So I’ve written a few times over the last year and a half about a side hustle I’ve been working on with two friends from college.

We have written and published a spicy RPG game for couples very similar to fantasy RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons. The Tavern of Conquests.

The three of us were chatting and spitballing it was weird that such a thing didn’t exist because there did seem to be a market for it and then we thought, famous last words, how hard could it be to make this thing?

Holy moly. It has been a project. We began in July 2022 and the book finally went on sale on Amazon this Black Friday.

It has been a really interesting little side project though.

But, as this is a financial blog, you might wonder how much it costs to make a game like this and how much you can make?

Well… I don’t have a lot to report on how much you can make, but I do think the big expenses for developing the game – other than maybe some more marketing – are done for a while.

We’d still like to invest in an artist to redo the cover at, and hopefully do the interior art in the long run, but it’s a pretty big expense. We all agree it’s completely worth it, but we have to somehow make the money to spend it first, so the art is currently commercial use approved Etsy clip art, and very generic free art that we modified using AI filters and Adobe Photoshop.

So our current income from this project has been $289.97 which has to be split 3 ways.

Hours of investment is not even trackable at this point. Somewhere along the way it flipped from, how hard it could be to a labour of love to get it done. It has been a crazy amount of hours.

We break down the work a few ways. One of the three of us is actually an award winning erotic fiction writer. They did a large portion of the writing and editing. The other sketched out a lot of the plot outlines and rough drafts of writing, as well as developing the game mechanics and doing a lot of the social media and advertising. The other did most of the graphic design and all of the game layout, as well as developing the game mechanics and doing some of the social media.

The current expenses have been:

• Adobe Suite Subscription: $297.59
• AI Art Subscriptions: $119.88
• Website Fees: $86.71
• Book Proofs: $41.27
• Advertising: $40
• IndieGoGo Fees: $20
• Etsy Clipart: $18.95

Total: $624.40

So… we’ve got a while to go until this thing is remotely profitable.

We currently get most of the $14.99 from digital sales on itch.io but only just over $4 of profit on the printed version. Split three ways, it’s really not much. But it was weirdly exciting to hold something that was just a mad idea a year and half ago in my hand.

Some things I’ve learned now, is the smaller the book, the higher potential for profit. The book is 215 pages long, some of which could’ve been condensed with different formatting choices and some of the art was nice but unnecessary.

Additionally, publishing like anything that is for 18+ means you’re not going to accidentally find it on Amazon. Even if I type in Tavern of Conquests on Amazon, it doesn’t usually come up and I often have to search L.J. Longo, one of the authors, go to their page, and then find it through there.

So… definitely no organic help there.

This is also sad because I think the feeling of holding a book in your hand and the physical sensation is actually an important element to the game, but it seems we should really push the digital version rather than the printed one.

However, the work is mostly done now other than advertising it, so hopefully we’ll at least break even in the long run.

Fingers crossed future updates will involve how we cracked the strange advertising needs for a product like this.

If this was interesting, there are more thoughts on the process here:

• The Tavern of Conquests (written right before launching the IndieGoGo)
• The Tavern of Conquests: An Experiment in Building a Role-Playing Game (right before launching the digital download version onio)