According to Mike Mearls, 5e is blowing away sales expectations and has already hit its fourth printing. D&D is crushing Pathfinder on Amazon. The #1-selling PF book is the Core Rulebook, and it is getting beaten by all 3 D&D core rule books, the Starter Set, the DM Screen, and both the Curse of Strahd and Princes of the Apocalypse adventures. Then comes the Core Rulebook. Before we see another Pathfinder title, we see the rest of the published D&D adventures. To find a Pathfinder adventure, we have dig deep into the ranks of things that measure their monthly sales in the single digits (or worse!).
With the recent deployment of the DM's Guild allowing players to actually make money on their homebrew (yours truly has made $70) and the SRD bringing 3rd parties back into the fold, the question is whether Pathfinder can survive the onslaught.
My prediction is no.
The basic problem is that PF, to this day, maintains its identity as "D&D for people who want to play 3rd edition forever." This was a viable strategy as long as 4th edition was WotC's flagship product, leaving the market without a traditional d20-based fantasy game. So what are Paizo's options here?
1. Keep running with the 3E model forever. The problem here is that 3E feels like an increasingly dated, ancient system. 5e's as big an update to the structure of the d20 system as 3e was in 2000, and 3e now feels as old and cumbersome next to 5e as AD&D did next to 3e. If Paizo keeps on with the 3.5 SRD, it will enter a death spiral as old players gradually quit and it fails to attract new ones. Currently, its growth model seems to be almost entirely on selling new stuff to dedicated players, so it may already be in that spiral now.
2. Update to the 5e SRD. Paizo has spent years trying to promote Pathfinder as a brand that stands on its own two legs, and not merely the Fruity Frosted O's to D&D's Froot Loops...with little success. After seven(!) years, Pathfinder is virtually unknown outside of TTRPG circles, and is still spoken of as, "Well, it picks up where 3.5 left off." While updating to the 5e SRD would certainly modernize the game, it would cement its reputation as the generic knock-off version of D&D. But this time around, it'll be trying to compete with an in-print version of D&D rather than extending the life of a dead one. It's hard to imagine it gaining D&D players, rather than its own fan base dumping it to get the real thing.
3. Do something new. Paizo could take its training wheels off, write a new d20 RPG system that doesn't have 3e's core problems or feel 15 years old, and market that. But this means dropping any ability to market itself as "D&D 3.75" and now relying entirely on the strength of the Pathfinder brand. And the fact is that Pathfinder isn't a strong brand. Pathfinder piggybacks off D&D. Period. No one cares about Golarion as such; it's merely an adequate grab-bag of classic D&D tropes, and everyone knows it. Paizo's big mega-dungeon; that was supposed to remind everyone that they're way ahead of the game compared to WotC sold like crap. If Paizo goes this route, a significant chunk of its audience will lose the only reason they played it.
I don't think Paizo will pursue the second option, despite it having the resources now to become the most prolific, best-known 3rd-party publisher for the 5e SRDs (sorry, Goodman Games). The first will gradually become more and more untenable as sales flag, at which point it will pursue the third. And that will be the end. The fact is that Dungeons & Dragons is the tabletop RPG. Pathfinder started life as a knockoff, and it will end life as a knockoff.
Monday, February 22, 2016
Thursday, February 18, 2016
Observations at Half-Price
Last night, I went to Half-Price Books looking to see if I could find any old AD&D material (I didn't find anything I wanted, just some really crappy splats). A couple observations:
1. Nearly the full set of 4e books was there, including a couple adventure modules and prerelease promos. Someone clearly had unloaded his collection. Every time I go, I see a new load of 4e books. The size of the collection always indicates they came from someone who seriously played 4e and corroborates with my experience that 5e has definitely killed 4e.
2. There was also a solid collection of 3.5 books. The core books were there, as were most of the Eberron books. I've been seeing a lot more 3.5 books in the last year. I'd say nearly every time I go to a used bookstore, there's a complete set of core 3.0 or 3.5 books on the shelf. It looks like people are offloading their 3.x stuff, too---either switching to Pathfinder or 5e (I rarely see PF books and haven't seen a 5e book yet).
3. 3rd feels ancient. I flipped through a monster manual and a couple adventures to see if there was anything worth converting to 5e. The awkward clumsiness of the NPC and monster stat blocks really jumped out. Once you've gone a while without seeing monsters with feats or DCs all over the place, they're really ugly.
4. Paizo's aggressively trying to hold onto its market. HPB is now selling new D&D Starter Sets and Pathfinder Beginner Boxes. But there's a lot more new Pathfinder stuff on the shelf besides that---the display suggests that Paizo's directly selling via HPB. There was some kind of card game, spell carts, little splat tools, and a whole bunch of other junk. Some people probably take this to mean that Paizo is way more successful, but I don't think so. PF's Amazon rank has never matched D&D's, and any time I find store data, PF and 5e are at best <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/content.php?2968-RPG-Sales-From-a-Game-Store-s-Perspective#.VsX7dJTWsw4">even in revenue</a>.
Problem is, there's way, way more Pathfinder product on the shelf. That implies that WotC's margins are significantly higher on D&D, and there are at this point probably more individual people buying D&D material. There just isn't that much stuff for one person to buy before he's got everything. Fewer SKUs generating the same revenue = more people buying.
I don't think their strategy is viable. Providing more and more crap to buy just soaks more and more revenue out of the same dedicated enthusiasts (you know, like how I bought every 4e book I found). It doesn't bring in new players. My experience with 5e is that Core Rulebooks + 1 Adventure = 1 Year of Gaming for a typical table. WotC's strategy of keeping the core books in stock, printing one adventure every six months, and letting third parties handle everything else seems to be a much better long-term strategy.
1. Nearly the full set of 4e books was there, including a couple adventure modules and prerelease promos. Someone clearly had unloaded his collection. Every time I go, I see a new load of 4e books. The size of the collection always indicates they came from someone who seriously played 4e and corroborates with my experience that 5e has definitely killed 4e.
2. There was also a solid collection of 3.5 books. The core books were there, as were most of the Eberron books. I've been seeing a lot more 3.5 books in the last year. I'd say nearly every time I go to a used bookstore, there's a complete set of core 3.0 or 3.5 books on the shelf. It looks like people are offloading their 3.x stuff, too---either switching to Pathfinder or 5e (I rarely see PF books and haven't seen a 5e book yet).
3. 3rd feels ancient. I flipped through a monster manual and a couple adventures to see if there was anything worth converting to 5e. The awkward clumsiness of the NPC and monster stat blocks really jumped out. Once you've gone a while without seeing monsters with feats or DCs all over the place, they're really ugly.
4. Paizo's aggressively trying to hold onto its market. HPB is now selling new D&D Starter Sets and Pathfinder Beginner Boxes. But there's a lot more new Pathfinder stuff on the shelf besides that---the display suggests that Paizo's directly selling via HPB. There was some kind of card game, spell carts, little splat tools, and a whole bunch of other junk. Some people probably take this to mean that Paizo is way more successful, but I don't think so. PF's Amazon rank has never matched D&D's, and any time I find store data, PF and 5e are at best <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/content.php?2968-RPG-Sales-From-a-Game-Store-s-Perspective#.VsX7dJTWsw4">even in revenue</a>.
Problem is, there's way, way more Pathfinder product on the shelf. That implies that WotC's margins are significantly higher on D&D, and there are at this point probably more individual people buying D&D material. There just isn't that much stuff for one person to buy before he's got everything. Fewer SKUs generating the same revenue = more people buying.
I don't think their strategy is viable. Providing more and more crap to buy just soaks more and more revenue out of the same dedicated enthusiasts (you know, like how I bought every 4e book I found). It doesn't bring in new players. My experience with 5e is that Core Rulebooks + 1 Adventure = 1 Year of Gaming for a typical table. WotC's strategy of keeping the core books in stock, printing one adventure every six months, and letting third parties handle everything else seems to be a much better long-term strategy.
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