New-ish GM for StartPlaying.games - The good, the bad, the ugly
I am a 30-year forever GM that decided to try being a paid GM on SPG around December 2025. This isn't a self promo, and my SPG name isn't my reddit username. I wanted to give my take on SPG and paid games so that people may get a fairly neutral view of what I've encountered over about 40 sessions during that time.
EDIT: There was another discussion thread mentioned in my post that has since been removed.
The Good:
Honestly, one of the best things about SPG is the fact that it even exists. It's definitely not for everyone, but many of the people I've met through there are more than happy to pay for a game because they don't have any other options. We all know that schedules, people moving in and out of town, and other commitments are the death of a large portions of campaigns so paid sites allow people to keep gaming when they don't have any other options. There are even free games available from time to time, although admittedly fairly rare. Would be nice for SPG to sponsor some games so the GM gets paid while bringing in new players that don't want to spend money on a game.
Second, it allows people to try other games. I run primarily 5e and Pathfinder on there and every one of my PF games has had at least one player that just wanted to try out the system. If I want to try out Shadowdark or Lancer I can either buy all the books, learn the rules, and beg people to play or I find a paid game and just try it out. SPG is very strict on ensuring safety within games and GMs are supposed to have clearly defined ways for players to alert the GM if the session starts to get uncomfortable.
Third, at least in my experience, people willing to pay for games are much more involved with the game and seem more excited to join each session. It has also held me to a higher standard, making sure that I have really prep'd my games and VTT tech. I can feel the difference my paid games have just due to the extra few hours of prep I put into each game. I understand that this is now a business transaction and make sure that I deliver a professional experience not only in-game, but also with communication and OOG logistics.
Last, the money side is totally legit and you do get paid from the site. I run 3 weekly games and a one-off every once in a while, and I make about $600/monthly. I price my games around $15-20 each and have 4-6 players per. It took me about a month to get my first game started, but after that I got the others going pretty quickly. I'm not doing this full time, so I think I'm happy doing 2-3 games weekly indefinitely for some extra cash. There's youtubers and stuff saying they are making $70k+ and it may be possible, but even though I love RPG's there's no way I'd do that. For one, unless you're running the same module 10 sessions/week there'd be no time for any prep or follow up. Second, I don't know how your voice would survive 40 hours a week in GM mode. I don't do crazy voices or anything but even after 3 games fairly close together I don't feel like talking about anything else. SPG takes 15% which I think is totally fair.
The Bad:
EDIT: Taking out my first point about number of sessions being inflated. My numbers don't totally line up for some reason, but it seems that should in fact be paid games.
There is an active discord for GMs and I may just be missing things, but there doesn't seem to be any tools to make me and my games stand out. There are some special games that get flagged and promoted like 'learn the system', but when I asked how to join I was told that it was invite-only, piling on top of the above mentioned nepotism. This seems to be a new process so maybe they'll eventually have like applications or tryouts for those types of games, but for now you pretty much just try to make your game ad as catchy as possible and hope for the best.
The system seems to heavily favor long 30-50 session games. I get it that as a GM I'd like to have a solid group that's going to be together for the next 6 months, but when I was trying out the site as a player it was very hard to find short or one-shot games. I even tried to join a few games that the GM responded were nearly over so they weren't taking new players. I don't know if there's any rules around that, but I feel like if your game has a slot open you should be open for players to jump in anytime. They really do need to focus and incentivize GMs to run shorter games to get players interested that are intimidated by the idea of signing up for a year long campaign when they've never rolled a d20.
The Ugly
Just like everything else, there are awesome GMs and horrible GMs. The bad thing is new players sometimes don't know the difference until it's too late and they give up the hobby. Reviews help, but there needs to be more ways for players to vet their GMs before play. I have a youtube vid for an into and always host my games with a free session zero or first session for just such a reason, and SPG should support that more easily. Maybe something like refunding players no questions asked for the first couple of sessions or something (within limits) would allow players to test things out a bit more. Allowing a spectator mode would even be great. I'd be happy for someone to join on my game just to watch how the game is going to see if they'd like me personally or even the system, but of course that'd be up to each GM and their players. By the rules, I can't invite someone to sit in a game that's hosted on SPG if they're not signed up for that game (which I agree with). Players have told me horror stories about the GMs they've played with on SPG, but I've heard and experienced all of those GMs and worse IRL.
The other thing is there's really no other option out there. I've seen a couple of sites with a few straggling games and I hear there's some facebook and discord groups, but afaik there's no site that is nearly the quality or popularity of SPG. I don't know any of their numbers, but there's thousands of people in their discord and there's always dozens of games ready to start. There's a hundred under that that have 0/0 players, but if you wanted to just play something later tonight, you probably could.
I'm certainly not affiliated with SPG and don't want to sound too much like a fanboy, but I don't want people to just totally shit on paid games because of word of mouth from a few people with bad experiences. If anything we need a dozen MORE paid gaming sites so there's better competition out there. I won't get into more specifics on $ or my account, but I'd be happy to answer any general questions to get more people out there playing games!