Part 1: The Set Up
This post is tough for me to write. It’s the sum of lessons learned over the last four years and it’s left me in a space where I’m having to make some pretty big changes in how I do business. But let’s start this post with a bit of brutal honesty (and this is something I’ve said in a previous post). I used AI for art as recently as 2022. Nothing that was for sale or publication and nothing where I would have hired an artist instead. I toyed with a few free programs in 2020 and made some ‘fan art’ for social media. I used it to create some placeholder cover imagery on Stories of the Free Lands. And I used it as the backgrounds for two of the ads for that same campaign. I already had a strong belief that I never wanted AI to take the place of a real human when it came to my games, but I thought, “What’s the harm is using it for other minor stuff?” It didn’t take long before I realized that was unethical, too, for many reasons. And since that campaign, I haven’t touched any program using scraped data for LLMs to generate art, writing or anything else. And I won’t.
And let me be really clear here. My previous post about this company’s stance on AI is still 100% in effect. I won’t use AI in any way, shape, or form, and that’s not changing. No exceptions, no buts, no maybes. Until the artists and originators of data that AI’s use are given the chance to control their content and get paid for it, and until AI processing is, at the very least, environmentally neutral, Coyote & Crow Games won’t be using it. It’s theft, it harms the environment, and it’s wrong. End of story.
So yeah, that’s the Rock in this story. AI is everywhere and growing fast, being used more often by game companies, and I won’t touch it. Despite how much time and money it might save me personally.
But there’s also the Hard Place: Freelancers; human beings who bring their skill sets to my project for a flat or hourly rate. Some of the freelancers I’ve hired have worked on multiple Coyote & Crow projects. Many are Native. Most live in North America. All of them work remotely. All of them sign a contract with me that has three critical components: 1) An amount they’ll be paid. 2) A description of the work expected of them (the number of art pieces, the number of words, etc.). 3) A deadline for submission to me. All of these things are things I discuss with my freelancers prior to writing up their contract. And I want to talk about each of the three in a little more detail before I get into why freelancers are the “Hard Place”.
As far as a pay schedule, when I started C&C, I paid half up front and half upon completion. This seemed reasonable because prior to Coyote & Crow, few people knew who I was or if I could be trusted to pay. I offered variable rates depending on how much I could afford at the time. Some of those rates were below industry standards, I’m sorry to say. From what I gather from talking with my peers and with freelancers since Coyote & Crow Games took off, my pay has exceeded the industry average for a smaller RPG company and I’m proud that through either a flat rate or an hourly rate, I never pay less than $25/hour, even if it’s just sitting in a booth at a con. I no longer pay half up front though. On larger projects, I’d sometimes do it in thirds, setting some mid-point date for a check in and another pay out. More recently, coming through on the tail end of Ahu Tiiko, I’ve changed to paying 100% of the contract only upon full completion of all deliverables at the end of the contract.
When it comes to deliverables, I’ve also evolved. When I started this, I didn’t know much about print publication, image standards, color palettes, really any of it. In fact, the core Coyote & Crow book is, to me, a miracle. I learned so much along the way and I’m so very proud of it. But if I were doing it over again, the book would look very different. My expectations for work flow, quality, and precision in what I expect from my freelancers is much more specific and informed now. I also don’t think you’ll find a single artist that I’ve worked with who will say that I wasn’t available or communicative or that I didn’t give useful feedback. Overall, I think I’m pretty easy to work with.
Finally, there are deadlines. I try to start by asking freelancers when they think they can get their work done. If it’s within my timeframe, I usually offer a week or two beyond the date they’ve given and use that for a deadline. In any case, the dates are always ones they agree to. I’m going to still use that process when I deal with deadlines in the future, but how they’ll be set and the penalties for missing them will be changing. Deadlines are at the heart of this post and my current predicament. The gross truth is, the vast majority of freelancers I work with cannot make their deadlines. I know, I know, not you. Or your friend. But those other freelancers? They can’t do it. I won’t name anyone in this post. That’s not what it is about. But I need to get into why my current model of hiring freelancers is actually worse than using AI – at least, worse for me from a productivity standpoint.
As a company with one full time employee – me – all of my projects are built to help keep Coyote & Crow Games in business. While I try to run my company like a non-profit, it isn’t, really. And that means that to pay my salary, my health insurance, my accountant, my attorney, and all of the other monthly fees that I incur, just to keep my doors open, I need to have sales. And more than just sales, as a board game company I need new games to stay competitive. As a side note, I hate that about the capitalist hellscape we live in. Sadly, that’s the system I have to work within at the moment. I’d love to be in a position to hire folks on permanently. To give some of the amazing creatives who have helped me over the last four years a full-time job with benefits. I’d weep with joy if I could make that happen.
But here’s the rub. If my projects, my games, are the top priority for my business and I cannot complete them without freelancers, and for those freelancers my project is their third or seventh or twelfth priority, well then, my projects won’t be getting done on time or maybe at all. And I get it, especially right now., we’re all hurting. Life is throwing us all under the bus on a daily basis. And sometimes when someone is broke or down or dealing with their kids or their day job, those creative juices don’t flow like they want them to. I truly do get it. Sometimes, a person just can’t hit a deadline. Having said that, I want to throw out a number to you all. It’s 90. That’s the percent of my freelancers who miss their deadlines. 90%. Those missed deadlines have probably cost me more than a full year in development across my games in the last four years. And because I’m a finite resource, when my freelancers miss a deadline, I have to push all of my projects back. For example, the card game I’m currently developing called Primacy? I brought on my first contractor for that in 2021. It’s been pushed back and deprioritized so many times that I can’t even keep track. And much of that is due to freelancers missing deadlines on other projects.
So what’s up with that 90%? Well, I’m hiring folks who don’t do this for a full time job. Part of that is that I rarely have a full-time job’s worth of work for them. But I’m also trying to hire from a very small pool of folks. Many of them are marginalized and often in more ways than one. They’re dealing with all the challenges that most of us face with some extra helpings of bullshit piled on top. I’m sure they take a gig with me with the best of intentions. They honestly think they can get the work done in the time they’ve agreed to. But not only do they not get it done by the deadline, they often don’t tell me that they can’t get it done by the deadline until it’s too late.
But it’s not just about one artist doing one piece missing a deadline. Or taking money and then delivering nothing. And it’s not even just about freelancers collectively missing deadlines. Although that’s a big part of it. If it were just a day here or week there of time lost, I might be okay. But it goes way beyond time and into money, inventory, reputation and more. I’ll give you four quick examples.
The Art Director: I hired someone on as an art director who started out as an artist. They literally did nothing and after two months of paying them extra money, I had to terminate them and take on the role myself.
The Event Manager: I hired someone to handle my conventions and outreach projects. They crashed and burned two straight conventions, cost me thousands of dollars, stole a mobile payment system and thousands of dollars worth of inventory, a month’s pay, then ghosted me.
The Project Manager: I hired a writer on a project to take over as project lead. They slowed the project down so badly that we lost three months of time on it and they changed writers’ work without notifying them. Then they ghosted me, taking pay with them and didn’t turn over any files or correspondence, costing me even more time.
Part 2: The Resolution
If you made it through all that, it’s important that I call out something here. I’m the captain of this ship. I hired these people. I can blame them for being flakey jerks, for stealing from me, for being unprofessional, unnecessarily mean spirited, and for doing real harm to a fledgling company that was trying to do right by them. But I’m the owner of Coyote & Crow Games and I made those calls. Most of the freelancers I work with just miss their deadlines. I say “just” only to compare it to what the three folks above did. It still stings, every time. It still hurts me and the company. But many of these writers and artists I also consider friends and colleagues. I want to see them shine and prosper. I want to promote their work, so I make allowances.
But those days are gone. I’m going to be drawing some very hard boundaries now when it comes to outside workers. Some of these are going to seem tough or strict. Certainly many of them won’t conform to mainstream game publisher practices. But I’m not a mainstream game publisher. I’ve tasked myself with keeping Coyote & Crow Games going not just to have a job and to make games, but to make a statement and right now that means being a hard ass and thinking about how I keep my doors open, my mental health on the right track, and my games continuing to flow. There will be complaints and there will be blowback, I’m sure. Just this post alone probably ensures that a number of freelancers, maybe ones I’ve worked with in the past, will never work with me again.
So when publishers, artists and other creatives rail against AI art, I get it. I agree 100%. But if my policy is no AI and I’m also spending hundreds, and even thousands of dollars – and worse, months of time – for art or writing that either arrives late or not at all, what am I left with? If I farm out my image needs to an overseas agency, am I doing justice to my goals of raising up Indigenous creatives? If I always write all of my content from here on out personally, am I helping Native writers or giving my customers the broad and culturally rich perspective they deserve? Do I just keep my principles and let Coyote & Crow Games slowly fail because I can’t operate at the same speed as other publishers who aren’t trying to do what I am?
I realize that this post has a ton of tea, a ton of drama. My point here is not to call any one person out. It’s that I think very few folks – whether they work in the hobby games industry or not – have a full view of what publishers my size are working with and how hard we have to fight for every inch of space, every sale, every print run. Wizards of the Coast is embracing AI. Other game publishers have begun using it and technology rarely gets put back in the closet. With Trump’s presidency imminent, I’m also likely facing massive tariffs on any imports. My costs will go up and my prices will have to go up with them.
I won’t use AI. But things need to change. And that means either finding a different path or letting Coyote & Crow Games die.