Paizo mentioned another item (Well, a Paizo Employee) recently which could be another metric that we could see even here. Forum discussion of Pathfinder in general has risen over the past two years. I think that is one metric that we can see here. Pathfinder discussion was about dead, so dead that for a while they even removed the Pathfinder forum completely and merged it with older games and such.
Not entirely true. As someone active on those forums particularly the PbP ones,
PF2E recruitment is fairly anemic. It used to be that every day you'd have a dozen games opening up for PF1e PFS games that would play out. Another area where things have dried up is folks engaged on the
adventure paths - if you go back to the weeks post-launch of their 1E Adventure Paths (take your pick of early ones like Runelords or ones in the middle of the 1E lifespan like Reign of Winter or near end of line ones like Giantslayer), the unique participants (reach) and number of new posts per day have dropped as interest in APs has waned.
"Reddit subscriber growth" is never a good metric. All subreddits will see subscriber growth due to the nature of how bots crawl reddit and subscribe into reddits. Posts per day is the real metric to gauge rising or falling interest, and aside from release triggers, the PF2E subreddit has been stable at 25 posts per day since Summer 2019. Pathfinder_RPG (which is where 1E was but still has some 2E discussion) has dropped from ~55 to ~45 per day over the same timeframe. All-in, Reddit sees ~40 PF1E posts per day and ~30 PF2E posts per day and these numbers have been fairly stable for 2 years.
This is all moot, the game is stable from a business continuity perspective. Paizo can serve a small fan-base on PF2E, PF2E Essentials, PF3E for a decade or more with just a handful of core employees. They've shed a ton of veteran staff and reduced their release schedule and are (presumably) in no real danger of bankruptcy as long as they can maintain their current pace. Folks have cited that Paizo may have debt, but there's never been a better time to refinance business debt and stretch it out over a new term in America, so even if they had some, their CFO now CEO could've refinanced that several times in the past few years and stretched it out over new terms.
Paizo also did extremely well with the
PPP program getting a big infusion of 1.02 million dollars less than a year ago and likely having it forgiven (something they'd be closing out right now) - which is essentially a million dollars of free cash for just keeping folks employed. This gives you a sense of their scale with $5M in payroll and just how much they need to sell (not just PF, SF books but just general gaming supplies from their online store) in a year to keep the engines running in 2021 and beyond.
