Did WotC underestimate the Paizo effect on 4E?

[Wicht]

Well, Paizo can add "Sweeping the 2010 ENnies" now to their list of successes.

I must admit that I was wrong in my predictions of their success. I thought they would win about half. Wow. Quite a sweep.

 

[jaerdaph]

I must admit that I was wrong in my predictions of their success. I thought they would win about half. Wow. Quite a sweep.

[threadjack] It was cool to see the indy Eclipse Phase RPG get some serious love tonight too.[/threadjack]

 

[ShinHakkaider]

[threadjack] It was cool to see the indy Eclipse Phase RPG get some serious love tonight too.[/threadjack]

And Shadowrun too.

 

[Mistwell]

I'm sorry Mistwell, I thought it was obvious I was talking about Role Playing Games, most specifically fantasy role playing games of the Dungeons and Dragons genre. I apologize for confusing you. If we factor in both board and card games, then of course, Paizo is still small potatoes.

So you're not counting Paizo products that are non-D&D specific either?

I must disagree however about the number of non-4e players that seem enthused about buying essentials. Have you looked at this thread? There is more unanimity about us non-4e players not buying essentials than anything I have ever seen in any thread asking preferences from a sub-group. I think most of us are pleased WotC is trying to make some changes but that is not going to compel us to buy it.

I listed Darksun, Red Box, Gamma World, Star Wars, and Minatures. You responded with Essentials, which is a line of products. Red Box has part of Essentials, but is not the whole of Essentials. I have seen a lot of posts from non-4e players saying they will check out the Red Box itself, not to mention those other products I mentioned which are all RPG related. Now, if you want me to link to a bunch of those people, I can (from a variety of boards). But if I am going to go to the trouble of digging all the comments up and linking to them, I would need a commitment from you that you would surrender the point. I'm not going to go find all those quotes only to have you shift the argument to something else. Do we agree?

 

[ProfessorCirno]

I do. I also like energy drain that sucks levels. Both of those things add something to the game that cannot be replaced by simple "save or suck" or "you'll get better" mechanics.

Congrats on being exceedingly rare. No doubt a few people are like you and enjoy characters dying immidiately because hah hah save or die (and you realistically never had a defense against it). But I'd put money down that you aren't the majority, not by far. The fact is, SoDs were one of the major complaints about 3.5. That's why just about every post 3.5 game has tried to kill them off or at least shove them in the basement.

[quoteMore to the point of the thread, you can't equate 4E and Pathfinder as you seem to be trying do.[/quote]

I just did it. What can I say - the impossible becomes possible in my hands.

There are some common design theories present, since both came from common stock, but the whole point of Pathfinder, the whole reason that it exists and is successful, is that it doesn't do what 4E is, which can be mostly simply stated as "throw the baby out with the bath water".

I honestly have no idea what you're getting at.

Premise: 4e is terrible look at this advertisement saying people dislike save or dies.

My statement: And yet you give Pathfinder which in turn tried to kill SoDs as well a free pass.

You: I hate 4e so much, guys.

 

[Wayside]

First off, the only "first" in your list is D&D -- and that's arguable (Glorantha, Tekumel and Blackmoor all predate D&D).

Whence "in one way or another." I take a more pragmatic view of the word "first." More explanation below.

Warhammer was not the first tabletop fantasy miniatures game: there were Middle Earth and Hyborian wargames first.

Last I heard, those were pretty valuable franchises in their own right. There are some important differences, though. For example, they weren't developed in tandem with the game so that players got to watch the world evolve as they played. And the fact that they were miniatures games second and stories first probably didn't help. And were either of those commercial products?

There could've been Middle Earth and Hyborian RPGs before D&D, too, and I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't catch on any better there. In the case of Warhammer, location is also a factor. Your examples are all stateside. Which commercial miniatures game with a dedicated fantasy setting and ongoing support beat it (or Reaper, if you want to start there) to market in the UK?

Dune and Dune 2 were the first RTS games.

Except they were very different games, and not fantasy. Blizzard's brand of RTS differs quite a bit even from later examples like C&C and Company of Heroes. Of course being first isn't everything. World of Warcraft wasn't first. It just had a high degree of polish and traded on the brand equity that was already there. Part of my point is that this is what Paizo is a long way off from having.

The World of Darkness was pre-empted by Palladium by years with Nightbane

I completely disagree. The Palladium System plays nothing like the Storyteller System, and as similar as the settings may be in some vague thematic sense, they're substantively different. The "first" here isn't "an RPG with vampires." It's the whole way White Wolf approached RPGs, and the completely new audience they created in the process.

and Shadowrun was neither the first cyberpunk game nor the first science fantasy game.

If you're going to define "first" as "this product came out the day before that one" then we're at an impasse. The cyberpunk games I'm aware of were essentially simultaneous. Shadowrun, Cyberpunk 2020 and Cyberspace were all released within about a year of each other in the late 1980s. Unless some game I've never heard of was released in 1985, those three games were all first to market.

Second, I don't think you can qualify Pathfinder as a "D&D clone" because it exists very specifically as an alternative to the current edition of D&D.

It's a repackaging of D&D 3.5. I went with "clone" because lately it's a popular term for this kind of thing, but call it whatever you like. "Clone" isn't meant to denigrate. I think 3.5 was a solid game, so by extension I think Pathfinder is a solid game. I myself haven't bought it, but only because I already bought 3.5 and I don't like Golarion any more than I like the Forgotten Realms.

It is neither retroclone nor fantasy heartbreaker, but rather "spiritual successor". The biggest obstacle it has is that it does not possess the Brand Name (tm) of D&D, even if it possess the sould of that game.

As a D&D clone I certainly wouldn't call it a fantasy heartbreaker, other than rhetorically. Who knows what will happen when it's time for Pathfinder 2.0, though (I think this is part of Umbran's point). As for name recognition being its biggest obstacle...well yeah. Other companies are now allowed to copy Kleenex's way of packaging tissues, but Kleenex is still Kleenex. The law may let you copy their packaging, but you don't get to take their name, too. As for terms like "soul" and "spiritual successor," all I see there is marketing-speak, and I'd really prefer not to have another ENWorld discussion of the thisness of a whatsit. I die a little inside every time someone mentions the ship of Theseus.

For every first you can think of, there's a pretty good chance that a little research will reveal some ideas/products/whatever that beat it to market. It isn't being first, or even being best. it's being the right *whatever* at the right time.

Sure. It's the number one predictor, not the sole predictor. The right time rule is just a reconfiguration of the first rule: being somewhere first is usually the right time to be there. Of course some upstart can always come in and unseat the leader. Sony was on top of the world with the PS2, but they made a few mistakes and then Nintendo beat them up and took their lunch money with the Wii. Android is currently in the process of doing the same thing to the iPhone. It all sounds nice in theory, but RPGs don't move like technology.

And please, don't confuse my objectivity with a dislike for Paizo. They're good people and, from a rules standpoint, I think they have a good game. But it's just the one game, and commercially it isn't much compared to the franchises those other companies I mentioned have built.

Except he compared Paizo to White Wolf and Catalyst in making his "league" comparison.

I'm fairly sure I didn't mention Catalyst, since they only license Shadowrun from Topps. I also only mentioned Shadowrun tangentially, since Warhammer and Warcraft are better examples.

But how many people does FFG employ? I would be surprised if it was much more than 30. And Games Workshop does not have as many employees as they used to have iirc. Even game companies like Mayfair and Days of Wonder probably don't employ much more than Paizo fulltime, if that. WotC is sort of the exception to the rule when it comes to number of employees in a "Hobby" company. But again, a better comparison is between Paizo and WotC's RPG department.

What does the number of employees have to do with the value of the brand? The people behind the current Warhammer RPG work for FFG, not Games Workshop. The people behind the video games have worked for studios like Mythic Entertainment, Relic Entertainment, Black Hole Entertainment, Kuju Entertainment, Mindscape, Vigil Games, Random Games, MicroLeague, Holistic Design, DreamForge, Cyanide, RedLynx, Key Game and EA. That's a lot of people working on Warhammer and making money for Games Workshop without being employed there. ICv2 had FFG listed twice for Warhammer 40K RPGs in Q4 2009, and FFG is just Games Workshop's licensee.

That, incidentally, is my basis for comparison. These observations are intended to answer--and to sober--some of the more feverish posts in this thread. They are not an insult to Paizo, since there's nothing insulting about being a successful company.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I do. I also like energy drain that sucks levels. Both of those things add something to the game that cannot be replaced by simple "save or suck" or "you'll get better" mechanics.

Save or Dies make things a lottery. Don't want them back.

As for elements that can't be replaced by simple "save or suck" or "you get better" mechanics, 4e has the poison/disease track - which is an elegant and flexible replacement for the clunky mechanics of level drain (for one thing it means that your condition in some cases can get worse.) It's not often used in my experience (for that matter nor was level drain), but works well for things like Lycanthropy, infection by certain parasites, and poisons.

4E is, which can be mostly simply stated as "throw the baby out with the bath water".

I'd have said 4e was more like "see which sacred cows taste better barbequed" - and with essentials it's even barbequing its own sacred cows.

 

[Wicht]

I listed Darksun, Red Box, Gamma World, Star Wars, and Minatures. You responded with Essentials, which is a line of products. Red Box has part of Essentials, but is not the whole of Essentials. I have seen a lot of posts from non-4e players saying they will check out the Red Box itself, not to mention those other products I mentioned which are all RPG related. Now, if you want me to link to a bunch of those people, I can (from a variety of boards). But if I am going to go to the trouble of digging all the comments up and linking to them, I would need a commitment from you that you would surrender the point. I'm not going to go find all those quotes only to have you shift the argument to something else. Do we agree?

I'm not really wanting to argue about it, to tell the truth. I acknowledge there are those who don't play 4e who might be interested in the Essentials box (and more interested in Gamma World than that), but I just quibble with the word "lots." The one poll asking about essentials placed it at about a 3:1 or 4:1 ratio. But its not worth arguing over. It will be what it will be.

edit: also there are plenty of people that really like Star WArs Saga, yes. But it seems curious you would put it in a list of things that might draw Pathfinder players back to WotC considering its a different genre and Wizards dropped the line. If anything, dropping SWS seemed to make a lot of people more irritated than not at the company.

 

[Garthanos]

Save or Dies make things a lottery. Don't want them back.

As for elements that can't be replaced by simple "save or suck" or "you get better" mechanics, 4e has the poison/disease track - which is an elegant and flexible replacement for the clunky mechanics of level drain (for one thing it means that your condition in some cases can get worse.) It's not often used in my experience (for that matter nor was level drain), but works well for things like Lycanthropy, infection by certain parasites, and poisons.



I'd have said 4e was more like "see which sacred cows taste better barbequed" - and with essentials it's even barbequing its own sacred cows.

Hilarious sorry cant give a xp.. gotta spread it around... agree entirely.

 

[Wicht]

What does the number of employees have to do with the value of the brand?

My bad, I thought you were talking about being in some sort of "league," not the value of the brand. My point was that Paizo most certainly plays in the same league as these others, considering their products sit on the shelf right next to each other and Paizo has size, sales and experience to rival almost any other RPG company.

As far as brand value, of course Dungeons and Dragons (and Warhammer) has better brand value and pedigree. This has little to do with being first to the market and everything to do with the fact they are seasoned commodities that have weathered changes and time. But this goes back to a point I made earlier to you. Pathfinder is only 1 or two years old. When Warhammer was 1 or 2 years old they did not have any of the things you are mentioning they have today. These things take time and some of your posts seem to be suggesting it is unreasonable to assume Paizo will continue to grow their brand in the same way others have grown their brands. As far as I can tell, Paizo is managing their brand very well for all of its youthfulness.