Quote from: Jaeger;686190Yes the overall player base can be grown, but make no mistake; they are competing for the same general group of players.

Have you actually read the Next playtest rules? They offer very little for character optimizers. And char op is the bread and butter of Pathfinder.

Quote from: Haffrung;685376Next will be a different game with a different focus - far less crunchy. So Paizo only needs to worry if a less crunchy version of D&D proves more popular or accessible to new players, and chokes off the supply of new players to Pathfinder.

Even in that case, they're better off sticking with Pathfinder and the niche that they've captured.

They don't have the brand recognition (even after all the missteps of TSR/WotC) of D&D, and so competing head-on for the same players is a pretty terrible idea for them.

If Next does well, and has a huge following, it increases the RPG market, and it's likely that Pathfinder gets some benefit from spillover.  At any rate, the people who still like the 3.x playstyle will stick with it.

If Next does poorly, Paizo just consolidates their hold on the market that they have, and possibly increase it if Hasbro decides to just ditch this D&D crap (which is actually unlikely, if anything they'll sell the brand).

If they try to match Next's strategy, they'll alienate a lot of their customers (who *went* to them because they felt alienated in the first place), and put themselves in a head-to-head battle with an ostensibly larger company that has brand recognition and almost certainly has better retail channels.

And if Next's strategy fails, then they've done that at the cost of alienating their current customer base.

Changing their game to compete with Next is flat-out stupid for them.

Even producing a Next competitor as a second line is questionable.  It calls their long-term plans into question (remember those alienated fans?  Think they'll like that?), and will cost additional resources on an unproven strategy.

In a lot of ways, the best result of Next, from Paizo's perspective, is that it's a runaway hit.  Some of those customers will decide they want more complex games, with more emphasis on character builds and strict tactical combat.  And Paizo is in a perfect place to deliver to those folks.

Also, we don't really know how crunchy DDN will be when it's finally published. We know we're a couple packets behind WotC, we know that there is still a long time for extra development before they go to print, and we know that the playtest was focused on the 'feel' of the game rather than the maths. Moreover, WotC's entire business model for over a decade has been 'release books full of crunch mostly aimed at players'. Let's see how the core game and the first handful of supplements go before we make any assumptions.

Pathfinder is sort of the third party candidate that got lucky and found themselves winning the election. They'd be crazy to try to compete with wizards on their own terms by developing a whole new edition. Their customer base consists primarily of people who are happy with 3x, don't want to see any big changes, and are actively annoyed with WotC. Paizo's best move is to keep doing what they're already doing and maybe release some glossy new supplement to capitalise on the whole 'fuck WotC' protest vote crowd.

Quote from: jadrax;684947They also got a good reputation while inside the WotC umbrella which was pretty much enhanced when WotC cut them loose as part of the transition over to 4th edition, which lets face it did not make WotC many friends.

I think this is a sorely underestimated aspect. Thanks to their custodianship of Dragon and Dungeon - at which I understand they did quite a credible job - Paizo created a sense of legitimacy about themselves which other OGL companies didn't have. They were basically the officially-endorsed third party publishers with Wizards' blessing - that, plus the wave of outrage at the way Wizards high-handedly pulled the plug on them, was enough I reckon.

Quote from: Spinachcat;685298I am very happy for Pathfinder. It keeps 3e players away from my games at cons and game days. All the rules lawyers can monkey spank to their hearts content, as long as their spunk doesn't stain my table.

Best comment ever. You are today's winner of the internet.

Incidentally, after reading the remainder of the thread I have come to the conclusion that Paizo are at a dead-end. Perhaps a profitable one, and a dead-end that has yet to come, but the world is moving on from D20 and the OGL.

Quote from: BarefootGaijin;686214Best comment ever. You are today's winner of the internet.

Incidentally, after reading the remainder of the thread I have come to the conclusion that Paizo are at a dead-end. Perhaps a profitable one, and a dead-end that has yet to come, but the world is moving on from D20 and the OGL.

The question is whether it will move on to a different form of RPG, or just away from D20.

I have no doubt that WotC killed 3x because they weren't getting the adoption they felt they should have with a brand as famous as D&D.  Moves like 4e are almost invariably because of that.  The question is whether or not *any* RPG, in today's world, can get the kind of foothold that Hasbro wants.

It'll be interesting to see what WotC does with D&D if Next "fails".

Quote from: BarefootGaijin;686214Incidentally, after reading the remainder of the thread I have come to the conclusion that Paizo are at a dead-end. Perhaps a profitable one, and a dead-end that has yet to come, but the world is moving on from D20 and the OGL.

This makes me smile because so far the OGL has not only spread like a virus, but demonstrated that it can adapt and overcome the competition. It allows for more dynamic evolution of a game system so why do you think that is a dead-end?

It's not the OGL per se, I just feel that Pathfinder will be surpassed. There was a comment earlier that mentioned PF players loving their optimisation and crunch. Another comment suggested moving too far away from 3.x.x would have a negative impact on Paizo.

It is a tricky path. It seems as though the Pathfinder market is painted as disenfranchised D&D 3.5 players, while opting for other games they have 3.x/PF as their 'go to system, of choice'.

As new players emerge and games develop, do Paizo continue to cater for this core market (using the OGL and keeping the 3.x/PF 'sacred cows' and all that stuff) or do they diversify and spread their resources over a large range of products, in the hope to engage and draw in newer blood/revenue? Is Paizo = OGL or Paizo =/= OGL?

I don't have any answers to my ponderings, but it will be interesting to see if we are at the 'high tide mark' as far as 3.x/PF and others are concerned.

Quote from: Spinachcat;685298But Paizo is smart. I suspect their real move is to expand the Pathfinder IP and move into electronic games. That's where the real dollars lie and after that, the a paper RPG just doesn't matter.

I am very happy for Pathfinder. It keeps 3e players away from my games at cons and game days. All the rules lawyers can monkey spank to their hearts content, as long as their spunk doesn't stain my table.

I agree wholeheartedly. Pathfinder is everything I find bland about modern fantasy. Its existence provides me with a pretty good heuristic for determining who I'm likely to get along with and who I want to game with.

I think Paizo is doing fine and won't need a new edition. If this info is accurate, they'll just sell 5e stuff and keep making money:

http://www.inc.com/profile/paizo-publishing

That's a listing for companies that have grown the fastest over the past three years. Paizo was 2370. Paizo is listed as a retail company. Be interesting to see if they make the list again next year for 2010 to 2014.

The growth is nice, but $12M is still a drop in the bucket to a big company like Hasbro.  They're not interested in that size of a market.

Hasbro, as a company, has 6,000 employees.  Assuming a relatively low cost of 100,000 per employee (after benefits, facilities, etc.), that would give them a $600M a year budget just on their employees.  $12M revenue in a market sector that isn't growing isn't worth the risk of keeping those people employed.

I just looked up Hasbro's revenues... their 2012 revenues are $4B.

And I don't really know if PF can really grow past the niche market.  I don't think it's accessible enough to new players.  I think the emphasis on charop and rules-lawyering is a turn off to non-RPG vets, and I think that the linear format promoted by adventure paths has a tendency to remove real consequences in the game.

Most people like playing games that they can lose, because that's where real tension comes from.  Winning all the time, to most people, is boring.

I think Hasbro wants the big play.  They want a hundred million dollar market at a minimum.  Certainly more than 12.  And they know that to do that they need to *grow* the market, and they pretty clearly didn't think that 3.x (however much people liked it) would grow the market.

4e was an attempt to do so.  I think it was a fine game, personally, just not a very awesome D&D game.  But it clearly didn't give them the results or even the trajectory they wanted.

So I think they're mostly going back to basics.  They want to make a game that's easy for people to pick up, and that focuses less on number crunching.  They're trying to figure out why people liked D&D, and hit those marks, rather than put out more of what the existing niche wants (which is basically Paizo's strategy).

Don't get me wrong - Paizo's strategy is perfectly sound - for Paizo.  And this isn't meant as an indictment of Pathfinder in any way.  I think it's a great game at what it does.

I think getting rid of the linear story path think is actually pretty important as well, but I don't know that they agree with me.  Which is fine, it's their money on the line, not mine.  But I do think that if they don't get some serious traction with Next, that Hasbro will ditch the D&D brand.

Does nobody else agree with me that D&D is at the moment stuck in a deeply uninteresting and pretty uncool (I hate that word, but bear with me) rut? Fantasy/SF is probably at a decades-long high at the moment in terms of popularity - in fact it may be more popular than it has ever been, with the success of Harry Potter, Game of Thrones/SoIaF, Hunger Games, etc. - but the Dragonlance style high fantasy tropes and orcs, elves, dragons and whatnot definitely don't seem to be part of the zeitgeist at the moment. Everything is either grimdark (SoIaF), weird (China Mieville, etc.) or rooted in the real world (Harry Potter).

It seems like D&D could ride the wave of the genre's increasing presence on the mainstream, but it might need to ditch a lot of sacred cows to get there.

Quote from: robiswrong;686446The growth is nice, but $12M is still a drop in the bucket to a big company like Hasbro.  They're not interested in that size of a market.

Hasbro, as a company, has 6,000 employees.  Assuming a relatively low cost of 100,000 per employee (after benefits, facilities, etc.), that would give them a $600M a year budget just on their employees.  $12M revenue in a market sector that isn't growing isn't worth the risk of keeping those people employed.

I just looked up Hasbro's revenues... their 2012 revenues are $4B.

And I don't really know if PF can really grow past the niche market.  I don't think it's accessible enough to new players.  I think the emphasis on charop and rules-lawyering is a turn off to non-RPG vets, and I think that the linear format promoted by adventure paths has a tendency to remove real consequences in the game.

Most people like playing games that they can lose, because that's where real tension comes from.  Winning all the time, to most people, is boring.

I think Hasbro wants the big play.  They want a hundred million dollar market at a minimum.  Certainly more than 12.  And they know that to do that they need to *grow* the market, and they pretty clearly didn't think that 3.x (however much people liked it) would grow the market.

4e was an attempt to do so.  I think it was a fine game, personally, just not a very awesome D&D game.  But it clearly didn't give them the results or even the trajectory they wanted.

So I think they're mostly going back to basics.  They want to make a game that's easy for people to pick up, and that focuses less on number crunching.  They're trying to figure out why people liked D&D, and hit those marks, rather than put out more of what the existing niche wants (which is basically Paizo's strategy).

Don't get me wrong - Paizo's strategy is perfectly sound - for Paizo.  And this isn't meant as an indictment of Pathfinder in any way.  I think it's a great game at what it does.

I think getting rid of the linear story path think is actually pretty important as well, but I don't know that they agree with me.  Which is fine, it's their money on the line, not mine.  But I do think that if they don't get some serious traction with Next, that Hasbro will ditch the D&D brand.

Let's be honest with ourselves for a moment.

Those 6k employees at Hasbro aren't at factories.  Those folks are completely corporate.  A few engineers, a few designers, but mostly they're management, whether they manage a business division or a factory or their outsourcing teams, they're all management.  Hasbro isn't using their own factories, they outsourced that stuff overseas ages ago.  If they haven't outsourced IT and everything else that hasn't been nailed down, I'd be shocked.  The big joke about GE and all the profit it made during the Jack Welch era was that it was made on the backs of outsourcing everyone and everything.  At GE Aircraft Engines, it used to be the case that there were 3-4 contractors for every GE employee, and I'm sure that hasn't changed.

What Hasbro did to Kenner is the stuff of legends in Cincinnati; you used to see the Nerf teams "testing" their designs in the Kenner parking lot, and the kids who were lucky enough to have a relative working at Kenner used to test out a lot of the Star Wars designs before they hit the market.  I knew people in high school and college who co-oped in Kenner's engineering department, and they used to rave about how awesome a place it was to work for; you might not have gotten the same amount of money that you did at other companies, but the corporate culture was second to none.  When Hasborg came in and gutted the place, it was a sad day.

All Hasbro cares about is the big kill, the 100 million dollar brand that you hear some people talk about.  WotC was bought for Pokemon.  Not Magic.  Not D&D.  Pokemon.  WotC is stuck as a boutique (to Hasbro) company trying to justify its existence beyond the intellectual property it brings to the table.  No matter what it does as a division, there's simply no way that WotC is going to grow D&D into that overnight.  Even if everything broke the right way, like if by some miracle a good D&D movie were released and not the smoldering piles of lion crap that Courtney Solomon has been involved with, it would still be a stretch to make D&D a 100 million dollar brand.

By looking at the numbers, then, D&D looks like it is toast, doomed to be shelved by a corporate entity that doesn't give a fuck beyond the piles of cash that D&D Monopoly or "Forgotten Realms Monopoly -- Now With 100% More Drizzt!" might generate.  Paizo, with its 12 million dollars, will then become the RPG industry's Big Dog.

If Paizo keeps doing their thing and maintains their momentum, the RPG community will be better off than relying upon the whims of Hasbro's bean counters to survive.

Quote from: flyerfan1991;686475If Paizo keeps doing their thing and maintains their momentum, the RPG community will be better off than relying upon the whims of Hasbro's bean counters to survive.

Too right. On which note we can safely say that our entire hobby is a niche, and enjoy it..