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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wakedown" data-source="post: 8232398" data-attributes="member: 15901">I feel like folks don't seem to grasp that the sales don't matter.Again this is about the people not Paizo LLC.   Paizo isn't part of a public company with shareholders like Hasbro/Wizards with consequences not hitting sales targets. They were a small operation that burst in a window of opportunity which enabled their founders (Lisa Stevens and Vic Wertz) to announce they are formally stepping out of operations and transferring operating the company to Jeff Alvarez in this past year.   There's all sorts of vehicles for founders/majority shareholders to have setup an early retirement - they could have paid out dividends during the glory days to themselves and set themselves up for a slightly early retirement.   Clearly for them to step away now, their goals have been achieved and revenue from sales figures aren't materially to their personal plans going forward.   It's murky who actually owns and is on Paizo's cap table but I imagine early co-founder Johnny Wilson may have some ownership or have transferred that.  They'd have to have given some to early contributors like Mona, Bulmahn and Jacobs for those guys to pour so much sweat into Pathfinder.  The company can likely run in perpetuity with a skeleton crew of just those four contributors and they can launch PF3E through PF5E over the next 20 years.  Or it could be possible Alvarez has been shopping the company so Stevens & Wertz can finally cash out completely and buy a boat or diversify their holdings and the pandemic was a big hiccup in navigating those waters.   There's really not a whole lot of precedent for a Paizo "exit" - they'd possibly have to carve up their ecommerce operations and domain separate from their Pathfinder/Starfinder IP and the question is who would acquire that now, versus let PF2E run it's course another 18-36 months before tendering an offer.Ultimately if you want a Pathfinder edition that is a passion product with something tied to a real attempt at impressive sales figures, there would need to be a majority shareholders driving that, otherwise there is nothing wrong with the company having a smaller staff of heavily invested folks with junior contributors/community players contributing art or adventures as long as they are feeding enough demand within their ecosystem.   Those are really the two paths for 2025 - the core team is producing content for the current PF2E or a new PF3E or new ownership has emerged with ideas on how to use their IP, which would come with a new edition to merit the ROI of the expense.</blockquote>

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