2025 - A year in review
Game writing income, publications and future plans
Hi,
The year is nicely underway and the whole world feels, well, not better. What a mess. It feels like our make believe games are insignificant in the whole scope of things, but it’s one of the things I do get my joy from, so no stopping me.
Also personally next year will be interesting. I quite my job in tech due to being completely burned out with the state of tech (especially AI). I’m looking into becoming a primary school teacher, but that’s a slow process. Which does mean the coming months I have time on my hands to focus on game stuff. More about that later!
Published in 2025
I didn’t publish much in 2025. This year I had the following releases:
The Five Laws of Roleplaying Games (May 2025)
PWYW - A manifesto of sorts based on the Five Laws of Library Science. Started out as a blog post here.Boat Ride to Valhalla (October 2025)
PWYW - A two page adventure for Pine Shallows, a submission to the The RPG Jamboree: Vikings & Myths
Game income in 2025
I thought it might be helpful to show an overview of what a small potatoes one man show ttrpg creator makes in a year. This was a bit of a low action year: I did not run any big crowdfunding campaigns, and both new publications in 2025 were small (and PWYW).
My gross income was about $2400. There will be some rounding errors due to juggling 3 currencies (euro, dollar and pound). After Paypal and platform fees are subtracted this leaves about 2300. Other costs were about $100 (postal costs for sending zines overseas and a commission for a future game), which leaves me with a net of about $2200.
Nothing to sneeze at, but far from a living wage.
Game income by platform
As you can see the biggest chunk of income comes from itch.io (43.8%). It’s were I sell most of my digital games. I did put up some of the bigger games on DriveThruRPG, and it was worth the effort, but barely. I’ll only put up bigger games or OSR adventures there. For small PWYW and supplemental stuff it’s just not worth the effort.
With 22% Indie Press Revolution (IPR) is the next biggest chunk. It’s a great way to get your physical zines into peoples hands. They are also VERY reliable. Every quarter you get a nice report on all sales, and a few days later the payout. Highly recommended to get your stuff to them! IPR still has a limited amount of copies of my games, so this number will go down in the next year until I publish a new physical game.
Grab one of the last print copies of A Visit to San Sibilia or Hira: the Eternal City at IPR!
To be precise, the 21,7% royalties were an advance on the French translation of Hiria: the Eternal City. The French edition of Hiria has yet to sell enough to earn out the advance, but it’s nicely on the way. Apart from some (good) questions during the translation process required almost no work on my part. We’re working on a French translation of A Visit to San Sibilia, but that won’t see publication until 2027 probably. Nice to have in the pipeline though!
The last chunk with 9.7% are some physical zines that were sold directly to some shops.
Game income by title
On itch.io I combine similar games in bundles with a small discount as an incentive to buy more games. This skews the results a bit, so I present both the income per title split out from bundles and with bundles as a separate category.
In both cases you see my two solo journaling games, A Visit to San Sibilia (2021) & Hiria: the Eternal City (2023) performing best. Considering a bit part of the income for Hiria is due to the advance for the French translation, it’s clear that even after all these years San Sibilia keeps being the best seller.
Weirdly enough the last half year the game had an real uptick in sales. No idea why (itch analytics are not that helpful), but I’m happy either way. It being a solo game there are a lot of actual plays pointing back to the itch page, and I also get a decent amount of referrals from reddit to the game. I just wish I knew how to accomplish that for my other games!
You can see bundles do help: about 20% of sales are of the bundles. But there’s no way of knowing people might have otherwise spend the same on single games. Still, grouping similar games in bundles with a small discount is a practice I’ll keep doing.
Plans for 2026
Like I said, I have resigned from my job, and haven’t started a new one yet. Apart from some long postponed projects in and around our house, I will have more time to write.
Looking at the things I planned for 2025 I see a lot didn’t materialize last year. It was a weird, weird year. I didn’t get around to do a lot I wanted to do. Most of the things I mentioned there, are things I still want to do.
There’s two major things I really want to do this year, and those are related to Pine Shallows and Look to Starward.
Look to Starward
As long time readers of this blog/newsletter know I’m working on Look to Starward, a retro science fiction adventure game. I hope to be able to publish a first draft soon, to get initiali feedback and to slowly work into a state that can be published physically.
Pine Shallows
Next to that Pine Shallows, my meddlesome kids game inspired by Gravity Falls, the Goonies and Stranger Things is coming to Kickstarter for a physical release. I have commissioned more art, I’m redoing the layout and working on the precise planning of the Kickstarter.
Hopefully my plans for 2026 work out better than the plans for 2025. What plans are you most excited about, and what are you doing in 2026?
See you in the next one!
Peter