Welcome those who like to read about sales numbers and the “darker side” of indie rpgs, marketing! I was inspired by this post by Greycastle Press that revealed numbers on their experience with Drive Thru RPGs “Deal of the Day” from a publisher perspective.
That article was written in 2022 and it offers a lot of insight. In fact, it’s the only insightful piece I’ve found that actually breaks it all down (if you know more please let me know, but my googling really didn’t reveal much else). Anyway, let’s break down my experience as another data point.
Side Note: After publishing this article, Peter B from Parts Per Million Games sent me links to his YouTube videos that discusses his experiences with Drive Thru RPG’s deal of the day promos. I’m including them here for further reference: video 1, video 2, video 3, video 4, video 5, video 6
What is The Deal of The Day?
Drive Thru RPG’s Deal of the Day is just what it says, it’s a deal for one day. It’s only on one item and it’s at least 40% off, but likely more (the publisher decides how much they want to reduce the price). It’s advertised on the top of their page, and in banners and what not around Drive Thru RPG, in a newsletter, and likely in more places I’m not aware of.
How Do You Get A Deal of the Day?
Publishers earn “publisher promotion points” on sales. These points can be used on various promos, but from what I’ve heard the only real use for them is for purchasing a deal of the day. And you can’t use cash to purchase a deal of the day, you can only use the points earned from your sales.
Publishers who are exclusive with Drive Thru RPG earn 20 points per month plus 1 point per $10 in sales. Publishers who are non-exclusive (like me) earn 10 points a month and 1 point per $10 in sales.
The deal of the day price actually fluctuates. It’s based on how many publishers are submitting a deal of the day, so demand causes it to rise and fall. When I submitted it was around 1,060 points.
I’ve been saving my publisher points since February of 2023 (when I first started selling on Drive Thru RPG) for a deal of the day. So yes, it took me about three years to get enough points to have a deal of the day!
Deal of the Day Timing
After you’ve submitted for your deal of the day, you don’t know when it’ll be live on the site. It was in November of 2025 (I forget the exact date) when I purchased the deal. It went live on January 27 of 2026, so that was a wait, especially if you’re impatient like me, but not as bad as I’ve heard it can be.
Anyway, the deal goes up when it goes up. Which is kind of scary to me, what if it goes up on a holiday when nobody is at their computers? Or during a horrible news cycle, like during a national tragedy. I understand all these things can’t be controlled at all, but if you’ve saved up points for years and then your big day hits on a really bad day, oof. It looks like in some rare circumstances they can be extended to 48 hours, but I don’t know how rare those circumstances are.
Side Note/Rant: Back when I first tried to get the deal I didn’t immediately buy it. I thought about it, then went to purchase them a few hours later. The cost increased by twenty points in those few hours. So spend ’em as soon as you can afford it!
After checking for the next few days the points went down again, but when I tried to purchase it was rejected because Monster Truckers was currently on sale. This is to prevent items already on sale from becoming a deal of the day with a double discount, but realistically it takes at least 30 to 90 days or more for the sale to appear on the site. So I had to wait for Monster Truckers sale to end (it was part of a sitewide promo) before I could again try to purchase the deal of the day.
My Expectations / Goals
Thanks to the article by Greycastle Press, I had at least some sort of idea of what I could potentially expect in terms of potential sales numbers. I set a minimum in my mind of 50 sales as a floor with their sales of 250 as a ceiling. At the bare minimum, I wanted to sell enough copies to get a copper metal (which is 51 copies) and I needed about 30 sales to get it at that point.
Picking the Title
Out of all the stuff I have on Drive Thru RPG, it felt like it would make the most sense to pick a “core” product. I have three of those right now: Street Wolves: Turbo Edition, The Wicked Forever King Hungers, and Monster Truckers.
With Street Wolves being my “most successful” venture so far is that was a good candidate. However, I’ve determined my potential future success as a publisher relies on publishing and promoting games that I fully own and control, as opposed to Street Wolves which requires Savage Worlds and I have to share revenue with PEG publishing on all Drive Thru RPG sales. So Street Wolves was out, at least for this first run.
I ruled The Wicked Forever King out, because A. it already has a low price point of $3 and I don’t think it could qualify and B. it’s always had more appeal in physical form.
Monster Truckers is fairly new and I believe it’s a great game. However, it needs more eyes on it. Getting the word out to show people the game is an uphill battle, so this sale was a potential opportunity to do just that.
Side Note: A thing I considered is that I didn’t want to have a huge discount on Monster Truckers soon after it came out to backers of the crowd funder. When I submitted it would have been way too close, it had only been available for less than a month at that point. The long wait saved me, so I don’t feel it’s that bad to have an item hit a sale roughly three months after its digital release.
Calculating a Sale Price
I wanted there to be a big discount so people would feel like they were getting a really good deal, but I also need money. I don’t really make a whole lot outside of crowdfunding. Every dollar counts, so it would be nice to actually get money instead of just exposure.
I settled on 60% off, a very healthy discount, yet I’d be walking away with a little over three dollars as my share with each sale. This brought the price down to 6 bucks from 15.
Thinking about it afterwards, 5 bucks may have been a better amount. But oh well.
Preparations and Promos
I didn’t do a whole lot to prepare other than the night before I revamped the listing page. Before it was pretty bland. I added more pictures and used the video link portion to put a link to one of the Monster Truckers actual plays. Regardless of it being a deal of the day or not, it really needed the boost and it was something I should have done earlier.
As far as marketing goes, I normally don’t focus a lot of attention on Drive Thru RPG. When I do marketing I rarely mention it. This is due to the fact that itch and this site get me a lot more of my cash per sale. Drive Thru RPG takes 35% of my sales total. It’s a significant amount. And on Street Wolves products I get 45% taken out because of PEG’s cut.
However, in this case it was clear I should push it fairly hard to get the “most bang for my buck.” I wasn’t going to buy any ads to promote, but I did what I did when I go the cheap marketing route:
- An email to my Drive Thru RPG email list (651 people)
- An email to my own email list (320 some people)
- Facebook page posts
- A Facebook group post
- Bluesky and Threads posts, reposts of other people’s posts, and follow up posts.
- A post on the RPGPromo reddit subreaddit
- Discord posts on several discords I’m a part of.
In the end I really don’t have much data that shows if it did much good, it looks like nearly all of it came from Drive Thru RPG internally. Still, it was totally worth it to do all those other things (see Marketing).
Side Rant: By crom Threads is really useless for me. The algorithm barely shows anyone my posts. I was popping on Bluesky with lots of reposts and likes. On Threads there was almost nothing. I really appreciate the support I get on that platform, but it feels like a waste of effort to try to keep posting there.
Sales
The sale started at 10am on January 27th, 2026. Sales started slow but were somewhat steady. It was hard not to keep hitting refresh on my Drive Thru RPG report.
During the first few hours my expectations were set pretty well. At the pace it was going, it looked like I would be heading for 100 or so by the end.
When I hit that copper tier it felt really good and everything after that was just gravy.
When I got close to 69 sales I started making a bit of a deal about it, because that’s always fun. So when that goal was met it felt nice.
By the time I went to bed, Monster Truckers sold 75 copies. Not too shabby. When I woke up and rushed to the computer, I was happy to see it had reached 95. I had crossed the threshold for a silver metal tier (though it hadn’t updated the banner yet).
In the remaining two hours the total came out to be 103 copies sold. Not the 250 that Greycastle Press got in their report, but I picked up a Silver metal!
The final total was way more than what I make in an average month on Drive Thru RPG. It was basically the equivalent of a really good day for me at a convention. And I didn’t have to leave the house for this, so in that respect it was great.
In case you’re wondering, there weren’t any sales on my other stuff, but I expected that. Monster Truckers isn’t like Street Wolves. This might be a weakness in some respects and if I’m ever able to do it again with Street Wolves I would be interested in seeing if there are any cross sales with my Street Wolves supplements.
Reflections
Looking back at the deal of the day, it did pretty well. It exceeded expectations, but I was still pretty far from Greycastle’s 250 copies of Journey. Granted, he ran his sale an extra day, but at that point he wasn’t getting the super important internal ads on Drive Thru RPG.
So why only 100 or so copies? Why not 250? Here’s my guesses:
- Monster Truckers is an odd genre: While people love the idea, there’s a lot of folks that are way more attracted to fantasy. Or horror. Or sci-fi. Monster Truckers is an odd mix of genres and may be limiting it a bit.
- Promotion was limited: Greycastle had access to a popular subreddit. The best one to have posted in was /rpg, but promo is really limited there with a lot of rules. /rpgpromo likely has a rather small audience or at least a smaller one like /solorpgs or /rpg.
- Unlike Greycastle’s sale item, Monster Truckers is not a solo game: Solo games seem to be an easier sell. At least by the amount of people asking me at cons if I have any solo games and I have to say no (for now).
- No reviews/ratings/comments: Monster Truckers had some sales on Drive Thru RPG and a lot of copies were fulfilled there through the crowdfunder, nobody had left a rating or review. Nor did they comment. And without enough sales for a copper badge, there was no social proof that the game was any good. I feel like this may have had an impact on the sales, but there’s really no way to tell. Now there’s a badge and at the time of this writing one 5 star rating, thankfully.
Now let’s shift focus a bit on focus on the Good!
- Sales. This one is obvious. I had a good amount of sales.
- There was more exposure to my products (see Marketing Value).
- There’s more people in my “pool” on Drive Thru RPG: When you purchase an item on Drive Thru RPG you get added to an email list of that publisher. You can remove yourself from the lists, but there’s still a lot of people who don’t do that. I’d rather have folks on the email list I own, it’s still good to have a pool of past customers that you can reach out to and let them know about your stuff.
- I got a Silver badge, which is fun.
- Someone gave it a five star rating. Finally! A rating!
And now one bad thing:
After waiting nearly 3 years to spend my points to get 100 ish sales is a little bit of a bummer. Why? Because it feels like it’ll take at least another year and a half or two to get enough points again. For such a huge build up, the results are impressive, but they’re not like, multiple year wait impressive.
One thing I noticed for as much promo you get during the sale, they don’t blast out their deal of the day on their facebook page or bluesky account. That seems like a missed opportunity.
Marketing Value
Now there was a “hidden” value aside from straight up sales. There were a pretty good amount of shares and likes on social media, meaning more people saw the post. The sale itself was a bit of an event for me in that there was something happening that was special, which gives people a reason to get excited and share the news. Awesome folks shared my posts or made their own saying how much they liked Monster Truckers, it gave them an opportunity and a reason to do it. I know that I try to share other people’s stuff as much as I can normally, but I’ll do it extra if they’ve got some sort of big goal or event going on.
People who didn’t buy it still saw the name Monster Truckers and that’s worth a lot more than you’d think. Hopefully they’ll see it again at a convention, store, or what not and decide to purchase it down the road. This year I’m spending a lot more time and energy on raising awareness of my games, and I feel like this sale was a great opportunity for that.
Community Support
As I alluded to above, folks in the ttrpg community helped boost my messages about the sale. I’m floored by the people who are willing to support me. Even if it’s just a simple “like” is helpful. But there are also folks who repost and even those who give endorsements. It’s very heartening for someone screaming out into the void to have a boost from someone that didn’t even have to bother.
Would I do it Again? And is it Worth it?
I would certainly do it again in a heartbeat if I had more promotion points. The main issue is that it takes a long time for me to get them. But if I have them and I’m not using them on anything else, why not? There’s zero negatives and a lot of positive to do it.
Was it worth years of waiting for it? ehhhh…. not exactly.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great program that works, it’s just that as something that I’m likely only to get once every several years. It’s not something I can rely on for sales and marketing. And for literally having to wait for such a long time I wasn’t super overwhelmed by the sales. They were great, yes, but not multiple years of waiting great.
Things would have to pick up a lot on Drive Thru RPG for me to start earning the points quicker. We’re talking something like my regular sales increasing 5 to 10 times before the deal of the day will come around for me again faster than in a few years.
So yeah, it’s a great thing with a lot of positive results, it’s just so dang hard to get! I haven’t changed my mind about not wanting to invest too much into promoting Drive Thru RPG as the main way to get my games in pdf form. I’d much rather spend what time and energy I have on marketing promoting my own store and getting my books into retail outlets (and promoting those retailers in turn).