Ruin Explorer
Legend
I think the time and money investment are both factors. Players who don't have a lot of time to invest in playing multiple games (especially open-ended games that can take months or years to play a campaign with) and/or money to invest the variety of supplemental materials that improve the game. For example, if you can play only two times a month, you are much better off investing in one game that trying to play two different games (especially two that emulate the same genre and have similar core mechanics).
I mean, I lovd D&D and I love Pathfinder for different reasons, and I want to see them both succeed, but realistically my time and money is in short-enough supply that I can only support one of them.
I think on top of this, there's the investment of learning a system. I mean, that's partly time but there's more to it than that.
For more casual players, particularly, that's a huge issue. It's part of why the d20 system did so well, actually, because if you'd learned 3E, you'd effectively learned most d20 system games.
It's not even really about "supporting" a system for them. It's just that they don't want to have to re-learn a ton of stuff, especially complicated stuff, or stuff which is different from previous editions but hard to remember.
It seems to me that 5E did really good here. We had a new player join recently who hadn't played any 5E before, but had played other D&D, and they took to it like it wasn't even a thing. Whereas I did not see the same pattern with 3E or 4E.
I feel like, based on the information we have re: PF2E, they're already making some mistakes on the rules-learning investment front. It's fine to go more simple, but if you're going complex-but-different, or just wildly different, that's more of a problem.