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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Baka no Hentai" data-source="post: 4150771" data-attributes="member: 62883">To arrive at this conclusion, you have to make several key (and, IMO, flawed) assumptions.The first being that a significant number of people continue to buy WOTC products only because Paizo (or any third party publisher) puts out supplemental material. I think this assumption is way off the mark, as I still hold to my belief that the majority of D&D players dont even know what Paizo *is*, and that of those who do, a very small percentage would stop purchasing WOTC products if Paizo no longer supported WOTC with its own material.The second assumption that you would have to make is that Paizo is catering to anything more than a niche market. The fact of the matter is, their core customer base for the Pathfinder RPG are going to be those people who dont want to switch to an entirely new edition of D&D, but that *do* want to purchase new rules. This leaves out all of the people who are excited to go to fourth edition, as well as all of the people that are fine with 3.0 and 3.5 the way they are and dont want to make any changes. Not to mention all the people who will download the alpha and beta Pathfinder rules, pick and choose the things they like the most for house-rule additions, then never give Paizo a dime (they would not be doing a single thing wrong in this case, as Paizo is the one releasing this info free of charge.)Lastly you would have to assume that those people that do purchase the Pathfinder RPG wont also purchase the fourth edition rules. Gaming is not restrictive in that you have to choose one particular game or another and never play anything else. Im sure that many people who are looking forward to playing Pathfinder will also be buying Fourth Edition products either out of curiousity, or to possibly play now and then, or even to have them in hand for when their current 3.5 campaigns that they dont want to scrap come to an end. Likewise, Im sure that a number of people (proportional to the size of the customer base for Paizo) who are pledged to play 4E will also purchase the Pathfinder RPG and/or adventure paths for their "alternative game nights" or to scavenge ideas for their 4E campaigns.At the end of the day, Pathfinder is going after a niche market. To think otherwise is deluding yourself. That is not to say that they wont do well in that niche, or that they wont do well enough to expand that niche from its current size. I for one hope that they do well, as anything that keeps gamers active is good for the industry as a whole.</blockquote>

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