The W.R.K.S Store
Our Ethos, Our Goals, Our Mission
W.R.K.S is pronounced WORKS. Its because the stuff we build works. No just kidding — that would be super cheesy. W, R, K, and S are the initials of my given names. But the W.R.K.S Store is not about I. It is run and operated by the W.R.K.S Games company and we are a small Indie game developer spanning PC and tabletop games and are a team of about 12 people around the world. So it's really a We.
But its also about You. You the independent game creator, you the gamer and what it means to be these things in the next few decades. The digital distribution industry for tabletop and PC games have been dominated by only one or two players for decades. Charging 30% on everything, monopolizing the market.
We owe these companies much. They set the groundwork for digital distribution. They educated the world on its value. They are not the enemy. They are, however, now in the way. In the way of indies earning a living wage from their efforts (nobody has profit margins that can afford a 30% cut). In the way of consumers discovering new products in a fair and just way. In the way of supporting the tabletop and gaming industries in the way a heavily growing indie segment requires.
The W.R.K.S Store is only for indie Creators. We have opted out of allowing AAA publishers to sell on the store.
Does this not impede our revenue? Yes, it does. But if we are going to be for indie Creators, we cannot start by having them swallowed up on our product category pages by AAA publisher products. So we took a commercial hit to make our statement.
But there are more issues with current digital distribution outlets like DriveThruRPG and Steam and Epic Store. Discovery is paramount. They have top lists, that make the best selling products sell more. They have rising stars, that highlight only short term winners. It makes even really high quality smaller indie Creators and their products hard to find.
So we have made a few more bold moves. There will no top lists in our store. No lists of any kind. Every category page or the browsable page will be randomized each time a customer comes to it. So every single product, no matter how many products there are on the store, gets the same chance of being shown to a user.
There are also no sales. What???? I know…controversial. We have access to a lot of data because we are ourselves an indie publisher. And we know that most publishers incorrectly underprice their products believing they need to do that to be successful. This is not true. It is also a concept encouraged by existing market stores that use sales to drive consumer traffic and confused the consumer for the last 10 years to believe they only need to buy games when on sale.
Does this not undermine customer value? No, we do not think so. A customer is not benefitted by offering a product at such a low value that the Creator cannot afford to create another one. That is short term thinking. As a customer, you win by supporting Creators that create games you love. Its a symbiosis, if you hurt them — you hurt yourselves.
The sale mentality has hugely harmed the smaller indie players and is stopping them from creating new games for you — the gamer. We encourage Creators to price their products fairly and we encourage gamers to pay a fair price for the product. What can we do as a company to encourage maximum value to the Creators? Take as little money as possible. The W.R.K.S Store does not operate on a % of the revenue share model.
No matter what the cost of the product, we take only £1 per unit sold. So we ensure that the maximum amount of the money you are paying for the product actually reaches the Creator.
There is much more to do. We are just getting started. Come join a revolution on http://www.wrks-store.com/
