Pathfinder 2E Release Day Second Edition Amazon Sales Rank

[Hussar]

By the same token, after the initial rush back in, what 2008, 2010 (sorry, forget the actual dates), what evidence is there that Pathfinder ever grew? It's not like Pathfinder overtook 4e. 4e dropped to Pathfinder levels and then off the charts completely. But, it's not like there is any evidence that Pathfinder was suddenly doing better because it was in the #1 spot, just that 4e was doing badly.

And, the market without D&D was about 13 million dollars, according to various sources. Then 5e hit, and the market rocketed up to it's current 60 million dollar mark. Again, there is no evidence that Pathfinder is doing any better (or worse). Pathfinder, and Pathfinder 2 could be ticking along evenly all the way through and we'd never actually be able to tell.

There is nothing wrong with stable sales. And, from a very far outsider's POV, like mine, that's what it looks like. Pathfinder hit it's niche back in about 2010 (ish) and has stayed fairly steady since then. It hasn't grown, but, it hasn't really shrunk either.

Considering that the game is pretty much predicated on yoinking D&D players that don't want to play 4e or 5e, I'd say it's in a pretty healthy place.

 

[darjr]

somehwere here there is a post of an image of the historical sales rank for the PF1 for book. I “think” it showed growth but don’t actually remember for sure.

 

[BryonD]

I don't think the marketplace shrank. And Pathfinder got a ton of media coverage, etc. I think there is a lot of evidence to think that it was huge right when it took off (release date was 8/13/09 FWIW).
But, yeah, I can't quantify that. And did it plateau quickly and just hold on for a while? No idea, but my guess would be it got to more flat than up pretty fast.

But I also am very confident that PF the day PF2E was announced was WAY below PF at its peak. Obviously 5E is the answer. Though even two years ago "Pathfinder" was 9 years old and really it was still 3X, which was old enough to vote.

If you think PF2E is doing about the same as PF was 2 to 3 years ago, then I don't think I can argue with you. Unfortunately, if there was a way to prove an answer, I'd guess it was down a little. But I wouldn't bet more money that I'd be happy to lose on a "fun bet". And regardless, I agree that it is in the same range.

But if we are saying that PF2E isn't a LOT bigger than PF was 2 to 3 years ago, then IMO, PF2E has not achieved a gamers' success. And I really tend to doubt the same amount of sales they already had was the planning target they used to start up the development cycle.
They certainly got a slug of cash with the release sales spike. But I just don't for a second think a splash in the pan and then back to the same old far distant second they already had a firm grip on was the plan. And I don't think they paid to ship a giant stack of books to GenCon and then pay again to ship those books to their warehouse, just so they would have extras.

I'm not even sure you can say anything is "stable" right now. It came out in August and plunged through the quarter. It got a nice spike (along with 5E) around Xmas and then dropped again. And then Corona hit and all bets are off. But even without the last bit, there hasn't been enough time to call anything stable.

I'd be curious what people consider their late April 2020 standards of expectation for October 2020.

Bottom line, it sounds like we agree on the optics of ballparking the quantifying. I think you are much more forgiving on the qualitative evaluation of those optics. And you say we would never know, but keep in mind that there is also simply a significant lack of broad based enthusiasm. Yes, the fans who love it love it. But I don't find that wide excitement in game stores or anywhere online. Even the Paizo forums are less than on fire.

When PF was originally announced there were a lot of people saying that nothing could ever ever ever take on the brand which is D&D. And, yes, we agree that 4E had more to do with the outcome than PF. But the certainty was wrong. Is it reasonable to expect this to happen twice? No, not really. Anything is possible. But I can't imagine that was part of Paizo's plan either. There must have been a reasonable in between of "significantly better than we have now without being forced to try to match the domination which is 5E".

And this part is just me speaking purely from my own gut feeling, but I truly believe that the name recognition of both "Paizo" and "Pathfinder" could have put a second major player on the table if they had built a game with broader appeal. It wouldn't have to put fear into WotC beancounters. But it could have been a lot more than it is achieving. And all signs point to a downward trend.

 

[teitan]

Oh lord why did I come back to this thread and why is it still going?

 

[BryonD]

You are always welcome

 

[Parmandur]

I don't think the marketplace shrank. And Pathfinder got a ton of media coverage, etc. I think there is a lot of evidence to think that it was huge right when it took off (release date was 8/13/09 FWIW).
But, yeah, I can't quantify that. And did it plateau quickly and just hold on for a while? No idea, but my guess would be it got to more flat than up pretty fast.

But I also am very confident that PF the day PF2E was announced was WAY below PF at its peak. Obviously 5E is the answer. Though even two years ago "Pathfinder" was 9 years old and really it was still 3X, which was old enough to vote.

If you think PF2E is doing about the same as PF was 2 to 3 years ago, then I don't think I can argue with you. Unfortunately, if there was a way to prove an answer, I'd guess it was down a little. But I wouldn't bet more money that I'd be happy to lose on a "fun bet". And regardless, I agree that it is in the same range.

But if we are saying that PF2E isn't a LOT bigger than PF was 2 to 3 years ago, then IMO, PF2E has not achieved a gamers' success. And I really tend to doubt the same amount of sales they already had was the planning target they used to start up the development cycle.
They certainly got a slug of cash with the release sales spike. But I just don't for a second think a splash in the pan and then back to the same old far distant second they already had a firm grip on was the plan. And I don't think they paid to ship a giant stack of books to GenCon and then pay again to ship those books to their warehouse, just so they would have extras.

I'm not even sure you can say anything is "stable" right now. It came out in August and plunged through the quarter. It got a nice spike (along with 5E) around Xmas and then dropped again. And then Corona hit and all bets are off. But even without the last bit, there hasn't been enough time to call anything stable.

I'd be curious what people consider their late April 2020 standards of expectation for October 2020.

Bottom line, it sounds like we agree on the optics of ballparking the quantifying. I think you are much more forgiving on the qualitative evaluation of those optics. And you say we would never know, but keep in mind that there is also simply a significant lack of broad based enthusiasm. Yes, the fans who love it love it. But I don't find that wide excitement in game stores or anywhere online. Even the Paizo forums are less than on fire.

When PF was originally announced there were a lot of people saying that nothing could ever ever ever take on the brand which is D&D. And, yes, we agree that 4E had more to do with the outcome than PF. But the certainty was wrong. Is it reasonable to expect this to happen twice? No, not really. Anything is possible. But I can't imagine that was part of Paizo's plan either. There must have been a reasonable in between of "significantly better than we have now without being forced to try to match the domination which is 5E".

And this part is just me speaking purely from my own gut feeling, but I truly believe that the name recognition of both "Paizo" and "Pathfinder" could have put a second major player on the table if they had built a game with broader appeal. It wouldn't have to put fear into WotC beancounters. But it could have been a lot more than it is achieving. And all signs point to a downward trend.

Honestly, besides the notifications from this thread I basically never hear anything about PF2E.

 

[Porridge]

View attachment 121307

By the way, thank you for posting this. It's great to get some quantitative data (not merely ranking data) to sink one's teeth into.

(Where did you get this, by the way? Do you have access to more than a year of data? If you did, one could start making educated guesses about all sorts of things, like what the typical spike/drop-off rates for new TTRPGs are, and what edition change conversion rates tend to look like.)

Anyway, with this data set, I'm inclined to bracket the months of 8/2019 (with the unrepresentative spike that comes with a new game) and 3/2020 (where everything goes haywire due to COVID-19 madness). Other than these two months, though, these numbers are relatively stable in the pre and post PF2 regimes, so they give us some nice numbers to work with. A couple of these numbers:

• Pre-PF2 release, the average number of PF1 games/month was approximately 3100.
• Pre-PF2 release, the average number of PF2 playtest games/month was approximately 250.
• Post PF2-release, the average number of PF1 games/month was approximately 2500.
• Post-PF2 release, the average number of PF2 games/month was approximately 2200.
• For context, pre and post PF2-release, the average number of D&D 5e games/month was approximately 19500.

A couple interesting things we can glean from this:

1. The average number of PF1 games/month only dropped by about 600 (20%) when PF2 came out.
2. Post-PF2 release, the average number of PF1 games/month has been about 300 (12%) greater than the average number of PF2 games/month.
3. Pre-PF2 release, the net number of PF games/month was approximately 3350.
4. Post-PF2 release, the net number of PF games/month was approximately 4700.

--Regarding #1 and #2: PF1 seems to currently be getting a bit more play than PF2. Whether this is due to (a) people finishing long PF1 AP campaigns, or (b) waiting for more material to come out so they can convert their characters, or (c) because they simply prefer PF1 to PF2, is impossible to tell at this point.

I'd expect to get feel for the size of (a) once we've got about two years of data to see whether there's a gradual decline in PF1 games and a corresponding increase in PF2 games. I'd expect to get a feel for the size of (b) by seeing whether there are little bumps of PF1-to-PF2 conversions after major crunch-book releases (e.g., the PF2 Advanced Players Guide). And I'd expect to get a feel for the size of (c) by gauging the extent to which we don't see (a) and (b)-style shifts.

Regarding #3 and #4: Interestingly, the total size of PF games seems to have increased substantially (by about 40%, or 1400 games/month) with the release of PF2. And the majority of these games didn't come at the expense of PF1, which only dropped about 600 games. So where did they come from?

The data's too noisy for me to make this out. It could be that many of those players came from D&D 5e -- the average number of D&D 5e games/month decreased by about 1000 post-PF2 release -- but the number of D&D 5e players is very large, the data pretty noisy, and the sample size pretty small. That makes it hard to confidently draw any conclusions like that. (I.e., there are month-to-month swings in the number of D&D 5e that are substantially larger than 1000 games, so this could just be noise.)

 

[Hussar]

Something to remember here is that there is no evidence that Pathfinder was pulling players away from 4e. What they did do was pull 3e players away from switching the 4e, but, that's a slightly different thing. Basically, everything split three ways - Pathfinder, 4e and those that remained in 3e. So, the question then has to be asked, how big was Pathfinder actually? If the market was roughly 25 million at the tail end of 3e , then really, the best Pathfinder could do was about 7-8 million dollars of the RPG market. And likely less than that. Peg it probably somewhere around 5 million-6 million really. Given that when WotC stopped publishing (but not selling) the market shrank to about 13 million, that makes sense. Pathfinder is number one at about 6 million worth of the market.

But the trick is, the market is a LOT bigger now. Heck, Pathfinder 2 could be doing as well as Pathfinder 1 at it's height and we'd have no real way of knowing. The signal gets lost in the noise. If the RPG market right now is about 60 million as has been bandied about, WotC could easily be 40-50 million of that. Which, given their growth numbers, is entirely possible. That still leaves 10-20 million dollars for everyone else in the market. Which, if Pathfinder 2 is in second place, they might actually be breaking the 10 mil mark. We'd never know because the WotC numbers just obscure everything else.

Like a lot of these sorts of things, how you interpret the numbers has a lot more to do with how much you like the system and a lot less to do with actual numbers.

 

[darjr]

Huh? Yes PF1 drew 4e players. I and several local groups were among them. I also saw it happen in real-time at GenCon. In fact one 4e DM we had admitted to us he ran 4e because he couldn’t get that slot as a PF1 DM because the Paizo room was literally spilling out into the hallways.

 

[Hussar]

Huh? Yes PF1 drew 4e players. I and several local groups were among them. I also saw it happen in real-time at GenCon. In fact one 4e DM we had admitted to us he ran 4e because he couldn’t get that slot as a PF1 DM because the Paizo room was literally spilling out into the hallways.

I'm sure there are lots of anecdotes. But, any poll I ever saw basically split things three ways. Plus, the fact that 4e was selling better than Pathfinder for most of the run means that they weren't pulling that many players. But again, I can't really prove that, so, it's mostly just my gut feeling. So, yes, technically, you are absolutely correct that some 4e players went on to play Pathfinder. I'm sure that's true. But, the fact that Pathfinder didn't actually surpass 4e until pretty late in the development cycle, to me at least, shows that 4e players were more sticking with 4e and then making the move to 5e, rather than stepping over to Pathfinder.