Pathfinder 2E Release Day Second Edition Amazon Sales Rank

[darjr]

And it does look like it started the trend downwards at 5e's launch

 

[Acolyte of Zothique]

Sure. Pathfinder 2 embraces the grit of being an adventurer in a way that 5th Edition does not. It portrays a world with deeply threatening monsters that will leave you bruised, bloody, and beaten. Long term consequences like diseases, poisons, and curses are plentiful. Combat is brutal. Both player characters and monsters go down quickly.

It portrays a fiction where shields get broken, adventurers have to hole up treating each others wounds, magic is as fraught with risk as anything mundane, powerful rituals require many people to cast and can take days, and where not every spell caster has access to powerful spells like teleport, mind blank, scrying, and raise dead.

It focuses on the details of the fiction. Do I raise my shield? Do I search or try to stay hidden from patrols? How long can we afford to rest? Whose wounds will get treated? If I take this treasure I will be encumbered. Can I deal with that? Where do I look for that hidden Rogue? My shield is pretty beaten. Can I afford to block this attack? Do you pick up shifts as a bartender between adventures to supplement your income? Do you seek out a mentor to help you learn a new technique? Do you spend time crafting consumables?

It also embeds level directly in the narrative. You get meaningfully stronger as you level and succeed against lower level creatures more and higher level creatures less. Higher level enemies are scary because it takes a lot more to impact them and when they strike they strike harder. It's a desperate experience.

It also embeds your character directly into the setting of the game. When you play a Cleric, the spells you have access to, your available Domains, your skill training, and a specific list of edicts to follow and anathema to avoid all depend on the specific deity you follow. Champions swear a specific set of oaths dependent on their alignment as well as being bound by the edicts and anathema of the deity they serve. As a Barbarian your Instinct also provides an Anathema and grounds to a specific source of your rage. A sorcerer's Bloodline directly connects them to one of various sources of supernatural power. The game calls out this impacts how others will perceive and treat them. There are also archetypes grounded directly in the setting with specific fictional requirements that any character can take.

If you use the optional rules in the 5e DMG you can make D&D5e as brutal and bloody as you want. I know this for a fact as I've done exactly this for my Ravenloft campaign which is coming up to it's 2 year anniversary. Default 5e is heroic fantasy; the rules are in place to make it as gritty and dark as you want.

So, what is the selling point of Pathfinder2e beyond this - bearing in mind that extra crunchy rules and more character customisation over 5e is not a selling plus for me?

 

[Mistwell]

Found one of the graphs. This was harder than it needed to be.
Pathfinder sales rank from camelcamelcamel when they still provided it.


View attachment 113928

How did you even find old CamelCamelCamel Amazon sales rank data?

 

[darjr]

Digging and arcane google foo.

PF2 broke 3000 sales rank pathfinder 2nd is at 3135

 

[Parmandur]

Digging and arcane google foo.

PF2 broke 3000 sales rank pathfinder 2nd is at 3135
View attachment 113959

I noticed that the Bestiary has fallen to #7,576, still hanging in the top 50 just below Out of the Abyss and Dragon Heist.

 

[Campbell]

Demand for The Lost Omens World Guide has dramatically exceeded what Paizo has initially printed. It is currently on backorder with both Amazon and Paizo. Some secondary sellers still have copies.

This is mostly a case of the distributor estimating demand improperly.

 

[Mistwell]

Digging and arcane google foo.

PF2 broke 3000 sales rank pathfinder 2nd is at 3135

Based on the data you dug up, the last time PF1 was at around the 3000 mark was Sept 2017. Which was meaningfully down from their high of around 650 prior to the release of 5e.

According to the data I've seen on number of books sold as represented by that bestseller rank (and I don't know how accurate this is) it looks like they were selling about 150 PF1 Core books a day on Amazon prior to 5e being released, and are now selling about 70 PF2 Core books a day (as of this moment, which obviously is changing a lot right now).

 

[Mistwell]

Demand for The Lost Omens World Guide has dramatically exceeded what Paizo has initially printed. It is currently on backorder with both Amazon and Paizo. Some secondary sellers still have copies.

This is mostly a case of the distributor estimating demand improperly.

It sounds like a good sign though. It's hopeful that sales are strong.

 

[Arilyn]

It's really hard to know exactly how well a game is doing for a company, even with Amazon sales ranks. Paizo sells a lot directly through their store and subscription service, which cuts out the middle man. Paizo has an online store with a lot of other company products for sale, including WOTC. We don't have any idea how much revenue this brings in. It's a different time, and we also don't know if Paizo needs to sell as much PF2 as PF1, during it's peak. Is Paizo happy with current sales, ecstatic, worried, panicking? No way to know.

As far as how popular it is compared to 5e? Well, in this market no one is going to be able to touch the magic of the brand label and name recognition of D&D.

 

[darjr]

People keep saying that, but it didn’t keep them on top when TSR faltered or at the end of 4e. It is a fact that it takes more than the brand name.