Pathfinder 1E Why Didn't Paizo Do their Own "Dragon/Dungeon?"

[kenobi65]

Now we're getting closer to the understanding I seek... Thank you sensei of gonzoism...

I guess what I don't get is the shelf space thing... How would a lesser shelf space magazine be any worse then a lesser shelf space adventure book?

Is it easier to get shelf space for a book somehow?

The issue, I believe, is that, in most general bookstores (like Borders or Barnes & Noble), they're shelved in totally different places. The magazine would go in the (very crowded) magazine rack, while the book would go with the rest of the RPG books, usually in or adjacent to the Fantasy & SciFi section. (And, I have no idea if Paizo has had any success -- or has even tried -- to get Pathfinder into the general book trade.)

 

[Rauol_Duke]

Also Vic Wertz, Paizo's Technical Director, has stated on a thread on their messageboards, that printing Pathfinder is much more cost-effective than printing a magazine. Another factor as well, I'm sure...

 

[Arkhandus]

There've been changes in the magazine industry in the past year or two, as I understand it, and distribution issues, that make it difficult for a new magazine to start up, especially on such a small scale (with such a relatively small consumer base as Paizo's would have).

It just wasn't very practical anymore, and it would have been difficult for Paizo to make it successful and profitable, given that they wouldn't be working with a major widely-recognized brand name magazine anymore. IIRC, it was issues like that which forced them to raise the cover price of Dragon and Dungeon by a few dollars in the last year or two of their print run, to try and make up for the increased costliness of production/distribution.

Not many people would buy into a new gaming magazine that first appears on the shelves at 9 or 10 dollars an issue, even if they recognize the Paizo logo on it. Let alone 12 dollars an issue or so, since the new magazine would have trouble selling ad space to support itself, much moreso than with Dragon.

Also, Paizo knew that Wizards of the Coast was going to be making their own online version of Dragon and Dungeon magazines, which would mean that Paizo would now have to compete with their former partners, who hold the biggest brand name in RPGs, for customers.

If there was any chance that the online Dragon wasn't going to suck badly, they'd have to hedge their bets that it would not be so unpopular as to drive customers away from WotC and towards Paizo's new gaming magazine, rather than drawing them away from Paizo's print product and towards Wizards' online offering.


So, instead, Paizo has started up Pathfinder, basically just a corollary to their existing Gamemastery line of adventures, and something that can more easily be guaranteed profitable. People always need new adventures to run, and while some folks just make them up wholesale (like me), others prefer the quickness and completeness/professionalism of running printed modules instead. Because Pathfinder is just a series of Adventure Paths, with a bit of extra material tacked on, it can sell at the price of an Adventure Module and still be profitable (they won't sell as many issues as they would of Dragon or Dungeon, but that's just a given; instead, they make up for it as much as could be expected, by selling quality and a thicker, meatier product).

People have developed a reasonable sense of trust in Paizo's ability to put together good adventures, so, especially while Wizards of the Coast is distracted with 4th Edition and barely paying any attention to their online Dungeon/Dragon content, Paizo can continue to gain customers and sell adventure modules with Pathfinder. And at a much higher price than a magazine could sell for, but considered worthwhile by many folks because of the quality of the product. Good adventure modules are always desirable.

They lose out on some customers, since they're not making Dragon or Dungeon magazine anymore, and because they're not putting out anything equivalent to Dragon anymore, but they maintain a solid niche in the market as adventure-module producers. They'll keep selling to DMs/GMs, and many folks that they don't sell to anymore would probably just stick to WotC's online Dragon content anyway. Not me, but, I hate online products (give me hardcopies anyday!) and I prefer player-oriented material rather than adventure modules. So I'm no longer buying anything from Paizo or WotC, but I'm not a big spender anyway.

 

[Scribble]

So, instead, Paizo has started up Pathfinder, basically just a corollary to their existing Gamemastery line of adventures, and something that can more easily be guaranteed profitable. People always need new adventures to run, and while some folks just make them up wholesale (like me), others prefer the quickness and completeness/professionalism of running printed modules instead. Because Pathfinder is just a series of Adventure Paths, with a bit of extra material tacked on, it can sell at the price of an Adventure Module and still be profitable (they won't sell as many issues as they would of Dragon or Dungeon, but that's just a given; instead, they make up for it as much as could be expected, by selling quality and a thicker, meatier product).

So there's the crux of it. If people always need adventures, why do they need them in book form as opposed to magazine form?

I guess I can understand what Kenobi mentioned about location in the store. I guess using my self as anecdotal evidence I tend to peruse the game shelves in a game store more then the magazine rack...

But would the same be true if I routinely bought Dungeon as a source of monthly adventures and knew that Paizo was starting a new magazine (with pretty much the same staff and most likely the same writers) as they had in Dungeon... I don't know.

Just seemed strange to me. But you're saying there's a big slump in the magazine industry... It's really that big of a slump? If so wow. (in that wow the internet really IS changing things kind of way...)

People have developed a reasonable sense of trust in Paizo's ability to put together good adventures, so, especially while Wizards of the Coast is distracted with 4th Edition and barely paying any attention to their online Dungeon/Dragon content, Paizo can continue to gain customers and sell adventure modules with Pathfinder. And at a much higher price than a magazine could sell for, but considered worthwhile by many folks because of the quality of the product. Good adventure modules are always desirable.

So why the difference in good adventure modules in magazine form? Couldn't they use the time in the same fashion on a monthly adventure mag?

 

[Rauol_Duke]

Couldn't they use the time in the same fashion on a monthly adventure mag?

No, because there was not a way for them to make a profitable monthly adventure magazine without incuring a million dollar cost to get that magazine into the same magazine rack spots as Dungeon and Dragon were.

 

[Umbran]

They also sell add space though. (Does pathfinder do so? I don't know.)

You can't say that doesn't amount to some of their revenue?

I can guess that, for a new magazine that doesn't have a whole lot of people buying it, it probably wouldn't add much. What you can charge for ads depends on how many people are likely to see those ads. Just having Paizo's name on it is probably not much of a guarantee for advertisers to gamble that they'll get a return on their advertising investment.

Every business venture has a bootstrapping step - most of them run at a loss for a while before they start generating a return on what the company invests in them. In this case, the magazine would likely not pay for itself initially. It would have to be around for a while, gaining fans, generating buzz, and so on. After a while, you're selling enough copies that advertisers are willing to pay to show their wares in your magazine, the economy of scale in printing starts working for you, and your subscription fees amount to something. And, of course, there's no guarantee that it ever pays off at all - it may never generate enough buzz, or just not be good enough to compete, or what have you.

That's where that million dollar number probably comes from - you have to have a million dollars you're willing to risk on it if you want to have it work at all. Paizo is great, but I don't know if they have a million in unallocated capital funds for which they've got no other use, that they can risk throwing down the drain.

 

[mevers]

So there's the crux of it. If people always need adventures, why do they need them in book form as opposed to magazine form?

Because in book form they stick around.

At the end of the month, any magazines that aren't sold are destroyed, and the publisher has to refund (or maybe just doesn't get paid from) the distributor for all those copies. According to Paizo, this is a significant portion of the total number.

This doesn't happen with books. If the book doesn't sell, it sits on the shelf, and you add the next issue of Pathfinder next to it.

Also, I recall Paizo saying the magazine business is horrible, and they are glad to get out of it. Yes, they loved producing Dragon and Dungeon, but they don't miss being in the magazine industry at all.

 

[James Jacobs]

Hi everyone!

Just thought I'd do what I can to clear up a little confusion... hope I don't inadvertently cause more! It's a complex process, and even after working on magazines for nearly half a decade I don't quite understand it all!

The main thing to keep in mind regarding this subject is that books and magazines, while both printed products with pictures and words, are not the same kind of product. The methods of producing and distributing them are in some ways VASTLY different. As an example, check out the way they're presented for sale. A book is displayed on a shelf, either spine out or cover out. New books are often displayed cover out in the front of a store on a display. Sometimes books are displayed on spinners, which are really just shelves that can turn. In any store, what shelves are used to display what books is more or less left up to that store (with some exceptions—some companies by "end-caps" for their books to be displayed on shelf ends, for example).

Magazines, though, are sold on a rack. They're always displayed cover out, and therefore they take up a LOT more room. The spot on a rack that a magazine inhabits is reserved for that magazine alone, and that spot is VERY expensive to keep. It's important to keep a magazine in that spot to "save the spot," so that means that each place that sells a magazine orders more magazines than they can sell, so in theory they'll always have a few copies "holding that spot." One month later, when the new magazine comes in, those old magazines are destroyed. The money the publisher spent printing and shipping those magazines is lost, and I believe that the publisher might even have to pay for the destruction process. Books don't have this problem, really, since when a book doesn't have to "save its spot" for the next book.

There's a LOT of other ways in which the production of a magazine differs from the production of a book. Same goes for shipping, postage, distribution, reprinting, and every other facet of the industry. There are even different laws that govern magazines and books. In pretty much every case, the magazine model is less efficient and more complicated. And I think that's all a big part of the reason why times are so hard on magazines, to be honest. The internet certainly isn't helping the situation, but in large part, the magazine business model seems to me to be designed to make money for those who distribute magazines, not for those who actually make the magazines in the first place.

I miss working on Dungeon immensely. I do not miss working on a magazine at all.

 

[MKMcArtor]

Is it easier to get shelf space for a book somehow?

Yes. Loads easier.

 

[Erik Mona]

I don't have much time right now, so I'm going to try to cover this as swiftly as I can.

• Nothing in our agreement with WotC precluded us from setting up another magazine. The whole non-compete thing is off base.

• Despite lots of people talking about how Dragon was "only" reaching a small part of the D&D audience, we regularly sold 40,000-50,000 copies of the magazines, each and every month. Most d20 companies don't sell that many copies of their products in an entire year.

• The magazine distribution business is much, much different than the hobby games business. In the hobby games business you sell a certain number of books to the distributor on a non-returnable basis. The distributor sells those books to retailers, and they either sell or don't sell. Either way the publisher has made its money usually within 30 days of sending the books to the distributor. In the magazine business, you send two to three times as many copies of the magazines to distributors, who often send them into terrible accounts where they sell something like 8%. Publishers don't get a penny until the magazine is 32 _weeks_ off sale, at which point you get the first quarter of the payments. And remember that only about half of the copies you've printed ever actually sell (but it'll take you about a year and a half or so to figure out exactly how well a certain issue did). We were happy to maintain that business with a "legacy" brand and an official license, but trying to pull it off with something new would have been a disaster. Wolfgang Baur is doing great with Kobold Quarterly, but he is one dude with a day job. Paizo employs six full-time editors and three full-time designers. And we had no intention to fire almost all of our staff on a gamble that would take a decade to get back to where we were just because Wizards decided to put the magazines online. No thanks!

• To get a magazine on newsstands you actually have to pay a bribe (er, "authorization") that can run into the high thousands of dollars. There was little guarantee that our new magazine could slip right into the old Dragon and Dungeon authorizations, which further increased the start-up costs of launching a new magazine.

• Ad revenue drives the business of most magazines (because you'd be a fool to drive the business on distribution, for reasons cited above). In the game industry, however, ad revenue pretty much just drives the publisher insane. Here's a little surprise secret of the game industry: Most of the companies in it are either failing or about to fail. I'd guess that something like 65% of our game industry ads, including and especially ones from names a lot of you would recognize as "healthy" companies in the industry, never paid a cent for their ads because they went out of business, because they "lost" the insertion orders, or whatever. A good half of our ad guy's time was tracking down tiny companies and sending them to collections, which was a giant waste of time.

None of these factors was enough to kill the magazines outright, but all of them made the proposition of launching a new magazine without the three-decades of brand power Dragon had an extremely expensive and extremely risky affair.

We decided to use the opportunity to build our business around a more stable and more predictable model, and as a result the company is more healthy now than it has ever been before.

--Erik Mona
Publisher
Paizo Publishing, LLC