(The title is taken from Philip Pullman's book, «The good man Jesus and the scoundrel Christ»)
So, I was reading another thread, and read a poster write:
And, you know, he's right. Many people here indeed think and refer to Paizo as a good-hearted company that wants to keep on sharing with the OGL, distributing and updating the 3.5e ruleset, give candy to everyone. The same people ofter refer to WotC as a candy-stealing, evil monster who wants to kill D&D and kick its corpse until it is barely recognisable; a company who failingly wanted to appeal to videogame players, who releases books, supplements, and new editions only for money grabbing purposes. I know that I'm overstating, but you know it to be true at the core.
Now, only at an hypothetical level, what if it was
the opposite?
I mean, Paizo didn't really invent something. I think they don't even have the resources nor the experience to develop a full-featured game like D&D 3.5e all by themselves. All they did before PF (correct me if i'm wrong, because i had never heard of them before) was to publish supplements and adventures.
All Paizo did was take an existing system released with an open license, add some changes and update what was strictly necessary (grapple rules, some underperforming classes), then resell it with a new brand. Heck, they didn't even solve one of the biggest problems of 3.5e, the all-powerfulness of wizards at higher levels, i.e. the exponential growing of spellcasters compared to the linear growing of other classes. You can speculate that they hadn't got a clue on how the system worked in the inside, otherwise they could have gone further and fix the huge problems of balance.
You could also say that they did this only to keep publishing adventures and modules the same way they did before, so they didn't need to change system or to reinvent theirselves. Some could say that they exploited 4e's situation (bad reception) by reprinting 3.5e at little cost compared to its production value.
And now they are getting near (some say they even outdid) WotC in terms of selling revenue. Well, I would call this a huge money-grab. You do relatively nothing compared to the huge work required to develop a big RPG, and become a selling competitor to the market leader. If there weren't the OGL, this could have been brought in court and Paizo would have lost. In fact, even though the laws on IP don't cover rules, Paizo basically reprinted whole sections of the 3.5e Player's Handbook with minimal changes.
In fact, the OGL, which was initially seen as a godsend by the RPG community, was a huge
-up for WotC. It permitted all sorts of alternative RPGs based on its excellent (at the time) ruleset, that one by one stole some market share to D&D. Paizo exploited this weakness without shame.
On the other hand, WotC worked their asses off to make 4th Edition, and they didn't do as well as they expected. The most insulting thing is that some people have been referring to
them as the money grabbers, and then switched to Pathfinder declaring their love for Paizo. Now, you can say many bad things about the marketing, PR and administration teams at WotC, but that doesn't mean that the developers worked really hard on the system and made the changes that they thought to be best for the game. And now they lost half their userbase.
In my opinion, WotC is just a normal company faced with the economic crisis and the difficulties of standing up in a market like this. Paizo, insted, are the real money grabbers, exploiting others' excellent work.
Now, to conclude, a little disclaimer: I didn't want to talk about the products, which were both produced by WotC (I refuse to consider Pathfinder a Paizo product, even if it legally is) and are both excellent products. I wanted to talk about the companies. All of this is mainly to make you think about the issue, I didn't want to state any facts, even if I did.
Discuss.
