NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steel_Wind" data-source="post: 5451560" data-attributes="member: 20741">At retail it does. However, you need to appreciate that Paizo was founded as a magazine company and their Adventure Path subscriptions are still, far and away, the largest product category that Paizo sells directly to the end consumer.Direct sales for Paizo? The Adventure Path is king. And there is a lot of money to be made there.This is important, as this probably generates for Paizo an amount of revenue per Adventure Path unit (when sold directly) as Paizo earns off most of their hardcovers when sold through a  distributor. This is not a small point, ok?To the extent that the hardcovers might earn a little more per unit when sold through a distributor than Paizo earns off an AP direct sale (and I'm not privy to hard data)  then I strongly suspect that the lower printing costs of an AP issue makes up for any revenue difference the hardcover brings. What does this mean in real terms? At 8,000 issues sold directly to subscribers per month (to be clear: I have ZERO confidence in that number and I am pulling that out of my butt) that would mean that the Adventure Path product line generates for Paizo about the same gross revenue as selling ~100,000 hardcover rule books in a given year. But, importantly, that money comes in predictably every month and pays the rent, utilities and some of the staff. Every month. Like clockwork.If we increase that subscriber amount and double it (and while I have no hard date, based on the subscriber base for Dungeon, about 16,000 per month seems a reasonable subscriber base for the AP line) then that is the same as the gross revenue they would make on 200,000 hardcovers sold in a given year. That's $225,000 per month in drect AP sales. Like clockwork. You can pretty much run most of the company off of that revenue alone -- and they do.That's big money in the RPG business. Not only that, it's evergreen money, too. The 40,000 subscribers that are causually discussed for DDI? On a net revenue basis, those numbers and Paizo's AP sales revenue are relatively close to one another.  That's how important the Adventure Path sales are to Paizo. And we have not yet even counted in the other products that Paizo sells directly to its customers.  Direct sales, whether at Gencon or through a webstore, are highly profitable.  And as has been discussed on ENWorld in other threads, Paizo sells a LOT more to its customers directly in terms or revenune per customer, per month, than WotC does.Now we don't have hard data for Paizo's sales -- but we do have the gem below recently published o<a href="http://blackdiamondgames.blogspot.com/2011/01/d-and-pathfinder-sales.html" target="_blank">n the blog of Black Diamond Games</a>. The revenue at retail at that one store (and it IS just one store folks so we need to be careful when projecting this result across the whole market) is somewhat surprising. Black Dimond Games currently earns just about the same amount of money off of five Paizo hardcover rulebooks as it earns off of ALL of WotC hardcovers and essentials line according to the owner. That makes Pathfinder a more profitable RPG to sell -- at least at this stage -- for both Paizo and for the retailer (as that means bigger sales from less rack space)The below chart indicated that the APs do sell reasonably well at retail. The stand-alone adventures for Pathfinder, however, clearly do not sell well.  There is magic in the AP line that is not found elsewhere in adventure gaming.One last surprising note: the Flip-mat and Gamemastery Map Tiles published by Paizo are surprisingly brisk sellers for those stores that stock the complete lines.  Paizo is making a lot of money off of those accessories. That's why they are increasing the lines, not cutting them back as WotC is doing with their own dungeon tiles.<img src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_vcg8qv3nees/TT0KWC3ICrI/AAAAAAAAEuY/mJQXAbJdvfo/s1600/pathfinder+2.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /></blockquote>

Verification