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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6067403" data-attributes="member: 2067">I think it's a subtle, but real, change in scope.WotC is part of a publicly traded company, Hasbro. This means that one of the stakeholders in anything they do is the investors, and investors are a particularly weird group of people to try and please because they are skittish and often irrational and their incentives are squarely on the stock price and have little to do with the actual product. An investor has no real desire to have the company produce something useful or high-quality, they just want the company to produce something insanely profitable at as high a profit as it can reasonably be produced.It's likely that Mike Mearls and Jeremy Crawford don't really have to take that into account on a day-to-day basis, but I can be reasonably confident that it affects decisions along the chain. For instance, you may see the hand of the investors in how 4e dropped the OGL, fumbled the GSL, and perhaps focused too tightly on brand definition early on. That's kind of speculation on my part, but if the bottom line is your ultimate concern, it's easy to see how short-sighted things like this can happen. There's no obvious and intuitive benefit to giving away your product -- it's too "experimental." Paizo absolutely has a bottom-line concern, but they're not a publicly traded company, so this gives them some flexibility. Most publicly traded companies (read: probably Hasrbo) get hosed, legally-speaking, if their shareholders find out they made any decision that was against the shareholders' interest. And they also have remarkably conservative legal teams, most often. Paizo, as an LLC, needs to keep everyone employed and happy, but they don't need to keep their stockholders in the black, too, so they're freer to do their own thing. It's kind of an ownership/management dichotomy thing (Adam Smith has some words on the topic).Again, that doesn't necessarily affect everyone's day-to-day jobs, and in WotC's case it might not even be an actual concern (I've got no insights into their management policies), but being publicly traded can hammer your flexibility due to the fact that a bunch of people who are only really interested in your profit margins and who skitter away like frightened kobolds at the first sign of trouble need to be convinced that it's not so scary when you're doing new or different or even just unusual things like opening your mouth to communicate with fans on message boards. Which is...tough. On the bright side, if they like you, you are like unto a god. And it helps distribute risk. The Hasbro investors might not be paying a lot of attention to what WotC is over there doing in Redmond (even if it's awkward) as long as GI Joe and the Transformers are going strong. If a Paizo release bombs, they are much more directly affected by the fallout. Which probably plays into why Pathfinder Online has a Kickstarter. N'stuff.</blockquote>

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