Even given the exact same sequence of events, not everybody is Lisa Stevens. With the same opportunity, I sure as heck would not have been able to build my RPG to be the #1 seller in the world. It would be a mistake to underestimate the team over at Paizo - they're world class RPG producers, with decades of experience between them. They know what they're doing, and they're very good at doing it.
Sales numbers are phenomenal for 5e and a lot of people are playing it now, but we will see down the line when it comes to campaign and game support…
If WOTC pulls off the two campaigns per year (which is equal to two adventure paths) with supplements I suspect we will see 5e sales continue to grow.
Things get real interesting if/when 5e is OGL… real interesting.
Depending on which companies jump on board, and the quality of those products (don’t worry I have not heard a peep about mongoose getting back into the d20 market) we may see 5e’s market share grow to the point that Piazo may not be able to simply ignore it.
Now…….Think about this
We have already seen some unofficial pathfinder to 5e conversions.
Once 5e becomes OGL… how long will it take for someone to produce a published 5e bestiary using Piazo’s OGL monsters? Create a book of 5e feats based off combining some Pathfinder Feats? Convert all those pathfinder classes to new 5e Archtypes?
That’s a lot of potential money Piazo is just sitting on
Let’s just look at a Bestiary,
They have the art (Which commonly the largest part of a project budget) and word count… conversion will take a fraction of the time it took to create it all… the project was paid for and made a profit… with a few hundred books sold directly at conventions the project would be 100% paid off and all additional sales (pdf or otherwise) would be pure profit.
There is no reason why they could not do both… support their own game, and off handedly gain sales from the 5e crowd who like their story telling.
Here is the kicker, and they can’t stop someone else from getting the monsters from their SRD and converting them all to the 5e OGL… so they minus well do it themselves.