Pathfinder 1E You're the CEO of PAIZO. Now What?

[Princesskeyblade]

If I were CEO of Paizo... I would keep doing what they are doing.

Also I would give the employees vacations somewhere tropical once a year as a nice bonus.

On Customer Service:

We have had nothing but great customer service. When we picked up the Beta rules at GenCon, we opened the book to find a huge chunk taken out of a page. I went back and brought the book back with me, and explained what we had found. Not only did they let me keep the damaged one, they mailed another one out to our house (Because they were sold out) and we got it really fast.

Recently, my husband's order was tossed into a puddle in our driveway by our mailguy. (It was just a fill in, not our regular guy, who places it inside our door like it is an important package.) It was just a cardboard envelope so everything got wet and one book got destroyed. He called the customer service, just to let them know that the post office was handling their packages this way and not expecting them to give him anything (it wasn't their fault that the package was ruined on arrival) but they still mailed him out a new copy.

Their customer service is incredible. I love shoping with Paizo.

 

[malkav666]

If I was CEO of Paizo,

I would keep handling the Pathfinder lines exactly as they are being handled now. The APs are varied enough that many game styles are being hit upon (I am particularly excited about Kingmaker), and the other lines dealing with Pathfinder are pretty hot in their current format as well. The layout, art, and writing in most of the Pathfinder stuff is some of the best in the industry IMO.

I would try and establish some kind of electronic initiative. I would love to see a gametable, but maybe even some plug-ins to make it easier to run organized play type of events in current third party tables would be hot (like submission forms for characters and event results tied directly into the table) or to keep clients on these tables up to date with the various releases.

I would also try and promote more B&M store events. I am not sure what they are doing now in this arena, but it would be real cool to have some type of sanctioned events with maybe special modules or some type of swag or incentive for the store owners to promote it (once again I am not sure exactly what they are doing in this arena currently. I just know that my current FLGS has no regular scheduled Pathfinder events. Although folks do play Pathfinder in the gameroom regularly).

I would also do some type of streaming video sessions of some of these great "in house" games I read about in the Paizo blog. I woudl especially be interested in seeing some of the sessions from the game Sean K. started where everyone is high level and evil. Seeing some of these sessions on video (or even audio stream) I think would do wonders to promote the line. I get a lot of textual news from the Paizo folks, but I would definitely push some other types of multimedia for promotional purposes.

Thats what I would do.

As a side note, I have dealt with Paizo and their online store on many occasions (I normally buy from my FLGS but they sometimes miss issues and I pick up my spares and missed issues a few times a year from Paizo directly) and I have never received anything other than top-tier service from them. One of my friends got a book that was dinged and they replaced it with no hassle as well. And the other folks I game with that do business with them have spoken glowingly about their customer service as well. I found the "smack around your customer service" found a bit up thread very out character from the overall tone of the CS experiences of myself and my crew.

love,

malkav

 

[Maldin]

Ok, my earlier post in this thread was more tongue-in-cheek, but this is a serious topic, and therefore requires a more serious post as well.

I have to agree with alot of the things people are saying about Paizo's past and present. So far its been an amazing run, and I add my voice to the chorus of kudos for Lisa.

While there were a few things that Ryan Dancey did that I didn't agree with, when he and his team (including Lisa) created the d20 license and the new 3E philosophy... he took a company, and from it created an industry. That was nothing short of brilliant. We as fans watched with horror (certainly unmatched by the horror of being on the inside), as wave-after-wave of layoffs devastated the design side of D&D. All people whose creativity would have been lost forever to the hobby. However with the license, suddenly the best and brightest could do what they could never do before... continue producing post-WotC what the fans wanted most. High quality publications. I won't bother listing the award-winning companies that people have already listed, however this changed the RPG landscape forever. Paizo has become the shining star of that landscape.

Part of TSR's problem was mismanagement. For example, the insistance on continuing the Buck Rogers black hole, for reasons that had nothing to do with the company's health. Rule books were profitable, non-rules materials (adventures, settings) were not. Rather then figure out how to fix it, the quick post-TSR business decision was to cut out the non-rules material and concentrate on what they knew made them money. It was a quick (and understandable) fix to save the company financially, but that philosophy unfortunately continued even after the company was healthy again. With the d20 license, it was my impression (and correct me if I'm wrong) that WotC thought they could continue churning out the profitable rules products, and hoped that the burgeoning d20 community would take up the less profitable (yet just as necessary) adventure market. Guess what? That community recognized that rule books were more profitable, so they produced that instead, and left 3E players with a general (though not absolute) lack of material they could use all those rules books for.

Now that WotC's profit margin is as dependant on rules as a vampire is on blood, they must re-invent the game continually to keep selling rules. Planned obsolescence is a tried and true business model. Is it one the public likes? Not particularly, and hence the backlash by a non-trivial subset of their market every time D&D goes to a new edition. There is another business plan that also can work... quality and support that lasts. If you can pull it off. WotC could do it, but they seem to periodically purge themselves of the necessary talent. Where does the talent go? You guessed it. The d20 (and successor) companies. Create a tried and true rules set... leave it alone! (well, feel free to have rules expansion products) and produce material that feeds the hunger CREATED by the rules... campaign setting material, stand-alone adventures, and (Paizo's specialty) adventure paths.

WotC is the behemoth. They will always be successful no matter what they do. The Microsoft of the industry. Ok... within reason - its always possible to eventually bleed to death if you keep cutting yourself, but I don't really see that happening. Although the GSL is certainly a major wound.

I think if Paizo wants to continue to grow, they have to keep doing what they are doing... the things that WotC is NOT doing. When WotC goes to a new edition (and they will, its their business model), does that mean Paizo must also? No! I disagree with GVD on this. Pathfinder is successful because people didn't want to move to 4E and start over from scratch again. Any chance Paizo's market is gonna jump to 5E? NOT A CHANCE. Moving PF to an all-new edition would fly in the face of everything that has made Paizo successful. What? New players? Why should someone new to the hobby choose 4E (or 5E) over PF 3.5E? The only reason is subjective belief imposed by advertising and market penetration. Nothing to do with the actual rules set. People, this is not high technology! Despite a whole lot of really goofy, self-important, self-congratulatory editorializing about 'modern, state-of-the-art design'. It's a verbal, pen and paper table game! Any balanced, effective set of rules is a good set of rules if you like it. Why do you think there is still a huge population of players still using ALL of the past editions.

If Paizo tries to play WotC's game of constant rules re-boots, they'll lose. The competition is daunting. If Paizo continues to stress adventures and setting, they'll win. There is little (major - I'm not going to count all of the small-print-run companies out there) competition there, and thats the market that will continue to flock to PF. The key is to expand market penetration by advertising the hell out of yourself as the place to go for settings and adventures - the things that actually make the game fun.

You can't out-crunch the crunch-monster. You can easily out-fluff them.

I'd give my publisher a six-figure salary, a company car, and perhaps an easy-on-the-eyes secretary.

I am shocked to hear that Paizo's publisher is not already making a 6-figure salary, however! Shocked, I say! Paizo's CEO should definitely see about fixing that.

Denis, aka "Maldin"
Maldin's Greyhawk http://melkot.com
Edition-independent Fluff-central for the World of Greyhawk... maps, magic, mysteries, mechanics and more! Most recent update: Greyhawk's Underdark

 

[Wicht]

Slowly start working on an in-house rpg with the long-term goal to move away from d20 alltogether

I keep hearing this but I don't understand it. One of the big attractions of Pathfinder is that it is OGL d20. Paizo likes that because they get to keep using all sorts of neat OGL books (like Advanced Bestiary to name just one favorite) making their pool of storytelling tools larger. Their 3rd party supporters like this for nearly the same reasons. Their customers like this because it makes all their d20 books potentially useful into perpetuity. Doing away with all of these positives just because a few people have the idea that a company can only be considered successful when it produces its own standalone game rules and refuses to allow others to publish under these self same rules seems to me not to be not only foolish, but contrary to the very OGL spirit Paizo is continuing forward with.

To put it another way, I suspect if Paizo were to drop their support for Open Gaming a lot of us would lose some of our interest in them as an industry leader.

 

[Raven Crowking]

If I was the CEO of Paizo, I would be lucky if I was as half as good as the current CEO in making these sorts of decisions.

AFAICT, Paizo is in great hands.




RC

 

[Coldwyn]

I keep hearing this but I don't understand it. One of the big attractions of Pathfinder is that it is OGL d20. Paizo likes that because they get to keep using all sorts of neat OGL books (like Advanced Bestiary to name just one favorite) making their pool of storytelling tools larger. Their 3rd party supporters like this for nearly the same reasons. Their customers like this because it makes all their d20 books potentially useful into perpetuity. Doing away with all of these positives just because a few people have the idea that a company can only be considered successful when it produces its own standalone game rules and refuses to allow others to publish under these self same rules seems to me not to be not only foolish, but contrary to the very OGL spirit Paizo is continuing forward with.

To put it another way, I suspect if Paizo were to drop their support for Open Gaming a lot of us would lose some of our interest in them as an industry leader.

Ok, hopefully I can explain this in a meaningful way:
That´s a bit about market saturation and pre-planned sales figures. Like with any non-essential product, the sales curve will flatten over time until you´ve reached saturation of your market share. Add to this the fact that sales figures of follow-up products will inevitably be not as good as with core/central products.
Most companies need to find a way to deal with this, like planned obsolence or revised and expanded products. Now think about market splintering.

So, a huge number of customers who were really starved for the pathfinder rpg have already bought it. Second sales would have been 3.5 switchers and generally interested folks, which leaves the poor third wave to total newcomers and late switchers. Then we should reach the economic dead zone for the core rulebook.


At that point, which could happen around 2012 (pure estimation) we have a market fractured into three editions, 4E, 3.5E and PF. At that point, how would you decide as CEO? PF 2.0/PF Expanded, which could splinter the market once more, or take the chance at your own thing, maybe with an own OGL-type of licence attached, and take the chance to increase your market share? Consider, if everything goes wrong here, your market share doesn´t change, you "just" sank the development money into it for nothing.
Me, I´d take that risk.

 

[Voadam]

Not gonna happen. Being able to make new PDFs (or modify existing, or make AoW/ST hardcovers, or do Dragon Compendium 2) is not permitted by the deal Paizo has on the mags. We just all should be lucky that they weren't pulled down during The Great PDF Debacle...

Have you seen anything from Paizo you can link to on this? I remember hearing Paizo say they can't do compendiums, new dragon AP hardcovers, or a pdf of the Shackled City hardcover under the terms of their license. When I asked on their boards at the time of the WotC pdf removals Lisa said the Dragon/Dungeon licenses were separate and the Dragon/Dungeon pdfs would not be pulled down. I have not heard them say one way or the other about filling out their pdf sales offerings of the magazines they put out in print that have not been put up in pdf format yet though. I vaguely remember hearing that they were putting conversion of the remaining old ones on the back burner as they worked on Pathfinder APs and then the Pathfinder RPG. If there is a definite statement indicating otherwise I'd be interested in seeing it.

 

[Wicht]

Ok, hopefully I can explain this in a meaningful way:
That´s a bit about market saturation and pre-planned sales figures. Like with any non-essential product, the sales curve will flatten over time until you´ve reached saturation of your market share. Add to this the fact that sales figures of follow-up products will inevitably be not as good as with core/central products.
Most companies need to find a way to deal with this, like planned obsolence or revised and expanded products. Now think about market splintering.

So, a huge number of customers who were really starved for the pathfinder rpg have already bought it. Second sales would have been 3.5 switchers and generally interested folks, which leaves the poor third wave to total newcomers and late switchers. Then we should reach the economic dead zone for the core rulebook.


At that point, which could happen around 2012 (pure estimation) we have a market fractured into three editions, 4E, 3.5E and PF. At that point, how would you decide as CEO? PF 2.0/PF Expanded, which could splinter the market once more, or take the chance at your own thing, maybe with an own OGL-type of licence attached, and take the chance to increase your market share? Consider, if everything goes wrong here, your market share doesn´t change, you "just" sank the development money into it for nothing.
Me, I´d take that risk.

However, as Maldin pointed out, the success of Paizo is not entirely dependant on their ruleset: it's based in large part on their ability to write interesting adventures and tell interesting stories. That market won't shrink in the same way the market for a set of rules will.

Much as us avid readers keep buying nonessential books to read, regardless of how many novels we've already read (or bought); so too us avid adventure buyers will keep buying well written modules. We don't even buy them to run them half the time. We just want to read them. The strength of the OGL plays into the strength of Paizo - it creates a broad base of ideas from which one can steal ideas for adventures. By shutting themselves away from the OGL they cripple their ability to tell the kind of stories they enjoy telling (which was a big part of the reason they didn't jump on board the GSL).

 

[James Jacobs]

Have you seen anything from Paizo you can link to on this? I remember hearing Paizo say they can't do compendiums, new dragon AP hardcovers, or a pdf of the Shackled City hardcover under the terms of their license. When I asked on their boards at the time of the WotC pdf removals Lisa said the Dragon/Dungeon licenses were separate and the Dragon/Dungeon pdfs would not be pulled down. I have not heard them say one way or the other about filling out their pdf sales offerings of the magazines they put out in print that have not been put up in pdf format yet though. I vaguely remember hearing that they were putting conversion of the remaining old ones on the back burner as they worked on Pathfinder APs and then the Pathfinder RPG. If there is a definite statement indicating otherwise I'd be interested in seeing it.

We got as many of the magazines set up as PDFs as we could before our license to produce magazine content ended. At that point, we turned all of the art and files and resources for the magazines over to WotC, since they owned all of that content. Our agreement lets us continue selling back issues and PDFs, but we can't make new PFDs of issues to sell.

 

[harpy]

PDF-only subscriptions. I'd make it possible to subscribe to product lines for PDF copies without print copies.

I wholeheartedly agree! The only thing that keeps me from being a subscriber is that I don't want physical books anymore. All they do is clutter up the house. With the coming of the iPad this weekend I'm pretty much done with the analog world.

If I was CEO I'd make a real digital push. There ought to be apps, character creators and other resources available via the web for an enhanced tabletop experience.

I'd also rework the Paizo forums and get them to normal standards for editing and stability. The easier people can use the forums and generate content on the forums the stronger the community will be.