The main rulebook is not what really drives profitability for a company. Game companies like WotC and Paizo make far more money on selling accessories, additional rulebooks, expansions, and adventures. I am far more excited by the upcoming Pathfinder 2e Beginner Box and how that is going to reach out to more people beyond the existing player base.
2e is easy to learn. I've conducted seminars and even built a video for new players on constructing characters. Players pick it up fast.
As for fracturing the player base, I don't think there was any way around it. The first edition was slowing down in overall sales. A company has to sell the product if it expects to continue to exist. Plus, 1e's existing math, based on the 3.5 system's math was not conducive to expansion. The growth of the game had caused a major problem with some rather silly power issues for characters. 2e was built using different math which will handle expansion better. Paizo really needed to create a new edition. What fractured the base was the decision not to make 2e backwards compatible. There was no way to do that with the need to change the underlying math.
My experience with players is that those who don't like 2e have never played it beyond the playtest. If one judges 2e by the playtest, one does not know what they are talking about. Quite a lot from the playtest was discarded or altered including the math. I ran a 8 sessions of PFS2 at Gen Con in 2019 and saw pallets of CRBs sold over 4 days. I also had people sit down to try out the game who during a break went to the kiosk outside the Sagamore Ballroom and bought the CRB. Paizo chose not to continue to make new content for 1e and rightfully so. To do that, they would have had three major product lines going, one of which was generating fewer sales every year. They made a business decision that would sustain the company for the future.
The single biggest problem Paizo has with 2e is a lack of content produced by the company for non-Organized Play customers. They are now selling the third Adventure Path and finally put out a second module, but that's not that much content in my opinion. Part of the reason for that is the pandemic and tariff issues. They originally were going to put out Dead God's Hand, but that got delayed much to my anguish because I really want to run that adventure! But they've got it scheduled for 1Q 2021 along with a few more adventures. The new changes to how Adventure Path's are produced should help that out too (going from 6 books to 3 per AP).
2e is really a great edition. So was 1e and so is 5e. They're all good. That's the nice thing about what is going on. There are plenty of good games to play out there. My point is that Paizo's release of 2e has been successful. There's too much evidence out there that it has been and very little suggesting otherwise. Let me put it this way. Paizo has not laid off any employees and is still putting out new content for 2e and Starfinder in a pandemic that saw FLGs close down across the US for pretty much 2 months. They're embraced virtual table tops and even moved their flagship convention online which was very successful for them. Most of their workforce is now working from home and will do so through the end of the year. I really expect the 2e Beginner Box to open up the game to a much larger player base over the next year and ramp up more sales. I wish they were traded publicly. I'd be buying stock in Paizo.
