Paizo Jessica Price (ex Paizo employee) spills the beans

[humble minion]

I wonder if the damage is already done. Seeing the large number of fans dropping them on their own site, cancelling subscriptions, etc., can't be a good thing. It's not like we're talking about customers like me (who just gets the big rulebooks and the occasional adventure).
Changing direction with PF2 cost them some fans. This might be the death knell.

While I haven't been a regular Paizo customer since a loooong time ago, around the time of the release of PF 1st ed, it's always looked to me from the outside that Paizo could be particularly vulnerable to this sort of thing.

The produce very high volumes of material - all the AP releases which are a massive amount of content, plus multiple sourcebooks etc per year. On a pure pages-per-year metric, their output dwarfs WotC, and almost anyone else i can immediately think of. And with the PF1->2 transition, and the fact that 5e seems to have brought people back to D&D who were not 4e fans, it seems to me that their customer base is probably not expanding at a huge rate.

What they do, however, is though subscriptions and a high release tempo, and their extremely loyal customer base, earn a lot of money per customer. The 'whale' strategy, as well-known from the video gaming industry. However, that does make them much more vulnerable than someone like WotC. WotC sells a small number of books to a vast number of people. If they alienate customers, they lose the small number of purchases those customers would make, and they probably go ahead without further ado. If Paizo, with its small base of high-spending customers who seem to have a very tight community who are 'extremely online' to a degree that WotCs larger customer base generally aren't, alienates customers, it's a different matter. You lose even a few dozen big subscriptions, and it's not a small deal over there.

And it's not like Paizo is raking in the dough by their own testimony. When the controversy about Agents of Edgewatch erupted and there was calls to delay, abandon, or rewrite it, at least one Paizo person basically said that going 6 months without an AP (since there wasn't time to bring another AP forward to replace it) would mean a hit to Paizo's cashflow that would literally kill the company. Mind you, I don't know how one squares that statement with Price's anecdote about Mona flying to New York to buy $3000 suits, but that's another matter...

 

[Parmandur]

They responded by...?

Quite a few things, I'm not going to list them all, but diverse hires, actually competent statements and actual rule changes have been implemented in the aftermath.

 

[Gradine]

 

[mythago]

You only got half of it, or maybe all of it but it's worth clarifying anyway: we can't neither give nor deny any credence to complaints. Refusing to give credence is the exact same error as giving credence: since we don't have the ability to review the complete evidence, we can't determine whether it's true or not. It's undetermined and there is no "guilty party": neither the employee (who could be right or guilty of libel) nor the company (who could be right or guilty of endangering the life of their employees) is guilty and therefore the only thing to do is encourage the plaintiff to contact the regulatory bodies to get vindicated. It can't always be easily done (from lack of fund, insufficent access to these institutions or state of mind (in the case of victims of abuse who simply can't realize their situation). In this case, I hope labor unions would help overcome any difficulty in getting access to a court. Going public is certainly worthwhile when denouncing something that is legal but one wants to change (ie, a political problem) but it doesn't seem to be the case here: the situations described seem clearly already illegal (I am pretty sure it's illegal nearly everywhere to discriminated based on gender or to refuse to clean an office to the point it's becoming a health hazard). The judicial branch is here to help (or at least it should be) and it's a sad situation when Twitter is preferred to the relevant authorities.

1) We're not a jury; this isn't a courtroom where we are weighing whether to issue criminal or financial penalties to Paizo. The idea that we are not allowed to have opinions on things others tell us until a jury or administrative body has issued a formal ruling on their claims is ridiculous, and nobody operates that way in their ordinary lives.

2) False dilemma, counselor; people who post things on Twitter are not doing so because they had to choose between Twitter or a courtroom and chose the former. People are allowed to - and do - talk about things on Twitter whether or not they are able to take legal action about those things.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Quite a few things, I'm not going to list them all, but diverse hires, actually competent statements and actual rule changes have been implemented in the aftermath.

Oh God. Diversity hires don't mean anything when it's not in management, and it's worth noting that Black was a diversity hire; the whole point was that his ideas weren't listened to and/or being stolen by others. Hell, there was that entire fiasco with a POC's adventure getting mauled by a senior editor without their knowledge this year. And I will wholly disagree on the "competency" of their statements or their "rule changes".

What WOTC has is the ability to ride things out because their brand is big enough that hyper-aware internet fans will not sink them. Full stop, that's one of their advantages. Paizo doesn't have that, which makes me hope that they'll move more drastically than WOTC ever would. But we're only at the start of this.

Edit: Lol, this is the first time I can remember getting put on "Ignore" by someone for something. What a weird turn.

 

[Parmandur]

Oh God. Diversity hires don't mean anything when it's not in management, and it's worth noting that Black was a diversity hire; the whole point was that his ideas weren't listened to and/or being stolen by others. Hell, there was that entire fiasco with a POC's adventure getting mauled by a senior editor without their knowledge this year. And I will wholly disagree on the "competency" of their statements or their "rule changes".

What WOTC has is the ability to ride things out because their brand is big enough that hyper-aware internet fans will not sink them. Full stop, that's one of their advantages. Paizo doesn't have that, which makes me hope that they'll move more drastically than WOTC ever would. But we're only at the start of this.

Yeah, don't expect anything better than what they've done so far.

 

[mythago]

Saw this on the paizo Reddit. Read on to the follow up comments.
TLDR the employee says there are definitely issues and the firing was definitely a shocker. Though one or more of Prices allegations are untrue.

TL;DR - an anonymous person claiming to be a Paizo employee made a vague Reddit post and claimed some of Price's allegations were false, then ignored multiple requests to clarify which.

 

[Ancalagon]

TL;DR - an anonymous person claiming to be a Paizo employee made a vague Reddit post and claimed some of Price's allegations were false, then ignored multiple requests to clarify which.

this has been brought up in the thread previously; as you say, the refusal to say what was the falsehood makes this anonymous post... kinda suspicious and useless.

 

[Fildrigar]

I'm much more concerned about the claim that Bulmahn sends around unsolicited dick pics.

This is far from the first time I've heard this. I'm honestly surprised this is the first time it's been mentioned publicly.

 

[Justice and Rule]

TL;DR - an anonymous person claiming to be a Paizo employee made a vague Reddit post and claimed some of Price's allegations were false, then ignored multiple requests to clarify which.

this has been brought up in the thread previously; as you say, the refusal to say what was the falsehood makes this anonymous post... kinda suspicious and useless.

They address it... which is to say, they don't really address it.