Mad at Paizo?

[zztong]

Am I alone with this sentiment? It's a not a joke question, I'm truly curious about this.

I don't hate Paizo. I don't care for 2e. Normally, I just ignore games I don't like.

However, a friend of mine likes 2e enough to want to run it. He has limited time to prepare (busy life) and I end up having to assist by looking up rules, etc. In order to be a good friend I'm forced to keep my nose in 2e. The last time this happened was with D&D 4e. It turned out few people at the table liked the 4e rules and most were just quietly miserable for a year. The folks at the table seem equally restless about 2e, though a bit more vocal this time. Some want to shift to D&D 5e. (We had been playing PF1 before the PF2 playtest.)

There will come a time when my friend needs a break from running and it will be my turn to run. I know he would prefer every DM run the same game because it can be easier on our casual players not to change systems. I'll want to run some other system.

So, again, I don't hate Paizo. What they're doing makes sense. Yet, it has created stress at the game table between friends. The group is unlikely to break up, but there's bound to be a lot of hand-wringing over the next year. I suspect it will ultimately be the end of the notion that all DMs run the same game and contribute to the same timeline/story.

 

[zztong]

that’s almost 600 books a month. Is that good sales?

A couple of decades ago I and some friends wrote a book for Hero Games. I vaguely recall they would sell about 2,000 copies of a new supplement and those would come out I want to say quarterly. So 600 a month sounds good, to me the key questions are "What do they make per sale?" and "What are their expenses?"

A couple of websites suggest Paizo has about 100 employees. That's around 99 to 99.5 more full-time employees than Hero Games had. Paizo has offices; Hero Games ran out of a basement.

The following number are bunk. They're from a different time, a different company, and filtered through my faulty memory. I lay them out here for discussion purposes...

We used to talk about making about 12% of cover price. Game stores bought the product at 50% cover, distributors bought at 25% cover. (Everybody doubled their money on a sale.) Of the 25% coming to the game company, half was going out in production costs and paying the artists and authors. I'm sure the model has changed since the 1990s.

So, again this is bunk, but applying it to a $60 cover price, $30 price to game store, $15 price to distributor, so $7.50 to Paizo after expenses... except when Paizo makes a direct sale then they get all $60. GenCon sales would have all been direct and they would have sold thousands of copies. Of course, that also assumes Paizo offers no discounts to anyone along the line. Again, my numbers are wrong. They're from an old model and a different company.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Ten years is enough time for an edition.

Not only there are lots of titles published by Paizo, but by third party companies.

Paizo can have a good future with Starfinder and maybe a third line about Gothic horror + noir punk. (the land of the dread, its version of Ravenloft is canon).

Pathfinder isn't only the TTRPG books, but also other products like the videogames, comics or novels.

Their modules are best-sellers and that is very important.

In the worst case Paizo would be bought by Hasbro but this wouldn't be the end of the franchise at all. Paizo could still sell new titles with D&D 5th Ed rules, but it isn't necessary yet.

I am a collector, and I would rather books in my naive language, and where I live I can't buy the English version. I have to wait more time to ge certain titles, and any times I can't, for example the Spanish translation of Bestiary 3 and maybe ultimate magic guide.

 

[GrahamWills]

According to the calculater, yes. But it's kind of weird, because even the #1 only gives 1500 sales/month. That seems low for the #1 best selling book on Amazon.

Moral: It sucks being an author. Yeah, this is really the reality. We think of best-selling books selling millions per year, whereas actually 10,000 is a great number. Being an author is a decision to bring joy to others at the expense of your income. I am overwhelmingly grateful to those why try on this path.

 

[S'mon]

They've stabilized at a pretty great place, selling better than Starfinder or Call of Cthulu. Is it the best selling RPG of all time? No. If it needed to be they had deeper problems as a company.

The Gen Con thing is weird, though.

I'm a bit surprised they're behind Xanathar's on amazon.co.uk - I'm not surprised they're behind the 5e PHB, but I thought the core book would be up with the 5e DMG & MM at least for a while after release.

 

[Parmandur]

I'm a bit surprised they're behind Xanathar's on amazon.co.uk - I'm not surprised they're behind the 5e PHB, but I thought the core book would be up with the 5e DMG & MM at least for a while after release.

No reason to suppose that they would be: Xanathar's is one of the best selling D&D books ever made, recall.

 

[S'mon]

No reason to suppose that they would be: Xanathar's is one of the best selling D&D books ever made, recall.

I guess I didn't know it was so popular! It is good though - good stuff for both GMs and players.

 

[Mercador]

I'm a bit surprised they're behind Xanathar's on amazon.co.uk - I'm not surprised they're behind the 5e PHB, but I thought the core book would be up with the 5e DMG & MM at least for a while after release.

Yeah, as much as I like to write, it would be a financial suicide to try to do that as a living.

 

[Parmandur]

I guess I didn't know it was so popular! It is good though - good stuff for both GMs and players.

It started out it's publication history by hitting #1 on the major bookseller lists, and has remained a constant high seller on Amazon for nearly 2 years. Which is astonishingly absurd, in the history of secondary RPG supplements.

 

[Morrus]

I can speak to it, having gone by the Paizo booth numerous times and saw massive pallets of PF2 books there.

That's what you were supposed to see. They even posted lots of pictures of those massive pallets of PF2 books on social media. I mean, they could have brought along too few and sold out early (I did thatt with Luna-1 at UKGE - sold out by lunchtime first day; it's easy to do). I guess they preferred to keep on selling. The Gen Con sales are a little subset of the many more pallets in their warehouse.