Pathfinder 1E Pathfinder outselling D&D

[Hussar]

I will admit that I don't know the programmers market to me, but that seems very high.

Based on your number you are paying each programmer $500 a day. Now the normal work schedule in the US is 2000 manhours a year, or 250 days a year at 8 hours a day. Most coders I know work more than that, but for the sake of argument we will leave it at that.

So 250 days * 500 a day = $125,000 a year salary.

I could believe that the lead programmer on the team is making that much, but most coders are not making 6 figures.

Now at the 300 per day you mentioned, that is 75,000. That seems a lot more reasonable to me.

Note that the money the employer has to pay does not equal the money the employee puts in his pocket. There's all sorts of additional costs associated with payroll - employee benefits, pensions, etc. I'm not saying that the figures here are right. I have no idea. But, you cannot simply take that money as being all straight up paid to the employee.

 

[Dm_from_Brazil]

One thing most people are not considering is that Lisa may be wrong.

ATTENTION: I am not saying in any way "Lisa is lying" - I am saying wrong, as in not right.

The RPG is industry is well know as an industry that don´t market research, and don´t know how many customers it has (EG. nobody really knows how many roleplay gamers that are in USA). So it is not that Lisa don´t know its market - the RPG industry as a whole don´t know!

Lisa also is using anecdotal evidence, and, seriously, this is NOT the best of data.

"So can we ever prove if PF surpass D&D?"

Well, a good source - altough it is not "The Financial Times", surely!-, is the people at ICV2, as they makes a living of collecting this kind of hobby market data - if Lisa is right, certainly it will show in their "Top 5 RPGs - Q2 2011" listing, that should be released by August.

But I think it is a little early to say "the king is dead, long live the king" - people have done this before, when this same ICV2 showed D&D and PF paired fot the first place, first time in history, at Q3 2010, and D&D came back to be alone in the first place in the following quarters.

But Lisa CAN be right - it could even be the reason Bill Slavicsek left WotC.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Lisa got her data from distributors and my guess is they have pretty solid data on their own product sales

 

[mhensley]

To put some perspective on the numbers.

To have team of 10 programmers working for me, I have to pay about 3000 to 5000 dollars a day (if the programmers were okay working for low wages).

To have a team of 10 writers working for me, writing game material, I would get away with maybe 1500 dollars a day, IF they cranked out top notch 100% usable right now material, otherwise I could drop their pay since they get paid per word written.

So coding is at least two to three times as expensive, just off the top of my head. Really, that seems to little, so I would guess that coding is about 10 times as expensive to buy than game design writing.

/M

Plus, they probably dropped a million bucks on the whole Gleemax debacle.

 

[Kzach]

Now if Paizo created a killer VTT, or partnered with the PCGen and MapTool folks, and made the app available for Mac OS, iOS, and Windows, THEN we're talking!

You know that the current Character Builder and Monster Builder work on the Mac (through a browser), right? And that the Virtual Table Top program, although in beta, is open to anyone who signs up for it and works on the Mac as well, yeah?

4e is easily convertible to 3.x so not sure why you said you couldn't do it. And knowing a bit about your setting from lots of conversations with you in Greytalk, I personally think that 4e is far better suited to it than 3.x.

 

[3catcircus]

...more likely, I think it is possible that someone much farther up the chain eventually notices Paizo and Pathfinder -- who knows, maybe his brother's kid plays it -- and Hasbro just buys and buries the company.)

This is actually a lot less likely than you might imagine. AFAIK, Paizo is a private LLC rather than a publicly-traded company, so there is little-to-no chance of a hostile takeover.

Additionally, unless an offer were made that was so generous that they couldn't refuse, the principals running Paizo most likely have long memories when it comes to what WotC did to them regarding the Dungeon and Dragon magazine licenses, not to mention the GSL debacle and the general running-into-the-ground that they've done with the D&D brand.

Had WotC not been purchased by Hasbro, there likely wouldn't be Pathfinder since the business decisions that drove

1. 4e design decisions,
2. the snubbing of 3.x and it's players as a major component of the 4e marketing,
3. and the elimination of the pdf sales of older editions

likely would never have been made when Adkison and co. were running things.

 

[Shemeska]

Plus, they probably dropped a million bucks on the whole Gleemax debacle.

The estimates of 30+ million out there are a tad low.

 

[pawsplay]

I will admit that I don't know the programmers market to me, but that seems very high.

Based on your number you are paying each programmer $500 a day. Now the normal work schedule in the US is 2000 manhours a year, or 250 days a year at 8 hours a day. Most coders I know work more than that, but for the sake of argument we will leave it at that.

So 250 days * 500 a day = $125,000 a year salary.

I could believe that the lead programmer on the team is making that much, but most coders are not making 6 figures.

Now at the 300 per day you mentioned, that is 75,000. That seems a lot more reasonable to me.

If you want code written fast, and you want it to work, you can forget about reasonable. Also, you're forgetting that most coders for hire only work part of the year.

Now, if you want to say WotC has ten guys on salary for $75,000, that's believable... except that they would be crazy to have that many people on staff permanetly.

 

[BryonD]

Note that the money the employer has to pay does not equal the money the employee puts in his pocket. There's all sorts of additional costs associated with payroll - employee benefits, pensions, etc. I'm not saying that the figures here are right. I have no idea. But, you cannot simply take that money as being all straight up paid to the employee.

Very true.
I'm in a OH heavy industry and I doubt IT matches us, but our costs for people exceed 200% of simple salary.

 

[Hussar]

Very true.
I'm in a OH heavy industry and I doubt IT matches us, but our costs for people exceed 200% of simple salary.

Holy crap. Did we just agree on something. Doom DOOM DOOOM I say.

LOL.

But, yeah, my father is an accountant, so, I have some second hand knowledge of how payroll generally works and straight up salary is generally only the tip of the iceberg.