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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 6279107" data-attributes="member: 22424">Well, indeed. It's also hugely significant that Paizo's primary offering is their Adventure Path product.Ever since 2nd Ed's "Complete Fighter's Handbook", if not before, the vast majority of RPG support has been what I'll term "non-perishable". You buy the splatbook, you add it to your game, and it remains part of the game forevermore (well, until the edition change). Much the same is true of settings - once you buy the book on Sarlona, that's it.The problem with this approach is that it quickly saturates - once you've got one set of splatbooks out there, you probably can't sell another (as, I suspect, WotC found with both the second round of "Complete..." books in 3.5e and with the likes of "Martial Power 2" for 4e). Or, at least, if you can, you can only sell them in vastly reduced numbers. Likewise, once you've published "Secrets of Sarlona", how attractive is a book called "Deeper Secrets of Sarlona" likely to be?Simply put, there's only so much you can sell, and diminishing returns are inevitable.Ideally, then, a company that wants to sustain the same edition long-term should probably aim to base this on sales of items that are somehow "perishable". That is, the group buys them, uses them for a while, and then sets them aside.The best example of such items are, of course, adventures: although some adventures get run multiple times, it's pretty unusual for the same group to play the same adventure multiple times (especially modern adventures, which are much more story-focussed than older ones, and so resistant to repeats).(Of course, White Wolf also managed to make their setting materials "perishable" by the implementation of a metaplot - people 'had' to keep buying in order to stay current. But that, of course, has its own problems. In theory, a company could even make their rules materials "perishable" if they would be willing to deliberately embrace power-creep, but that would most likely see the game rejected pretty quickly.)Paizo, of course, put out big books of "non-perishable" rules expansions - Ultimate Magic, Mythic Adventures, etc. I'm not denying that. But their primary offering is apparently their Adventure Path product, which is "perishable" - I can always use more adventures. This at least slows down the rate at which the edition saturates.</blockquote>

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