2024 Year in Review (by numbers)

2024 Year in Review (by numbers)

January 2, 2025
Business

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Hi there! It’s once again that time of the year. Every year I take stock of what I accomplished, go through my numbers, chart what I did and how well it did, and try to draw some conclusions.

WARNING: I do go into money stuff in the middle of the article. I include a large header like this before it starts in earnest, so if you don’t want to read it, you can skip to “Overview/Meandering” at that time.

  • 2021-2022’s summary is here.
  • 2023’s summary is here.

What I did this year #

I’m trying to be a little more organized about this than previous years now that I have more and more kinds of things to go into. So:

Major Game Releases #

These are releases to my big current games! Or at least related-enough.

Minor Game/Supplement Releases #

Tiny little things because I guess I wasn’t doing enough when I was writing a fucking 200 page update to a big game!

  • Infinite, by INFINITY was a menu I made for the Celestial Bodies Jam. It’s fun to make menus. Hire me to make you a menu. You will certainly not regret me making you a menu.
  • Corpslayers was this year’s Minimalist Jam project. Cyberpunk heist game designed to fit in a home-printed half-letter zine. It’s 18 pages long and free. This was born from a few things: wanting to hack Slayers into something barely recognizable that still hits the core beats, wanting to create something smaller, and especially wanting something that’s more of a proper-zine than most everything else I make.
  • HARDPLACE is a supplement for the excellent HARDCASE. I really love the original game, both content and layout, and I wanted to work within the bounds of that incredibly terse one-to-two-page-per-item vibe so I figured this’d be a fun little end-of-year project.

Physical Releases #

I got into physicals this year! More on that later but the big summary:

Other #

Other things I did!

Itch Views and Downloads #

Itch is still my primary platform so I care about that more than others! So we’ll start with that until getting into the true bottom line.

Unlike previous years I’m going to do something a little different, which is include deltas. This is how much more or less a project got in the appropriate stat! (It’s generally less, which is very much to be expected, so understand that I’m not discouraged by negatives and you shouldn’t be either. An older project is inherently going to get less year by year.) I’m also going to tag things that came out near the end of the year because they’re going to get more of a bump!

So without further ado:

Major Project Lines #

Things that have proper releases, basically.

  • Celestial Bodies: 11,883 views, 2,454 downloads (2023 delta: +1,868 views, +277 downloads)
  • APOCALYPSE FRAME: 31,820 views, 17,450 downloads (2023 delta: +10,568 views, +7,110 downloads)
    • The Infected World: 1,298 views, 189 downloads (2023 delta: -986 views, -250 downloads)
    • Ballad of Industrial Gods: 859 views, 170 downloads (2023 delta: -43 views, +13 downloads)
    • ReFRAMEd: 1,466 views, 587 downloads (2023 delta: +790 views, +372 downloads)
    • APOCALYPSE FRAME grouping total: 35,443 views, 18,396 downloads (2023 delta: +10,329 views, +7,245 downloads)
  • Valiant Horizon: 7,191 views, 3,083 downloads (2023 delta: +2,528 views, +2,778 downloads)
    • Ages of Heroism: 1735 views, 192 downloads
    • Tactics: 1773 views, 173 downloads
    • Valiant Horizon grouping total: 10699 views, 3448 downloads (2023 delta: +2528 views, +2778 downloads)
  • Liminal Void Quickstart: 551 views, 260 downloads (2023 delta: +161 views, +119 downloads)

Bigger Things #

$10+ things that are standalone or third-party.

We’ll get to The Binary Atlas later in sales. Just keep that name in your back pocket.

Tiny Things #

Free, pay-what-you-want, or cheap things that are standalone or third-party.

SRDs #

  • 36th Way SRD: 291 views, 165 downloads (2023 delta: -377 views, -470 downloads)
  • Total//Effect SRD: 347 views, 85 downloads (2023 delta: -226 views, -49 downloads)

Total #

53085 views, 23493 downloads (2023 delta: +17206 views, +10151 downloads)

Huge! A huge year.

WARNING: This is where money data starts. Everything I have to say from now on is inextricable from the act of selling things. Stop reading now or skip to “Overview/Meandering” if that’s a problem for you.

Itch Sales #

Same as above, I’m going to add in deltas where they make sense.

Major Project Lines #

  • Celestial Bodies funding outside of crowdfunding (ahem) goes to Charlotte, as per agreements we made when we started it (we plan to have the opposite arrangement for a subsequent project). So nothing to report there on my end, but it’s doing great.

  • APOCALYPSE FRAME: $5208.3, 147 payments (2023 delta: $+1855.64, -43 payments)

    • Ballad of Industrial Gods: $84, 17 payments (2023 delta: $-41.50, -8 payments)
    • The Infected World: $326.05, 22 payments (2023 delta: $-391.95, -26 payments)
    • ReFRAMEd: $75, 15 payments (2023 delta: $+50, +9 payments)
    • APOCALYPSE FRAME grouping total: $5693.35, 201 payments (2023 delta: $+1472.19, -68 payments)

We will get to why that huge spike makes sense for an older game in the next section. (Hint: it’s physical sales.)

  • Valiant Horizon: $1146, 47 payments (2023 delta: $-1739, -55 payments)
    • VH: Ages of Heroism: $404, 21 payments
    • VH Tactics: $201, 25 payments
    • Valiant Horizon grouping total: $1751, 93 payments (2023 delta: $-1134, -9 payments)

We will, errrr, also get to why there wasn’t a similar spike in the next section. (Hint: it’s unfortunately not physical sales.)

Not much to report here, but thanks very much to folks paying for PWYW games!

Bigger Things #

  • ANOINTED: $0, 0 payments (2023 delta: $-30, -3 payments)
  • The Binary Atlas: $398.5, 38 payments (2023 delta: $+206, +21 payments)
  • NOVA: BURNOUT: $90, 9 payments (2023 delta: $-60, -7 payments)

For some reason The Binary Atlas was EXTREMELY in the black this year compared to last. RUNE is pretty popular, folks!

Tiny Things #

Not much to say here aside from general appreciation (Corpslayers and HARDPLACE are PWYW and the fact that they made anything is absolutely fantastic).

SRDs #

People going hog-wild and paying for an SRD did not in fact continue, which is fine.

Itch Total Sales #

$8026.85, 358 payments (2023 delta: $+381.45, -72 payments)

Now bear in mind…that delta is not counting Celestial Bodies, which was $4605.50 and 269 payments. If we count that it’s actually…

$8026.85, 358 payments (2023 delta: -$4,224.00, -341 payments)

This number isn’t as far off as it seems because there’s more coming in this article.

(after itch’s cut + payouts that’s more like $6,662.29)

Counting Celestial Bodies or not: either way, it stands: how did I make that much money while having that many fewer payments? Well…

Itch Physical Sale Breakout and General Printing Chat #

So this year I started physical sales on itch. For anyone who’s not familiar, you just add a reward that costs more and include a field for an address. Put a big warning on your thing saying “put an address down or you won’t get a book”. Include shipping in the cost (I use media mail in the US and pirateship simple export outside of the US, so $5 and $15 added on).

Can this work? Yes, absolutely. Let’s break down those itch APOCALYPSE FRAME and Valiant Horizon sales:

  • APOCALYPSE FRAME: $5,208.30, 147 payments
    • Physical: $3,965.00, 94 payments
    • Digital and tips: $1,243.30, 53 payments
  • Valiant Horizon: $1146, 47 payments
    • Physical: $440, 14 payments
    • Digital and tips: $706, 33 payments

As was alluded to, that huge APOCALYPSE FRAME spike was because of physicals! So there you have it.

In comparison, Valiant Horizon physicals…did not sell very well. APOCALYPSE FRAME sold well enough to do a reprint but Valiant Horizon hasn’t yet broken even. As with many things in this ecosystem, it’s a mystery why. Could be the pitch, could be the genre, maybe the price was off, could be anything.

Existential Worry Unlocked: Do I need to make games with mechs in them for them to sell well? Do I just live there now exclusively? I sure hope not.

I did also pay more for VH’s printing job than I had to, which, maybe I needed to eat crow on at least once to learn this. I’m not hurting for it, nothing I wagered was money I was going to miss, but it’s gonna sting a little existentially nonetheless - I know it’ll sell eventually and I’m not gonna lose my shirt but I wanted it to do better and it didn’t. (For what it’s worth, I sold more than that off of itch. It still didn’t break even though. Spoilers I guess)

Now, how much of that do I get off of an itch sale and how does it compare to wholesale? I give itch their 10%, paypal’s payout system takes about 5-7%, and I have to pay for packaging, so I get about 80-85% of any given MSRP. This is pretty good! Wholesale is like…40-50%. But I do have to do work: this does involve exporting addresses from itch to pirateship, bugging people to send me an address when they don’t put one down, printing postage, bringing them to the post office myself, and so on and so forth - it’s still more of a cut than like almost any ecommerce platform takes and itch is way less flexible than an actual store with like, a cart where I can set shipping so ultimately I’ll aim to transition to a proper storefront next year. If you’re just getting set up and don’t want to mess around outside itch’s ecosystem though? Give it a shot. You might be surprised by the results.

DTRPG #

Unlike previous years, I had way more going on than just itch! This is the first and least weird one because it’s the same kind of thing. I joined DTRPG in July and put the (paid) APOCALYPSE FRAME catalog up. After their cut (35%) and accounting for a sale or two2:

Is it much to write home about? Not really in the grand scheme of things. Do I regret it? Absolutely not, I’ll be putting Valiant Horizon and Ages of Heroism up there in the new year at the very least. I didn’t have to work hard for it given I already had everything I needed to get set up, so it’s free real estate. Can’t hurt to do it!

Non-Itch Physical Sales #

The bigger leap I took this year was not only selling physicals, but selling them via means I hadn’t done yet. Aside from itch, I sold in 4 ways:

  • IPR. If you’re in this space you probably know ’em, you probably love ’em. They sell primarily at conventions and to retailers. I made $774.40 off of sales of 44 APOCALYPSE FRAMEs (mostly from them to retailers) after the cut.
    • Crucially this is via consignment: this is all from the October payout and reflects copies sold to stores, not wholesale purchase. By their quarterly schedule, I’ll be paid out soon for the past 3 months.
  • Tabletop Bookshelf. They’re a recent up-and-comer! They bought some APOCALYPSE FRAMES and bought some more not too long after. Take note, retailers! Buy some books! I made $400 from this after the wholesale cut.
    • In comparison to IPR, this WAS a wholesale purchase, so I got the money up front for the books.
  • Mixam PrintLink ( here and here). This is a service Mixam runs for POD stuff! Basically they print off one copy of something, send it to someone, and bill you the difference between their print costs and a markup you set. I made PrintLink entries for APOCALYPSE ReFRAMEd and Infected World. The quality’s decent and while you can’t do any fancy options (no soft-touch covers, sadly) it does the trick. I made $82 off of 2 Infected World and 7 ReFRAMEd sales after their cut. Their cut is $3 and $3.50 respectively, so I made $7 per ReFRAMEd and $16.50 per Infected World, which is frankly not inspiring compared to a proper print run - but neither of those would have gotten a proper print run because…well, you can see it: a single digit number of people bought these ones so it wouldn’t have been worth it.
  • In person. This is an avenue I want to explore more. A big thing I found out is that a lot of my presence as a developer makes a bunch of sense online but less sense at an in-person booth, where I don’t really have “lower-end” products to buffer bigger purchases. Nevertheless, at the event I attended, I made $250 from this (4 APOCALYPSE FRAMEs and 4 Valiant Horizons).

In total, this comes out to $1,506.40. A tidy addition to the itch amount! But there’s also one last piece of the puzzle…

Commissions #

This was the first year I was hired to do stuff for someone else’s game! (I don’t advertise it enough but I do have freelancer rates posted, by the way.) This was fun! I don’t know that I want to do it more than my own work but it’s a nice break between things.

I wrote:

  • A set of enemies for Gila RPG’s LOOT! I came up with enemies that act as traps: impossible or hard to kill directly but are defeated when everything else is defeated, have a very strict way of “acting”, and add an extremely puzzle-y vibe to combat.
  • A set of spells for Trepallium, a game in development! The assignment was to use the spell creation mechanics to come up with 32 “pre-made” spells to act as default ideas and give players more ideas to make their own. I came up with a bunch of ’em and helped kick the tires of the system a bit!

In total, these two earned $713.80. It was fun! I want to do more commissions! Hire me, I’m worth it!

Revenue Total #

This all brings my total revenue to about $9,170.65 after expenses. Last year my itch revenue was $12,556.99 before itch’s cut: that means it was about $10,600 practically.

But revenue’s not the whole story, is it?

Expenses #

So my big expenses were:

  • Printing. This is the big hit. Turns out printing books is expensive! Between prototypes (including an upcoming one for Celestial Bodies 👀) and two 250-copy print runs, this set me back $3,408.90. Ouch! (100% worth it eventually but damn it sucks seeing that on the balance sheet.)
  • Postage. This cost me about $625.84 through the year. I shipped a lot of books, it turns out!
  • Event expenses and packaging. This was about $300 and includes things like a nice table cover, a few kinds of envelopes (I had a few bum purchases because things were just a little too big for an envelope. Womp womp, live and learn), table fees, etc.
  • Crowdfund prep. We didn’t buy ads yet for Celestial Bodies, but we DID commission two writers for supplements. My half of that came out to $625.

In total, expenses came out to $4,959.74. This seems like a lot, but my 2023 expenses came out to about $6200 between business setup costs, Valiant Horizon art and editing, the initial APOCALYPSE FRAME print run, and various other expenses.

Profit and final year-to-year comparison #

A little subtraction will get you:

  • 2024 profit: $4,210.94
  • 2023 profit: $4,400.00

So about $190 less than 2023.

That result above is bad, theoretically! Lower profit year to year bad! Higher profit year to year good! Growth forever, baby!

Because I’m not publically traded - and crucially, not trying too hard to make personal income off of this, something I need to stress every time I write something like this - this is a great result given I spent a ton of this year just writing Celestial Bodies Titan Edition (or recovering from writing Celestial Bodies Titan Edition).

~$6000ish of that 2023 revenue was from crowdfunding. In contrast, none of the 2024 revenue was: that was mostly physical sales carrying me. This is, in the longer term, way more sustainable. Since I joined the scene and well before, the topic of the crowdfund churn has been percolating, to say the least. Having a source of revenue that continues to turn a profit while working on bigger things3 is a huge boon: it lets you not be tied to crowdfunding for that cash, which then lets you invest money in future projects, invest time into making things instead of being on essentially a marketing grind, and in general just care less about raising funds and more about, y’know.

The art and the hobby, not the business. This is an art and hobby.

Right?

Binary Star Logo

Spacer for people who don’t want to see money stuff but DO want to see my final thoughts.

Overview/Meandering #

A lot of what I’ve said in previous years still stands. Just go re-read that if straight bullet-pointed advice is what you’re looking for. Links are at the top of the article. I’m not really in my explicit-advice period, I’m in my meandering/navel-gazing period, so let’s take a meander and gaze at some navels.

Read More, Play More #

It’s been said that reading, playing, and writing games are 3 different hobbies and usually you have to pick 2. I’ve mostly been doing 1, frankly. I have had a lot of fun writing tiny things as a break from larger things! Corpslayers has some of my favorite writing of late and HARDPLACE was great to slap together. (I’ll probably make a post later scoping out what it’d cost you to commission something like it from me for your game because I want to make more of those.) But the other 2 are good too!

I don’t read nearly enough and I should. There’s a ton of neat new stuff out there and I don’t absorb nearly enough of it. Part of this is time but not all of it. Also I should play more tabletop games (not video games). Don’t really have the time or space to drop into voice chat though. I should really play more solo games and get into PbP though at least. Just something, you know? It’s really easy in this line of work to just flatly lose sight of what you’re doing. Play is important.

I don’t have much to add beyond that. It’s good to engage in as many aspects of things as possible. That’s kind of the point, here.

Getting Physical #

It’s pretty neat to hold a book in your hands, isn’t it? Especially when it’s your own book. Strongly recommend.

I’m the strongest soldier of digital-first. Costs you nothing and that’s how most people are going to be playing with it anyway. Make it fancy digital but y’know, charge accordingly - especially if you’re starting out and have no social or actual capital! But I also do like a physical book for reading, and I’m going to stubbornly hold onto the idea that this hobby is intended to be at least somewhat analog until my dying fucking day, so I like an idea of physicals.

On the opposite end of the digital-first spectrum is shelf-stuffers: you know, fancy editions that nobody would ever play because they’re too lovely and expensive and premium. Designed to go straight onto a shelf and Not Leave. With all respect to folks who make those - and there ARE some lovely ones, and I certainly can’t say I’ll never do it, it kind of is what sells after all and I’m sure some of my books are going onto a shelf, never to return - my goal isn’t to make museum pieces! I believe this hobby is about play and I want to make things that facilitate it. I want people to use my books to death. I want it to be like, a practical product.

At the same time, if I AM making physical products, I do care about the physical presentation and what it tells you in addition to just the practical Function Over Form style aspects. I’m trying to pick physical forms that make sense for that. APOCALYPSE FRAME is a mech game: that feels like a hardback with slick pages, so I made that. Valiant Horizon is a fantasy game about friendship and reputation and legacy: it felt feels a softback with a soft-touch cover and uncoated pages because that feels more welcoming to me, so I made that. It’s a hard balance to strike for sure - Celestial Bodies will be both hardback and softback, for instance, and at that many pages we have fewer options that make sense - but in general I want to try to keep making things that people can actually use at a real table AND make them as fitting to the product as possible.

And I want to be able to keep making them! Printing something that doesn’t make any economic sense runs the risk of tanking other projects. I want everything I make in my hands in an ideal form but at the same time we have to be a bit realistic here. I’m successful by TTRPG standards, which is to say I’m still in a niche of a niche when we’re not grading on the absurd curve of what that phrase entails. Knowing my time and financial limits is important. This was the hardest barrier for me to break because any expense like this is a risk and takes time and energy, but I’m glad I did.

My sincere belief is that this hobby is about making art that inspires art; it’s about playing such that your play inspires art; it’s about making art that inspires play; and it’s about playing such that you invite other people to play.4 I feel like as long as you’re doing your best to keep all of that in mind you’ll probably be in good shape. Physical books are riskier, but great reward is usually gated behind great risk.

But don’t bankrupt yourself doing it, please. I have a day job, y’know. I want you to put yourself out there but also not burn yourself out.

Show Up #

I was originally going to just write about Just Making Something (there’s a little bit of that in here too) but the 1E manifesto covered most of what I wanted to say so I’m going to talk about various kinds of community instead. This one gazes way more into my navel, but you’re already this far into this post so I’m going to have to assume you really want to gaze with me. So get that telescope out, or something.

*

I have a discord server! Following Celestial Bodies’s terrifyingly better-than-expected itchfund, it’s huge beyond my wildest expectations. It’s mostly delightful but also terrifying because people can have opinions about my work at me at any time. Even worse, sometimes those opinions are substantive and make me think about my own work differently! How dare you cause warranted introspection into my own work by giving it your time and attention! Augh!

I generally feel like a discord’s better than most Social Media (derogatory) just because it’s less “everyone in the world can see my post and put me on blast” but a chat program like discord also really sucks for long-form thoughts and catching up on conversations and really makes you feel like you need to be on it all the time to not miss anything. (Not as bad as IRC on that front, but not great.) I have mixed feelings about it but the biggest one is that I miss forums so fucking much. It was the right answer all along and I’m so annoyed that we decided to move to the much more brain-melting options of Current Social Media (and I’m not excluding Discord from this). I’m mildly considering starting a Discourse forum or something - I’ve noticed a few popping up, specifically this one Yochai Gal linked on his post about why he left bluesky and one founded by former cohost-adjacent folks that I feel weird linking because it’s tiny and not particularly TTRPG related - but my main reservation is that if I start one and nobody shows up I’m going to feel like an enormous tool. So we’ll see!

I don’t know. I guess what I’m saying is don’t let the gravity of any given social media pull you under: it gives you way less than you give it, generally, and I don’t think it’s fully possible to be healthy with it in any manner that isn’t just shooting the shit. Put your cards on the table for better opportunities if you truly hate social media and show up. I’m gonna try to make those opportunities happen more and show up for them more too.

*

I run Minimalist Jam every year and helped run Celestial Bodies Jam earlier in the year. It’s fun! I do like joining jams here and there but facilitating them is also a good time. I want to run more other than MinJam - it’s something I’ve faltered on, I think, for my stuff (and for my community, frankly). I think sometimes people get too caught up in them and burn themselves out trying to do all of them and that sucks. But I heard from several people that MinJam got them to Fucking Make Something and broke at least one person out of a design rut and that’s the dream, you know? If I want my legacy to be anything I hope it’s something like that.

In addition to MinJam 4, I’m aiming to run a Total//Effect jam in 2025 when I release the updated SRD. If you’re interested and want me to do more of these, submit something to it. Anything (well, not anything but y’know). As noted above, I have a constant anxiety of “I start it and then nobody comes”. Prove me wrong please and show up.

*

As I’ve mentioned a few times, I’ve been trying to get more involved in local stuff. It’s slow-going because it’s a lot harder to make things happen in person when I have to be somewhere at a specific time vs. online which is largely asynchronous, but at the same time, in-roads are being made. We’re contacting stores, we’re making catalogs, we’re getting little “designed in the DMV” kiosks set up in stores, we’re trying to organize events.

I say “we” but I’m not particularly spearheading the efforts - that’s a few people who are frankly putting in much more effort than I could hope to. But I am trying to put my abilities out there where I can, volunteer where it makes sense, and try to actually meet and be in community with people in real life. It’s certainly tough to do more than that - I’m a very reserved person and I have very real anxiety about a lot of stuff like this. But I think it’s good and even the little bit I have done has helped, I think. “In-person” and “retail” are things I have way less experience with and as a result I’ve learned and will continue to learn quite a bit. Always more to learn, and “understanding when this just isn’t your field of expertise” is up there.

Once again, “I put myself out there and nobody else follows” is a constant anxiety I have. It’s way less constant when I know other people are also in it for real and in person, though. This kind of thing works best when a lot of people believe in the same thing and are working, at their capacity, to make it happen.

*

If you want a community (or a kind of community) to exist, it won’t do that on its own. Someone’s gotta get it going and other people have to agree to it continuing. Every crappy structure online, in person, etc. can give way to a sustained number of people deciding to do something different. If we all act like, as someone put it, 100 people all pretending to be businesses then nothing’s gonna change; if we act in unison to try to do things differently, then something can happen. No guarantee it’s going to work or go anywhere or be there forever but I think you’ll get something out of it no matter what. Nothing can happen without the first step.

If you can: show up.

  1. I’m going to call Liminal Void “big” and “current” even though it’s neither of those because I’m stubborn and in denial. ↩︎

  2. DTRPG is opt-out for global sales by the way, not opt-in. Fair warning, or something. I was certainly not expecting it! ↩︎

  3. I am not fucking kidding, follow this thing. This will be the last time I say this in this article, I promise. Don’t make me regret doing the thing I just spent a paragraph complaining about to make this thing happen. ↩︎

  4. Maybe I’ll make a manifesto out of it like the cool kids are doing eventually. ↩︎

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