The Honest Pros and Cons of Keeping the Shop Open

One thing I didn’t expect from yesterday’s newsletter was the outpouring of requests not to close the shop. Yes, it’s possible to keep the shop open. “Possible” isn’t the only consideration here. Let’s revisit the end of the email for a moment:

I need to manage my stress levels and somehow still make a living. I’ve spent weeks now wandering through the long dark tea-time of the soul, figuring out what to do and how to keep going. Everything that’s been removed from my plate falls into one of three buckets, and sometimes more than one:

• This is work that I am physically and mentally incapable of doing anymore.

• This is not profitable and therefore not the best use of my time.

• This isn’t something I want to do anymore.

Let’s address these one at a time.

Can I Do It?

Yes, I am still physically and mentally capable of doing the work. The maintenance is routine, fairly light, and I have help as needed. That’s never been the issue. Getting it off my plate would make it easier for me to do other things, but it doesn’t take an egregious amount of effort and therefore needs to go immediately. That's why there’s a wind-down period, and not a sudden flip of the switch.

Is It Profitable?

No, it’s not profitable. The shop, on its own, costs more to run than it earns. The money is made literally everywhere else. When I added it to the website at the end of 2024, it was mainly because it was expected. The notion of keeping all of the money, minus a small payment processing fee, was appealing. As much as I desperately wanted to get away from DriiveThruRPG, I knew that people wouldn’t follow me to my own shop. And I was correct; very few did.

Would I keep it open if it were profitable? Maybe. Don’t read this as a scammy attempt to get you to buy things. Deciding to close the shop wasn’t a clickbait cash grab. But if sales are worthwhile in May and people are still buying, I might extend it into June. Would there be any long tail on a static shop that doesn’t have new things added to it regularly? Probably not. If I extend it through June, it will slide back to being unprofitable in July.

The reason for the move to Substack and Patreon is to explore the possibility of shutting down the entire site in the future, depending on how my health issues go.

Do I Want to Do It?

No. And there’s no way to express my reasons without coming off as a whiny, entitled jerk, but this hobby and this industry have not been kind to me. I appreciate all the wonderful fans, readers, and customers who have followed my work all the way back to the 1990s; I’m not talking about you. But I’ve always been an iconoclast who wants to do things my own way. I have a different vision; the narrative bent, the whole “no art” stance, not accepting D&D as my personal religion, there’s a laundry list of perceived sins that I’ve committed and taken flak for, and I’m tired.

The fact that I made creative concessions bothers me, and always will. I’ve written before that I changed what I wrote, how I wrote, what I released, all to appease what people said they wanted, how DriveThruRPG needed things to be done, to conform to what was rewarded, and I still took flak. Again, not universally, but there’s enough downside to take the shine off of the upside. Most of the stuff in the shop marked as “Legacy Roleplaying” reflects that. Yeah, there’s a lot of cool stuff in there that I’m proud of having created. I don’t want to look at it anymore, because what it represents hurts, and I really want to move on.

In this era of diminished capacity, I want to make the things I feel passionate about making, the way I want to make them, without compromise. I want to put my finite energy and resources into creating things I care about that can hopefully find their own audience. What I’m creating now is good. It’s worthwhile. It deserves a chance to stand on its own as a body of work without having to make concessions to the zeitgeist.

Keeping the shop open doesn’t fit with that vision.

Bottom Line

I will keep the shop open as long as people are buying enough to make keeping it open worthwhile. Sales in the past 24 hours are encouraging, but that’s a reaction to the announcement. We’ll see what things look like next week and the week after. At best, maybe I’ll extend it to July, but I think things will taper off quickly and go back to pre-announcement levels.