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!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Saplatt" data-source="post: 6365658" data-attributes="member: 6775639">In the long run, we're all dead. But 5E is certainly off to a hot start.I suppose that depends on what you mean by "strong." Are sales strong enough to keep the game in print?  Probably. And since that's your primary concern, I'm happy for you. Okay.  One more time. My point is that the 5E sales thus far belie the notion that the only significant audience (consumers of the product) will come from either Pathfinder fans or 4E fans.Pathfinder has never, at any point in its history, sold as well as the PHB is selling right now. That's a fact, Jack. So 5E's sales can't be explained just by reference to a positive reaction by the Pathfinder crowd.The opening salvo of 4E did sell pretty well, but all indications are that sales faded over the next three years to the point where a much smaller company, Paizo, was able to pass it by in sales. For that reason, I don't think 5E's success is based on an appeal to the hardcore 4E crowd. (As if there were ever any doubt about that.)Therefore, the opening burst in sales is most likely the result of sales to LAPSED customers of D&D, including, perhaps, the group that originally bought into 4E only to discover that they didn't like it or that they became bored with it.This has nothing to do with any attack on the viability of Paizo as a continuing game company. The whole point is that D&D and Pathfinder can both prosper side by side. In fact, I'll go further and say there's a good chance that Paizo may actually benefit from 5E if it brings enough new and lapsed people into  the hobby since some of them will at some point check out Pathfinder, or at least some of its products.      All that said, I do think there are some indications that Pathfinder is nearing a critical point in its cycle. If you look at the last few hardbacks they've produced, the general trend is that each one seems to sell less at the outset and then drop off faster than the ones before it.  The same thing happened in 4E and I suspect the same thing happened in 3.5.  It's just a law of diminishing returns, because the more splat books you produce, the more likely it is that some portion of your original audience will decide that they  already have enough.In addition, I suspect there's a little bit of a deterrent effect on new customers who look at a shelf full of resource books and wonder just how big an investment they are going to have to make to get into the game.</blockquote>

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