We don't want to do Corporate.

This was a thread I posted on Twitter, but I’m posting it here so that it’s more visible. My Twitter account is private; this is important.

Yes, this one is okay to share.

I’m not interested in Conquering the Space, or in building Big Corporate to make games sustainable. Sometimes folks have to make hard choices, but I’m not interested in Making It Big at the expense of anyone else.

This isn’t altruism. This is me explaining a thing that might seem foreign to you if you’ve been entrenched in the mechanisms of power in the ttrpg (tabletop roleplaying game) space, if you’re looking at the folks on itch and wondering why we’re so small.

(Disclaimer: we’re not as small as you think we are.)

It’s not because we’re incompetent or unskilled or lazy. It’s because a lot of us are plain sick of the “hustle”.

Yes, even those of us doing kickstarters, or who call ourselves professionals. We want a different kind of creative space. So we’re making it ourselves.

Sometimes that means we have to diversify our revenue. We stream, we work survival jobs, we do consulting, we join co-ops, we apply for food stamps.

Sometimes we get a good gig working at Wizards of the Coast, but it’s always gonna be just a gig.

We might never do this full time. That might never be possible, for all of us, much as we might want to.

The goal for me is not “make enough money to do nothing else but this” if achieving that goal means breaking the ladder behind me.

So we’re down here looking for ways to make it sustainable that are outside the corporate model.

That means we don’t keep gates if we can help it, and if we find a gate, we try our best to break it. We don’t do leaders of authority, we don’t do sermons…

–glances at this post–

…If we can help it. And if we notice ourselves or each other Doing That, we let each other know.

So if you’re part of that old guard and you’re seeing this, if you’ve been watching us explode over the course of the day because the creator of a Fast Food Game had a bad take, if you’re still wondering why this is such a big deal to us…scroll up. Read it again.

That’s all I got. Somebody else can talk now.