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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celtavian" data-source="post: 6664531" data-attributes="member: 5834">You and Tony are wrong in this instance. What of it? A reactionary bunch of statements doesn't change that. Why would someone be so offended because someone tells them they are wrong when they are dismissive of obvious events such as saying, "Paizo isn't viewed as a serious competitor." That's unbelievably foolish statement no business could afford to make. The fact that you're a fan allows you to make such a statement. But WotC can't make that statement. They are competing with Paizo for customers. Pathfinder is D&D. Everyone that played in the last ten years knows what it was based on.Let me turn this around and you can assess for yourself. It's pretty easy to see. If you own a company that allows another company to build a game system off an old game system you owned that takes a sizeable chunk of your customers, is that a business problem? If you owned that business, what would you do?  Explain to me in business terms how what Paizo did was a positive for Wizards of the Coast's D&D division? What is an acceptable loss of your customer base to a competing game system that directly took customers from you due to displeasure with the game system you released to replace the old game system? You always want as close to 100% adoption of your new game system as possible, right? If Paizo is the company that siphoned a sizeable chunk of that customer base preventing near 100% adoption, why would WotC not view them as a serious competitor? Explain that in business terms. My business acumen does allow me to assess situations like these. Does it surprise you that someone in the gaming hobby would assess businesses as part of their other activities. I do a lot of investing. That means I study a lot of businesses and how they function. My education background is business. I study a lot of financial statements. I  study how businesses take and sustain market share. Is it any different than say a person that studies history or science in their spare time or does it for a living? I'm not going to say RPG/gaming companies are my specialty. They certainly aren't. Gaming companies are not the best investments. They require a lot of R&D expense to keep abreast of the competition. They are dependent upon subjective customer tastes. It is a highly competitive industry that is hard to dominate for long periods of time. Even if you do build a dominant position, some game from an unknown company can come out and unseat you as top dog and there's practically nothing you can do about it once customers have migrated to a new game adopting it as their favorite. I don't like the risk associated with investing in gaming companies. Maybe as quick hit investment aimed at making money off a monster grower like WoW or StarCraft, but not as a long-term investment.  Sorry you don't like talking business. I do. I'd love to see the internal business discussions that WotC had when Paizo started to take market share. That would interest someone like me that likes to study business. I would love some tell all book that took me into the business meeting rooms at WotC and Paizo to see what it was like when they were splitting the D&D customer base up. I would find that fascinating. Just as I would find the financial statements interesting to see what portion of revenue was siphoned off by Paizo. What effect it had on WotC's TTRPG division. What WotC has planed to recover it. Maybe someday someone will write that book. At the moment that information is not readily available. I would have sift Hasbro's financial statements pretty closely to glean anything of use. Since I'm not investing in Hasbro and don't plan to any time soon, I'd rather spend my free time looking over the financials of other companies. This is an entertaining discussion of business principles and how they apply to the TTRPG industry. I find it odd that some would claim that Paizo didn't take a significant enough market share from WotC to cause them to both view Paizo as a serious competitor and look to change their game to recover market share. To someone like me it is glaringly obvious. You just never let someone take your market share. It's even more embarrassing that they did it with an older version of your game. If I had worked at WotC during that time period, I would have been looking for another job as soon as the writing was on the wall. It is a completely unacceptable concatenation of circumstances that led to the existence and success of Paizo from a business perspective.I will leave it at that since I'm offending your sensibilities. You think what you want to think. But I intend to look at it through the lense of a business person studying a business problem: two companies competing for a splintered market.</blockquote>

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