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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jimmy Dick" data-source="post: 8161402" data-attributes="member: 6994416">As a GM, player, and Venture Officer for Pathfinder Society via the Pathfinder 1 and 2 editions, I see a lot of players playing roughly 4 hour sessions with a fairly complex set of rules. I also see a good stream of new players coming to play with us. Most of this is currently online, but we still have a good amount of live games occurring (hopefully social distancing!). There is some truth to the statement about adding rules onto the base set until the system collapses under its own weight. Pathfinder 1st Edition did this spectacularly in my opinion. Yet, here is the problem for publishing companies. How do they continue to make a profit beyond the core set of rules?For many, it is via a gaming world and adventures set in that world while adding a steady stream of rulebooks. Eventually the system will once again collapse under its own weight. Yet, if that company does not publish additional rulebooks, some players consider the edition to be lacking in content. We have seen this with Pathfinder Second Edition where some were dissatisfied because they felt there were not enough options to choose from for game play. Striking a happy medium is not an easy thing to do.What is the future? For Paizo and Wizards of the Coast, it seems to be business as usual. For 3PP, the profit margins are going to continue to shrink. There is definitely going to be a shrinkage of 3PP over time. Some of this will be countered by those who write out of a labor of love, but they will not make a living doing it. I do think that really creative authors have a way to survive in the business, but they will need to move beyond writing gaming materials. They need to be writing fiction books set in the worlds they create. From there, they can create a set of rules for that world or use an existing rule set and develop the adventures for it. We certainly have seen enough game sets created from fiction before. Gaming as a whole is not going to suddenly grind to a halt. More people are playing the games. It is just the profitability of games that is in question. While ditching physical printing would definitely lower costs, I question if enough of the gaming audience will purchase digital only content. I still see digital publishing as the future of gaming, but I do not think we are there yet. I will say based on my own students and their use of digital content including 800 page textbooks, digital publishing has a solid future.</blockquote>

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