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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Maggan" data-source="post: 5182338" data-attributes="member: 6616">Paizo was official D&D. That carries a lot more weight than being a 3pp in the crowd. Neither do I. They worked hard, but the fact remans: when Dragon and Dungeon were pulled, Paizo had something no other company has ever had, namely the names and credit card numbers of 50 000 odd customers. That wanted periodical support and were willing to pay for it. Of course they want to do that. That's why they made the core book. Because their adventures wouldn't sell if there weren't rules for the game on the market.The momentum carried over from people having D&D3.5 and buying AP from Paizo could only last for a while. Yes. I don't think I said otherwise? If so, I apologise for being unclear. I'll clarify.You asked how Paizo could sell well before they released their core rules. I answered that I believe the momentum from D&D3.5 carried over, and that the availiability of the D&D3.5 books as well as the SRD on the internet meant they didn't need the core rules in print.Now they do, and I believe they will make more rulebooks, and make more money selling them than they do selling adventures.Yes. And many did go with 4th edition. The majority in fact. But Paizo converted enough to base their new business model on. Even if only a fraction of the Dragon and Dungeon customers stayed with Paizo, they were in a much better position than any other RPG company bar WotC and maybe White Wolf.   Okay. The Dark Heresy line (which I own in its entirety) consists of 9 books and a Game Master toolkit, of which three are adventures (one other adventure is upcoming). Thus the majority are rulebooks.Chaosium. Necromancer Games. Fantasy Flight. Privateer Press. Sword&Sorcery. Green Ronin (e.g. Freeport), Atlas Games, Columbia Games, Kenzer, West End Games ... and that's not looking very far back in history.Take some of the most lauded adventure campaigns in the history of RPGs, Masks of Nyarlathotep, Horror on the Orient Express and Beyond the Mountains of Madness.Brilliant. Groundbreaking. Massive. Cool. Fun. And still, Chaosium isn't taking the world by storm. No it's not. It's a subscription model. People pay for continual support. EN World has been saved by it. WotC seems to be doing alright by it. Paizo is doing great thanks to offering subscriptions, it was one of the things they based the entire launch of their AP strategy on.Subscriptions.And access to a database of customers prepared to give you money is a holy grail of any business. Take Apple e.g. they have a database of millions of people signed up to iTunes, and their credit card numbers. Every single competitor would kill for that database (they'd preferably kill Apple).It is my belief that what Paizo is doing right is running their business as pros. And making great stuff, but the key to their success is mainly how they run their business, not the quality of their offerings.If they started compromising on quality, they'd still survive. If they took out the business savvy, they'd collapse. Look, I'm saying that they are geniuses. Ok? They are brilliant, they make brilliant stuff. But there's much more to running a successful business than making brilliant stuff, that's all I'm saying./M</blockquote>

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