Pathfinder 1E Pathfinder: The reason the OGL was a bad idea for WOTC

[lrsach01]

But will sales of Pathfinder mean some lost sales for 4e? Yes. That's competition.

Absoutely. WotC won't be getting my dime. I'm going Pathfinder. I haven't bought a Wizards book in over a year. In the mean time, I bought the remaining Dragonlance books from MWP and I've become a subscriber to the Pathfinder Adventure Path as well as the Chronicle. Let's see... About $20/month just for PAizo.....I think.

 

[billd91]

I am not so sure that is the case. I do not know how many people, if any, are choosing to purchase one in spite of the other rather than simply choosing to buy one and also choosing not to buy the other. Many people will play both.


I think 4E will swim or not swim well on its own merits. The power of the brand prevents it from totrally sinking even if the game is not what many people that have played D&D for a long time desire.

The orders of magnitude between what D&D sells and what any other game on the market sells prevents any serious competition but there is plenty of room in the market for a great many more games than currently even exist.

Any time you have one person choosing to buy Pathfinder but not 4e, who otherwise may have bought more 4e products, you've got competition. It doesn't have to be a lot of competition. It doesn't have to be competition capable of causing WotC major pains. But Paizo is definitely in competition with WotC because they're vying for the same market - fantasy role players. That market may have a ton of sub-groupings that they don't compete over as well as a overlapping subgroups that will invest in both. But there will also definitely be subgroups that will deliberately select one over the other because of the merits of the products, companies, authors, budgets, whatever.
To say that they aren't in competition just because there are a couple of levels of magnitude in volume just doesn't make sense to me.

 

[Mark]

Any time you have one person choosing to buy Pathfinder but not 4e, who otherwise may have bought more 4e products (. . .)

Well, that's just it. Most of the folks I talk to about not buying 4E do it because they don't like 4E, not because they necessarily like something else better. As to competition, my contention is merely about serious competition, which Pathfinder is to anything out there other than D&D, I'll grant you. Mind you I like the folks at Paizo a good deal. I think they are aces. But I've had over 10K downloads of a number of freebies so the 25K dls of Pathfinder thus does not strike me as huge. Plus, what was the old Dancey claim? Something like 4 Million gamers played RPGs every month? How many copies of 4E will be sold through in the first three months? Seriously, direct comparisons between WotC and anyone else at this point should probably be avoided and claiming any correlation between anyone else and WotC in regard to sales of some company significantly effecting the sales of WotC doesn't strike me as practical.

 

[JDJblatherings]

...
So its just something to remember when you consider the new GSL. WOTC has some good reasons to want to restrict things this time around, and while we gamers want our cake and the ability to eat it too...companies only make products when they make profit. Cut into that profit, and you potentially cut out the product.

the pathfinder RPG doesn't exist solely because of any freedom to exploit IP one gains from using the OGL. It exsists because WOTC created an entirely new game that wasn't a paced evolution of the D20 rules but instead an entirely new and revolutionary system. If 4e had been 4e to 3.5 as 2nd edition was 2nd edition to original AD&D there would not be a pathfinder rpg.

 

[Ranger REG]

the pathfinder RPG doesn't exist solely because of any freedom to exploit IP one gains from using the OGL. It exsists because WOTC created an entirely new game that wasn't a paced evolution of the D20 rules but instead an entirely new and revolutionary system. If 4e had been 4e to 3.5 as 2nd edition was 2nd edition to original AD&D there would not be a pathfinder rpg.

Meh. I'm not buying 4e because the 10-year period haven't passed for 3e. Pathfinder RPG and future supplements can maintain my enthusiasm for 3e until I am ready to buy 4e.

Pathfinder is to 4e as PS2 is to PS3 (both are still in the market with supporting game titles).