The-Magic-Sword
Small Ball Archmage
I will say Roll20 and Amazon really might not be reliable metrics for this, over on the sub no one mentions roll20 when we're asked for VTT recommendations, and similarly a lot of people are probably buying direct from Paizo depending on Amazon price shenanigans, the demand for pdfs, and such. I get that they seem like the reliable metrics on the face of it, but Roll20 took hits from that whole controversy, Paizo's market is probably doing a little more research on which VTT they're using too since the product is aimed a little more at power users while still being accessible.
Meanwhile the people who are using this to spin their 'man, if paizo had just designed the game completely differently they wouldn't be failing' thing are bewildering, I think it would have nose dived had they gone in the direction of making it more like 5e, since it wouldn't offer the things it does now. Literally everyone who converts talks about the differences as being the motivator, there would be no reason to switch if it weren't the case.
Like, Look at this person, or this one, and then this. This is an almost daily thing-- most of the playerbase is from 5e, and self describes their reason for switching as being options, difficulty challenging their players, and even support for character optimization.
If anything I would use the growth of the subreddit to better capture the growth of interest in the system. Their growth has only really accelerated, which to me is pretty convincing evidence that the game as a whole is growing pretty aggressively-- more users are looking for resources and discussion on the game, regardless of what they're playing on, or where they're buying their books. Even though thats only a fraction of the market, I think it probably speaks to the greater volume of players that they represent a fraction of.
I'd actually argue the drop in Amazon sales might have more to do with that massive humble bundle deal they did a little while back, it literally cleaned out their entire stock of Core Rulebooks, it might have front loaded a lot of the interest and channeled it away from Amazon.
Meanwhile the people who are using this to spin their 'man, if paizo had just designed the game completely differently they wouldn't be failing' thing are bewildering, I think it would have nose dived had they gone in the direction of making it more like 5e, since it wouldn't offer the things it does now. Literally everyone who converts talks about the differences as being the motivator, there would be no reason to switch if it weren't the case.
Like, Look at this person, or this one, and then this. This is an almost daily thing-- most of the playerbase is from 5e, and self describes their reason for switching as being options, difficulty challenging their players, and even support for character optimization.
If anything I would use the growth of the subreddit to better capture the growth of interest in the system. Their growth has only really accelerated, which to me is pretty convincing evidence that the game as a whole is growing pretty aggressively-- more users are looking for resources and discussion on the game, regardless of what they're playing on, or where they're buying their books. Even though thats only a fraction of the market, I think it probably speaks to the greater volume of players that they represent a fraction of.
I'd actually argue the drop in Amazon sales might have more to do with that massive humble bundle deal they did a little while back, it literally cleaned out their entire stock of Core Rulebooks, it might have front loaded a lot of the interest and channeled it away from Amazon.