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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steel_Wind" data-source="post: 5265578" data-attributes="member: 20741">Of course they underestimated them.  They are now competing with their own IP, rebranded by another company and sold in direct competition with their own products. In some areas, it's a competition they are losing, too.The suggestion that WotC is not "competing" against Paizo is fallacious. It assumes that those customers who purchased Pathfinder products were never going to purchase 4E products, no matter what. Take away that unjustified and breathtakingly dismissive assumption - and that argument has no clothes -- and no logic.It's one thing to say that some players would stick with 3.5 and won't buy 4E and so they are not "WotC's potential customers" for 4E. But that's not what has happened with Pathfinder. Paizo has sold a new game based upon the old, and most people who are playing it don't bother to even use 3.5 books within their Pathfinder games at all. If that's not competition in RPGs, then I don't know what is. Pathfinder and D&D are not competing products in the marketplace, even though now both are being sold on the shelves of major book retailers and not just in hobby game stores? The presence of competitors on the shelves of mainstream book sellers is a new phenomenon for WotC.  It is as clear a sign of real competition in the marketplace that exists. To hand wave away the presence of those books on the shelves of Big Box Retailers and describe that product as "not in competition" with D&D?  I think that's a plainly nutty statement, that's what I think it is. Paizo had legitimacy and a claim to the goodwill of fans as "real" owners of D&D given their stewardship of both Dungeon and Dragon magazine. They have leveraged that goodwill and the OGL into a brand that actually competes  favorably in the marketplace with D&D.Did WotC expect this would happen? Not a frikkin' chance. Did Paizo think this would happen? I expect they HOPED it would happen, but...no. PFRPG's success has exceeded their own best case scenario as well.</blockquote>

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