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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Firevalkyrie" data-source="post: 4122152" data-attributes="member: 57371">A "Fantasy" or "OGL" heartbreaker is a game that somebody obviously put a lot of effort into, that is doomed to marketplace failure (or at least to low sales) because of insufficient differentiation from D&D, insufficient cash for marketing and so forth. Somebody (that being Paizo) is obviously putting a lot of effort into Pathfinder, but its chances of finding significant success in a market already saturated with high-fantasy RPGs (and a clear market leader in that segment which is also the market leader in the RPG segment overall) are pretty limited. At the Source - which is the biggest game store in Minnesota and one of the biggest in the country - I see lots of very pretty, very well-produced fantasy RPGs on the shelves; none of them save D&D sells well if at all. Stranger things have happened, but I wouldn't put my money on PRPG finding more than a tiny niche in the market.There's a huge difference, also, in the challenges faced by Pathfinder and D&D. Pathfinder merely has to cannibalize enough business from the curious and the interested to turn a profit for Paizo. D&D is the gateway game to the entire hobby. Except for a tiny percentage of outliers like me (started on Star Wars D6, maybe a month or two after it came out in 1987), almost everybody in this hobby started through D&D.I have 7 Pathfinder issues on my shelf, and from what I can see that's not on an Internet message board (which are by definition filled by the small proportion of people who are passionate enough about something to post about it on the internet), Pathfinder has NO real-world visibility at this moment. There are no copies in mainstream book or toy stores. Only some game stores carry the Pathfinder line - every game store and virtually every general-purpose bookstore at least carry SOME D&D product.Let's not fool ourselves, Pathfinder is only likely to draw attention from deep hobbyists unless Paizo has a LOT more backing than we think they do. Television, radio and print ads cost a LOT of money, money I doubt - but would be happy to be proven wrong - that Paizo has available.I'm not worried about Paizo's idea of their product's chances. But that post was written in response to somebody who was imagining for himself that Pathfinder has a nonzero chance of knocking off 4th Edition as the dominant game in the market. I have a dimmer view of what "the necessary funds" means than Dimitris. I'm sure he means enough to produce a pretty and slick hardcover RPG that will look nice sitting on the shelf at an FLGS. I mean enough to do what Wizards can do through Hasbro - get it into game, book and toy distribution channels and get print and possibly radio and television advertising out there so that people are made aware of the product without specifically seeking it out.Pathfinder's chance of doing that is exactly zero. Newcomer products with very little brick-and-mortar presence don't knock off highly established products with a heavy presence. Despite the increased prominence of E-tailers in recent years, brick-and-mortar stores still make up the overwhelming bulk of retail sales; E-commerce has only barely managed to become profitable overall in the last year or two. I'm not knocking what Paizo has accomplished with their store and with Pathfinder in only a handful of years and seven months respectively, but you're looking at the progress of a startup. It LOOKS like a lot of progress, but it's still only a VERY small company and there's a limit to both what it and its distribution network can handle. It looks like a nice game - and I will probably buy a copy and run it from time to time - but it's not going to change the world.Also, 2 companies would make a joint venture, and joint ventures in the consumer marketplace are inherently limited, that's the reason AT&T merged with BellSouth, to bring Cingular all under one roof so it could react more quickly and more decisively to conditions and changes in the wireless market.</blockquote>

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