I'm still not sure what the motivation is to ascribe some mysterious unknown cause of Paizo's financial difficulties over the most likely explanation, inference notwithstanding.
Not making use of inference
is the motivation.
I've spent the last few years reading about the history of the tabletop RPG hobby, and in the course of doing so I've noticed that gamers seem to be particularly prone (more so than most other people) to narrativizing history. We take a series of events and make them into a story,
just like in games, and settle on the idea of that being "what (really) happened."
And quite often, we get it wrong.
Remember the idea of "TSR died because they split their customer base among various campaign settings; they would spend 100% of their time and effort on a given product, and only 10% of their customer base would look at it, while the other 90% wanted nothing to do with it because it wasn't for their preferred campaign setting, and that's what ended up tanking the company"?
Except, as it turned out, this wasn't the whole truth. While splitting their customer base seems to have had
some negative impact on TSR's finances, what we now know suggests that, in terms of what led to the company's collapse, that was a distant third. Far more salient causes were:
- Their agreement with Randomhouse, which granted TSR money upfront for books they gave Randomhouse to sell, but which required them to pay back the money on unsold books which Randomhouse would subsequently return to them.
- Factoring. This is the process whereby TSR would agree to turn over 100% of the expected net profits for the upcoming year to a lending organization, in return for receiving roughly 87% (or so) of those profits at the beginning of the year. A side effect of this agreement was that they had to stick to the outlined sales plan, leaving them with no room to pivot in response to industry changes (e.g. selling the AD&D 2E CD-ROM through Babbage's stores even as those stores were closing, and so selling all of their inventory for pennies on the dollar).
And that's just the stuff we've uncovered in the years since (and simplifies things a lot, particularly with regard to what's
not listed above).
As a personal rule, I like narratives in games, but not in real life. I want to know what's actually going on, and what happened before, rather than assuming "this makes the most sense." And to be sure, sometimes the latter is the best we can do (and on occasion, the inference even turns out to be right), but that's not a reason to make that the go-to option.
It might very well be that PF1 sales were declining, to the point where Paizo needed to release a new edition to avoid closing their doors (from what I've read, the major motivation for new editions of TTRPGs is primarily financial). I just don't want to presume that out of hand; we used to presume that "adventures don't sell," but Paizo still sells Adventure Paths, periodic stand-alone adventures, and Pathfinder Society adventures. So I'd rather not assume they can buck one trend but not another.
