Pathfinder 2E What's the deal with 3rd party PF2E Adventure "support"??

[dmccoy1693]

This is what I've heard it comes down to. A lot of 3PP are no longer putting their stuff up on Paizo due to the cut that Paizo takes. DriveThruRPG and Open Gaming Store seem to offer much better terms.

DriveThruRPG takes 35% of the sale (or 30% if you sign an exclusive contract)
Paizo takes 25%
The Open Gaming Store takes 20%.

Compare that to having your own webstore that takes 2.9% + $0.30/transaction. This is why Kobold Press releases much more in their own website than at DTRPG.

Paizo's site is a pain in the butt, especially the publisher side of things. Not only that it offers the least details about sales, details that can help make sales. That would be forgivable if the sales are there, which they are not anymore and haven't been since they redesigned their website. Frankly I suspect that the biggest thing that hurt sales at Paizo's site is the elimination of the store blog. Before the website design, they had a daily blog advertising some product in their store and links to the recent blogs were emailed to their entire customer base every week. They had a regular 3PP Roundup blog that made a difference in getting sales there. They stopped doing that not long before the website redesign. When that ended, sales dropped.

DriveThruRPG has tools in their site to get noticed: banner ads, featured products, an email customers tool, etc. The Open Gaming Store has d20pfsrd, the 5esrd, the 13thAgeSRD, and more that let a publisher post their material on their site, in a "try before you buy" idea. The only thing Paizo offers is their forums. With customers shifting towards Facebook and Discord, a forum alone is not as useful as it use to be. Their tools for encouraging sales at their site are not keeping up with the times.

 

[Morrus]

No, but how many other games can boast multiple successful 3PP publishers and their own version of the DM's Guild? The folks running Chaosium now are closely modeling their marketing on WotC and it appears to be paying off.

All these guys.

DriveThruRPG.com Community Content Programs

DriveThruRPG.com works with game publishers on two types of programs which allow you to create your own content for your favorite games: one for RPGs (like D&D, Traveler, Cortex, and Cypher System) and one for card games (like Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, Boss Monster, and others).

www.drivethrurpg.com

 

[Philip Benz]

DrivethruRPG takes 30% off the top - if it's exclusively sold on their site.

For me, the frustrating thing with 3pp work is not being able to use Golarion lore in any way, shape or form. When I write an adventure, I'd like to have a robust setting behind it, with gods, nations, ethnic groups and so on. Instead you have to either make it super generic, or else do up a robust setting yourself to use as reference.

 

[Morrus]

DrivethruRPG takes 30% off the top - if it's exclusively sold on their site.

For me, the frustrating thing with 3pp work is not being able to use Golarion lore in any way, shape or form. When I write an adventure, I'd like to have a robust setting behind it, with gods, nations, ethnic groups and so on. Instead you have to either make it super generic, or else do up a robust setting yourself to use as reference.

The point of the OGL is to drive creation. The whole idea is that you do, indeed, create your own setting.

 

[Parmandur]

No, but how many other games can boast multiple successful 3PP publishers and their own version of the DM's Guild? The folks running Chaosium now are closely modeling their marketing on WotC and it appears to be paying off.

Right, precisely my point. It's not necessarily that PF2 is getting little 3rd party support as such, just more normal third party support for a non+3.x game.

 

[Bravesteel25]

DriveThruRPG takes 35% of the sale (or 30% if you sign an exclusive contract)
Paizo takes 25%
The Open Gaming Store takes 20%.

Compare that to having your own webstore that takes 2.9% + $0.30/transaction. This is why Kobold Press releases much more in their own website than at DTRPG.

Paizo's site is a pain in the butt, especially the publisher side of things. Not only that it offers the least details about sales, details that can help make sales. That would be forgivable if the sales are there, which they are not anymore and haven't been since they redesigned their website. Frankly I suspect that the biggest thing that hurt sales at Paizo's site is the elimination of the store blog. Before the website design, they had a daily blog advertising some product in their store and links to the recent blogs were emailed to their entire customer base every week. They had a regular 3PP Roundup blog that made a difference in getting sales there. They stopped doing that not long before the website redesign. When that ended, sales dropped.

DriveThruRPG has tools in their site to get noticed: banner ads, featured products, an email customers tool, etc. The Open Gaming Store has d20pfsrd, the 5esrd, the 13thAgeSRD, and more that let a publisher post their material on their site, in a "try before you buy" idea. The only thing Paizo offers is their forums. With customers shifting towards Facebook and Discord, a forum alone is not as useful as it use to be. Their tools for encouraging sales at their site are not keeping up with the times.

Thanks for the correction and the extra information! That's just what I had heard, glad to get better details.

 

[Shroomy]

All these guys.

DriveThruRPG.com Community Content Programs

DriveThruRPG.com works with game publishers on two types of programs which allow you to create your own content for your favorite games: one for RPGs (like D&D, Traveler, Cortex, and Cypher System) and one for card games (like Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, Boss Monster, and others).

www.drivethrurpg.com

Sure, and I believe the Miskatonic Repository was one of the first ones after the DMs Guild; plus, they also have 3PP publishers creating CoC-specific supplements which was my main point.

 

[JeffB]

Sure, and I believe the Miskatonic Repository was one of the first ones after the DMs Guild; plus, they also have 3PP publishers creating CoC-specific supplements which was my main point.

It was. And there have always been 3PP supplements for CoC- since 1982. Theatre of the Mind Enterprises anyone? Grenadier minis wrote a book, nd plenty of others. Wasn't Delta Green originally a 3PP product? (still may be?)

 

[Doctor Futurity]

The amount of 3PP support I have, in print, on my game shelves right now for Pathfinder 2E is more than I did after the first three years of D&D 5E, so it seems ahead to me.

I'm more interested in the fact that so many PF1E 3PPs continue to come out, and that not as many of those publishers seem willing to migrate (Legendary Games, Raging Swan and some others being the exception). I personally chalk it up to an aging cottage industry with nominal sales figures: you're in a rut, you know this particular system (1E), and you don't have a lot of time or existing financial incentive to publish for the new system. But enough support material for PF2E explaining how to create content exists from Paizo to allow for new content design....but the specifics of PF2E design ethos (the tighter bandwidth on encounter ranges) as well as newer rule designs such as ancestry mechanics and the class design I bet make it hard to just write new PF2E content without putting more effort into redesign rather than basic conversion. It's not a straight translation/rules update, in other words.

Also, as a fan of PF2E I've noticed it does a pretty good job of giving the GM more tools for content design on his/her own, and as a result takes some pressure off of needing 3PP content to fill a gap.

 

[Retreater]

The amount of 3PP support I have, in print, on my game shelves right now for Pathfinder 2E is more than I did after the first three years of D&D 5E, so it seems ahead to me.

I'm more interested in the fact that so many PF1E 3PPs continue to come out, and that not as many of those publishers seem willing to migrate (Legendary Games, Raging Swan and some others being the exception). I personally chalk it up to an aging cottage industry with nominal sales figures: you're in a rut, you know this particular system (1E), and you don't have a lot of time or existing financial incentive to publish for the new system. But enough support material for PF2E explaining how to create content exists from Paizo to allow for new content design....but the specifics of PF2E design ethos (the tighter bandwidth on encounter ranges) as well as newer rule designs such as ancestry mechanics and the class design I bet make it hard to just write new PF2E content without putting more effort into redesign rather than basic conversion. It's not a straight translation/rules update, in other words.

Also, as a fan of PF2E I've noticed it does a pretty good job of giving the GM more tools for content design on his/her own, and as a result takes some pressure off of needing 3PP content to fill a gap.

I, for one, would love to see some good adventures for PF2. Paizo isn't producing anything I like these days. The 3PP stuff I've picked up hasn't been impressive. The one KS I backed for an Adventure Path basically stopped sharing updates with me because of some weird technical snafu, and I can't download the PDFs. I don't really care because the first several volumes were not great.