Pathfinder 2E Release Day Second Edition Amazon Sales Rank

[Mistwell]

Yes, I do!

Go to this website, and in the "ASIN" blank enter the number: 1640781684. That'll give you the daily Amazon rank of the PF2 core rulebook for the last two years. (It'll also give you the lowest FBA price each day, and the lowest price with shipping each day.)

Here's the full graph:
View attachment 132561
For reference: the graph starts in April 2019, the low point on the left is July 2019 (release date), and the upward bump in in the middle starts in March 2020 (onset of the pandemic).

Wow thank you.

And...wow. That's grim. While Covid clearly harms their sales quite a lot (I assume in a shift to focusing on digital), PF1 was selling around the 1000-2000 range for a period of at least four years prior to the announcement of PF2. This chart shows PF2 has pretty consistently fallen to fewer sales than PF1 by October 2019. So before Covid, it was already laging the prior many-years of PF1.

 

[kayman]

Is the PDF sales are been taking into the acount ? For example i am from Brasil (Brazil) and the physical copies are to expensive to me so i bought all the pdfs avaiable from PF2 on the paizo website... My question is ... How much the PDF sales represent the profits of a company like Paizo? Is the way to see how many pdfs paizo sold? Sorry for my bad english...

 

[Justice and Rule]

Wow thank you.

And...wow. That's grim. While Covid clearly harms their sales quite a lot (I assume in a shift to focusing on digital), PF1 was selling around the 1000-2000 range for a period of at least four years prior to the announcement of PF2. This chart shows PF2 has pretty consistently fallen to fewer sales than PF1 by October 2019. So before Covid, it was already laging the prior many-years of PF1.

I think you are not looking at all the factors on that chart. First off, it seems like the massive price spike for physical copies on Amazon probably had something to do with it; previous to then, you could do what I did and buy the books for cheap and then get the PDF for roughly around what the subscriber price was. That stopped when the price went skyrocketed. If you're hard up on money (which many people have been), becomes harder to buy that physical copy.

The second part is you keep saying "4 years prior to the announcement of PF2", but that's 2014, just before 5E drops. The RPG market is completely different then.

Third, if you look up where PF1 CRB around when 2E was announced, it was in the mid-teens (it got a small boost back up, from what I suspect were people buying copies assuming it would become scarce or expensive soon). But it was doing far worse in a good market compare to where PF2 is now in a problematic market.

 

[Mistwell]

I think you are not looking at all the factors on that chart. First off, it seems like the massive price spike for physical copies on Amazon probably had something to do with it; previous to then, you could do what I did and buy the books for cheap and then get the PDF for roughly around what the subscriber price was. That stopped when the price went skyrocketed. If you're hard up on money (which many people have been), becomes harder to buy that physical copy.

The second part is you keep saying "4 years prior to the announcement of PF2", but that's 2014, just before 5E drops. The RPG market is completely different then.

Third, if you look up where PF1 CRB around when 2E was announced, it was in the mid-teens (it got a small boost back up, from what I suspect were people buying copies assuming it would become scarce or expensive soon). But it was doing far worse in a good market compare to where PF2 is now in a problematic market.

Let's talk about your second point. I am not saying what you think I am saying. I am not saying it was selling in the 1000-2000 range up until 2014. I am saying we only have data from CamelCamelCamel going BACK TO 2014. But from 2014-2018, for that entire four year period, PF1 was selling in the 1000-2000 range. In other words, until Paizo announced PF2, PF1 was selling in the 1000-2000 range.

The RPG market was not, in any way, "completely different" in 2018. All the factors in play in 2018 were in play in the month prior to Covid, for instance. So no, I'll repeat: PF2 after only a few months is now selling lower than PF1 was selling, right up until the end of PF1 when PF2 was announced. Not four years ago (though ALSO four years ago), but JUST PRIOR.

As for your third point, it's not correct. PF1 core rulebook is what was selling in the 1000-2000 range when 2e was announced. That's a fact. You can see it on the CamelCamelCamel chart I posted (though admittedly it's difficult to be precise, that's roughly the range). It was not doing "far worse in a good market" it was doing "far better". That's why I am talking about it.

To return to your first point, I think it's impossible to pin this on pricing issues. Amazon prices rise and fall, and Erik Mona has commented on that issue on Reddit, but over time you get a fair picture. We have FOUR FULL YEARS of data for PF1, and now we have all the data of PF2, and the trend lines all remain consistent regardless of occasional spikes and dips in pricing.

 

[Retreater]

As for VTTs ... Foundry is the best VTT for Pathfinder 2e. ( my past experiences is with Roll20 and Astral) ...

I mean that's great and all, but if your system hardly works on the most popular VTT, you have a problem (even if it's not Paizo's fault). Being good on Foundry is like making an app that isn't available on Apple or Google devices but works on Linux computers.
Which I think is the direction Paizo is going anyway. Pathfinder is becoming defiantly niche and proudly inaccessible to casual players. Their modules are about zany themes that don't connect with many players; their APs are so challenging that only the cream of the crop power gamers have a chance to survive.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Clarification: in the Orr Reports, PF2 has been rising each time. PF1 has been declining.

Paizo's total share of Roll20 has declined from 24% in Q4 2014 to 6% in Q3 2020.

 

[dave2008]

Is the PDF sales are been taking into the acount ? For example i am from Brasil (Brazil) and the physical copies are to expensive to me so i bought all the pdfs avaiable from PF2 on the paizo website... My question is ... How much the PDF sales represent the profits of a company like Paizo? Is the way to see how many pdfs paizo sold? Sorry for my bad english...

No, what is currently being compared is the sales rank* on Amazon only. We have no idea how much they are selling on their own site. But that hasn't change in the period being discussed (2014 - now).

*I just want to be clear we are discussing sales ranking, not actual sales. We don't know what those are either.

 

[dave2008]

Paizo's total share of Roll20 has declined from 24% in Q4 2014 to 6% in Q3 2020.

Have the total # of users dropped though. I think a lot of that has to do with 5e taking a bigger % because it added so many users, but I don't know that the absolute numbers for PF changed that much.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Have the total # of users dropped though. I think a lot of that has to do with 5e taking a bigger % because it added so many users, but I don't know that the absolute numbers for PF changed that much.

Both roll20 and 5e have grown a lot, and Orr stopped reporting totals after 2018. What we do know from ICV2 reports is that the size of the RPG industry has approximately doubled in terms of cash flow. If Paizo is stagnant in terms of revenue, we'd expect its market share to drop by about half since then. The question is how good is Roll20 as a proxy for total market share, and the answer is, "I don't know."

 

[fearsomepirate]

The reason I'm being vague is what we're seeing from Paizo could go one of two ways: Either they're seeing healthy growth, and are commensurately expanding their products, or they're struggling to maintain their current level of operations and are flailing about to find sources of revenue. I'm being 100% truthful when I say I truly have no idea which it is, because, as I said, two companies can look very similar on the outside and have wildly different financial pictures. I can say that the heady days of 2010-2013, where they legitimately thought that Pathinder might displace D&D as king of the TTRPGs, and were financing projects like Kingmaker and Online, appear to be long behind them, and now their main goal is to find a survivable niche large enough that they don't have to seriously scale back operations.