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Wizards of the Coast has its own listing of free stuff that scrolls for several pages. If it canвЂ™t be found on DriveThruRPG or DMs Guild, thereвЂ™s the Unearthed Arcana Reddit. There is a free variant of nearly every monster, class, race, and magic item for D&D alone. With so much free content available, no one who has access to the Internet ever needs to buy another tabletop role-playing game accessory. The net result being that a lot of game designers offer their content for PWYW or free. PWYW is a perfect example of this, where a budding game designer hopes they make money but doesnвЂ™t expect to (or worse, doesnвЂ™t think their content is good enough to sell). Because many creatives enter the tabletop game industry as a hobby rather than a career, they set their prices below what the market should bear. This all seems to the good вЂ¦ unless you are trying to make a living off of tabletop gaming. Moreover, Wizards of the Coast recognized that purchasing the rules can be a barrier to entry and released a вЂњBasicвЂќ version of the game to make it easier than ever to play. Some OGLs are more tightly controlled, but in the case of the OGL supporting the latest edition of D&D, much of the game is publicly available at no cost. Releasing an OGL to the public means at least some of the core game is available for free. In theory, the rise of OGLs was meant to help publishers produce their own content, but in practice, if an OGL was available on the web it was available to everyone, including potential consumers.

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ThereвЂ™s also the question of what it means for the industry when 10% of all products on a major distribution platform are free.ДЄ curious side effect of the Open Game License (OGL) movement in tabletop gaming was that it essentially unlocked the rules so that they were available digitally. In short, PWYW might work in some cases, but the platform itself seems to be literally selling PWYW short.

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You can search for PWYW separately, but given that free is a powerful form of advertising, the likelihood of someone finding a product when searching for вЂњFREEвЂќ and paying nothing to download it seems high. After all, a consumer searched for вЂњFREEвЂќ and PWYW was listed along with it. WeвЂ™ve discussed the psychology of PWYW previously, but thereвЂ™s likely a psychological effect of bundling PWYW with other free products-it sets an expectation that any contribution will be $0. We can therefore assume that the publisher is hoping to make more than nothing on a PWYW product. If they planned to only offer it for free, they would list it as such. PWYW products arenвЂ™t free or rather, that is the very bare minimum the publisher expects a consumer to pay for it. Not all products are created equal of course, and it bears noting that вЂњfreeвЂќ encompasses two categories on DMs Guild/DriveThruRPG: products that are actually free, and products that are offered as Pay What You Want (PWYW). Or to put it another way, 1 in 10 products on both platforms is available at no cost to the consumer. ItвЂ™s the same story on DriveThruRPG, with over 10,600 no cost products on DriveThruRPG, or a slightly higher 11.6% available for free. If the above numbers are accurate, a search for the вЂњ FreeвЂќ on DMs Guild finds nearly 2,000 products available at no cost, or about 10% of the entire product base. This doesnвЂ™t take into account the many other places products are distributed, like Amazon or Noble Knight Games, or Free RPG Day, or the many pirated copies of games floating around the Internet.

Add them together, and there are over 100,000 products on these two platforms alone. Extrapolating from these numbers, DMs Guild has over 18,000 products, and DriveThruRPG has over 90,000 products. Similarly, over 2,000 products on Dungeon Masters Guild have achieved the Copper ranking, or 12.29% of all products. Judging by the Copper ranking on DriveThruRPG there are (as of the day this article was written) over 13,000 products or 14.34% of all products that sold over 50 units. ThereвЂ™s a percentage associated with each tier, which gives us an estimate of just how many total products are on each platform.

The metals icons are awarded by sales for each product, from copper all the way up to adamantine. We can make some guesstimates about the total volume of products on both DriveThruRPG and the Dungeon Masters Guild by looking at the metal legend for each. Picture courtesy of Pixabay.вЂ‹ Surveying the Product Population