Pathfinder 2E Release Day Second Edition Amazon Sales Rank

[Aldarc]

Really? I've never once seen a mention of Pathfinder beyond directly RPG related sites. I just happened to watch an episode of Legends of Tomorrow and they are playing 5e D&D.

THAT'S what media attention looks like. Outside of gamers, no one has ever heard of Pathfinder.

HarmonQuest uses Pathfinder. They don't mention it, but you can see that they have the PF1 books and a number of classes, rules, and things are clearly Pathfinder.

 

[darjr]

Harmon quest has mentioned it.

Also I recall a time when several big tech blogs/podcast were all about analog gaming during 4e and the later part of the board game boom and pathfinder was the rpg of choice for most of them. Adam Savage and his crew being the one that comes to mind.

 

[Mistwell]

What numbers do you have to support the movement of their Amazon sales? Given that Amazon offers only relative sales numbers, it would be hard to tell with everything else subject to similar and chaotic forces. More over, FLGSs have closed their doors all over the place, so it's hard to separate that effect from any particular distributor shutting down temporarily.

Their sales in All Books decreased, while the 5e book sales increased. So we can eliminate "people not buying RPG books" and we can eliminate "Amazon not shipping RPG books" and we can eliminate "other books increased in popularity over RPG books while the RPG books stayed the same" given those facts.

Paizo should have seen an uptick in sales on Amazon with Diamond shut down if Diamond were a meaningful part of their sales channel. Which tells me that assumption has proved false - Diamond wasn't that big a deal for Paizo sales.

 

[Parmandur]

Their sales in All Books decreased, while the 5e book sales increased. So we can eliminate "people not buying RPG books" and we can eliminate "Amazon not shipping RPG books" and we can eliminate "other books increased in popularity over RPG books while the RPG books stayed the same" given those facts.

Paizo should have seen an uptick in sales on Amazon with Diamond shut down if Diamond were a meaningful part of their sales channel. Which tells me that assumption has proved false - Diamond wasn't that big a deal for Paizo sales.

I agree with you that Amazon is probably a bigger portion of thenPF business than many would want to admit, but I think there are too many unknown variables to reach any sort of definite conclusions. It could be that the local gamestore scene had reached market saturation, for instance, with everyone who wanted the books already getting them. That would give with the slowdown in the midst of the D&D lockdown boom.

 

[BryonD]

It could be that the local gamestore scene had reached market saturation, for instance, with everyone who wanted the books already getting them.

Do you think this is reasonably likely?

 

[Parmandur]

Do you think this is reasonably likely?

Potentially; like you have pointed out, the game doesn't seem to be on a growth trajectory.

 

[Jester David]

The games most likely to benefit in the long run from that are going to be games that offer something generically different that D&D can't do: hence the recent surge for Call of Cthulu.

And that's the catch. If I'm going to play a generic fanatasy game, I might as well play D&D. If I can't tell different stories there's no reason for me to go OSR/ Pathfinder (d20SR?) Learning a whole new rule set to do the same thing is silly.
If I'm going to spend hours learning how a new game works, it might as well let me be a space wizard or colonial marine or a Vulcan science officer or an uplifted gorilla detective.

I wonder if there is a place for high end D&D adventures like Beadle and Grimm but more like the Paizo Adventure Paths

They did the big fancy collector's edition of Rise of the Runelords. But when they decided to do a collector's edition for Curse of the Crimson Thone they went 75% less fancy.

 

[Jester David]

Eh, the boom has helped other games. Cthulhu got a huge boost when Critical Role played it. There are more published authors making money now because of DMsGuild alone then probably ever before. That ain’t nothing. Zhiewhander (sp) a clone of a much older game was the third highest selling rpg on Amazon for a while, till Cthulhu surpassed them.
Is isn’t very spectacular, except maybe in the growth of the DMsGuild, but it is there.

I believe Call of Cthulhu is also extremely popular overseas, in Korea. It's popularity might only be tangentally related to CR.

 

[BryonD]

Potentially; like you have pointed out, the game doesn't seem to be on a growth trajectory.

sorry, I actually read your comment backwards. my bad.

 

[darjr]

They did the big fancy collector's edition of Rise of the Runelords. But when they decided to do a collector's edition for Curse of the Crimson Thone they went 75% less fancy.

But that wasn't quite like the box sets from B&G and also not really ALL IN for 5e.

I've been told a lot that Paizo's strength was their adventure paths and their story telling. Is it still? I know hindsight is 20/20 but I think I said it before that maybe they should have embraced 5e AND been more supportive of PF1 and released things that tweaked 5e so they COULD tell the stories they wanted to tell. Though I still don't quite get why they couldn't tell the kind of stories in their past adventure paths using 5e.