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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wayside" data-source="post: 5272524" data-attributes="member: 8394">Whence "in one way or another." I take a more pragmatic view of the word "first." More explanation below.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?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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.</blockquote>

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