing PDF products:
What did affect sales rates was the discount amount from the original MSRP of the title. So a book priced on site at 40% off its MSRP sold much better than a book priced 20% off its MSRP, even if both books ended up priced at $15. – Pricing (2013)
For the past few months, I’ve been spending a lot of time slicing up all sorts of sales data from our site to get some insight into best practices for our publishing partners. – Pricing Part 2 (2014)
Kickstarter and the blockchain:
As a first step, we’re supporting the development of an open source protocol that will essentially create a decentralized version of Kickstarter’s core functionality. This will live on a public blockchain, and be available for collaborators, independent contributors, and even Kickstarter competitors, from all over the world to build upon, connect to, or use. – The Future of Crowdfunding Creative Projects (2021)
Since our announcement, we’ve had thousands of conversations with our community over emails, support tickets, social posts, and Zoom calls to understand your concerns about these technologies. The environmental issues, scams, speculation, and risks are real, and we share these concerns. – We Won't Make Changes to Kickstarter Without You (2022)
The Future of Crowdfunding Creative Projects (2021)
We Won't Make Changes to Kickstarter Without You (2022)
Patreon pricing:
Aside from Patreon’s existing 5% fee, a creator’s income on Patreon often varied from month to month because of third-party processing fees. … Starting on December 18th, a new service fee of 2.9% + $0.35 will be paid by patrons for each individual pledge. – We’re Updating Patreon’s Fee Structure. Here’s Why. (2017)
The new payments system disproportionately impacted $1 – $2 patrons. We have to build a better system for them. Aggregation is highly-valued, and we underestimated that. – We messed up. We’re sorry, and we’re not rolling out the fees change. (2017)
5% of the monthly income you earn on Patreon plus payment processing – Pricing (2022)
Platform Fee … Payment processing fees … Payout fees… Conversion fees … – What fees can I expect as a creator?
We’re Updating Patreon’s Fee Structure. Here’s Why. (2017)
We messed up. We’re sorry, and we’re not rolling out the fees change. (2017)
What fees can I expect as a creator?
#RPG #Publishing