So, with a little time having passed since Pathfinder 2E won Best Roleplaying Game of 2022 from Tabletop Gaming, I thought I might talk a bit about how intense some of the challenges faced by this game and the company that makes it have been.
The game was barely out and on shelves when the COVID pandemic forced people to isolate and avoid groups for their own safety.
The Suez Canal was blocked, impacting shipping and storage costs by astronomical degrees.
- Nearly half the creative staff moved on to more lucrative or higher prestige positions with other companies, most within a very short window (which, to be clear, every one of them richly deserved; their talent is missed but their success is celebrated).
- While ultimately to the greater good, months of production time were lost when the freelancers went on strike in support of our unionization efforts.
- More time was lost to people getting sick or losing family members to COVID.
- Inflation hit record highs.
- Streamers with subscriber bases more than twice the size of the entire PF1 consumer base at its height made "PF2 dunk videos" to boost their followings at Paizo's expense.
Now, some of those things had really brutal knock-on effects. In some instances, the prices for shipping and storage increased by as much as 600%. Products sat in shipping containers for weeks or months, costing us money instead of making us money. Game stores that are traditionally some of our most effective marketers and a vital point of sale for our product had to shut their doors, in some instances forever. Many of us at Paizo spent weeks working an extra 20 or more hours of overtime to try and keep things on track and moving through the pipeline despite the delays. It really felt hopeless, a lot, for a very long time.
But crazily, this game, this second edition of Pathfinder, it saved the company. Communities like this have grown exponentially in the less-than-a-handful of years since the edition released. The core line and design hardcovers have blown away past benchmarks for PF1 and Starfinder in both physical and digital sales. The Lost Omens line sells more copies than the old PF1 Campaign Setting and Player Companion lines combined.
As the cost of doing business kept rising and rising, so too did the tide of people coming out to support PF2. People like the GMs in this community who ran and still run Beginner Box games for anyone interested, and those people they bring into the game who turn around and buy their own Beginner Box, and then their own Core Rulebook, and so on into however many products they desire for their game. People like the content creators cranking out content that helps advertise books and promote the system to people who might not otherwise really know what PF2 is about. The PF2 3pp content creators and reviewers like Infiknight who help promote some of the folks who might just be the next generation of designers and developers working on the game. So on and so forth.
Pathfinder 2e is the best-selling, most successful thing Paizo has ever made. Sadly, anything less might have spelled the end of the company with all the challenges that came into play, and there are undoubtedly still challenges ahead. Fortunately, it is what it is and it was what it was so we don't need to waste too much time speculating on might-have-beens. The point of all this is, "thanks". Thanks for buying and playing this game more than any game we've ever made. Thanks for talking about this game to all your friends. Thanks for continuing to buy our books in record numbers even though all the rules are free online. Thanks for supporting what is, in my humble opinion, the best fantasy tabletop game on the market.
And please, stick around and keep talking about PF2 and bringing in new friends to play it. I have it on good authority that there's some wild stuff coming in 2023 and 2024 that is going to blow your f*cking socks off.