NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Maggan" data-source="post: 5182084" data-attributes="member: 6616">This is speculation.Paizo started as a support company for D&D3e and managed to capitalise on their relationship to the D&D brand after Dragon and Dungeon were pulled. Thus, they managed to convert many of the customers to the new AP format, which was a very smart move.But, as someone else has mentioned, Paizo is also the only company in the history of RPGs to have such a head start: an entire database of subscribers who were willing to pay for content. I don't know the conversion rate they managed, but even if they just managed to convert around 20%, that'd still translate in thousands of customers, willing to pay for content on a subscription basis.I'd kill (figuratively speaking of course) to start an adventure publishing business with that kind of foundation in place.This also occurred roughly as WotC started winding down D&D3e, basically ceding that market to whomever was left, i.e. Paizo. After D&D4e was released, or arguably after Paizo realised that the GSL wasn't their idea of a sound business foundation, they decided to put the Pathfinder rules on the market. IMO this in itself is a testament to the fact that "modules don't sell": the rules of the game were available for free on the internet, and the D&D3 rulebooks can be bought for a song on eBay, and yet Paizo needs to have a core rulebook in place.Maybe the Pathfinder book scratches the "it's gotta be in print otherwise I won't buy the modules" itch that many gamers have, but I also believe that Paizo will start to transition to more rulebooks during the end of 2010 and during 2011. Add to this that the Pathfinder RPG was the huge success story of GenCon, selling tens of thousands of books. In an RPG market where a couple of thousand is considered a resounding success.So ... hmmm ... I think that the need for a Pathfinder RPG was not urgent due to the rules being readily available in other books or on the net, and that the momentum of D&D3e carried over for Paizo until they managed to get Pathfinder in place.The reason they sold modules in defiance of the commonly accepted conventional wisdom before the Pathfinder core rules were released was that they managed to capitalise on their exclusive access to a loyal customer base which were already spending money regularly, i.e. the Dungeon and Dragon customers.I suspect that Paizo will indeed end up doing that, once the subscribers have had their fill of adventure material. After 5000 pages, how many more pages can you sell to basically the same customer base? Another 5000? 10000? 1000? I don't know, but I believe that Paizo knows.But given the subscription model, they might shift the adventure material into being more rules material, thus negating the need for a heavy hardback every other month. I think Paizo is successful because they started with a customer base that was ready to spend money regularly, and managed to build a business foundation on top of that.It has, IMO and all that of course, very little to do with fluff or adventures, and everything to do with capitalising on a unique opportunity and shaping the product on offer to fit the customer base available.Why do I say that? While Paizo produces excellent stuff, they aren't the only ones to do so, and not the only ones to ever have done so. There's been people producing stellar fluff and adventures who haven't been able to reap the rewards as Paizo has, so to me it's obvious that there are other factors in play.That said, if Paizo didn't produce top notch stuff, their business model would likely collapse due to churn among the customer base. They need to be the best to stay the best, which seems like an obvious thing to say, but many, many companies forget that.Finally, when looking back at the major thing that the two most successful RPGs today have in common, it is ... a working subscription model.All this from my armchair ... well, IKEA office chair, but unless I have overestimated the importance and success of the Paizo subscription model, I would be surprised if someone from Paizo came out and said: "hey dude, you are soooo wrong."Which of course means that Erik or James or Lisa will be along on a moment saying precisely that. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />Cheers!/M</blockquote>

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