Pathfinder Sales Collapse

According to ICV2, Pathfinder has now fallen so far in sales that Starfinder is now the #2 best-selling RPG. And no, Starfinder sales haven't exploded. It's currently ranked #41 in Amazon's fantasy gaming list, and #3009 in all books. The 5e Player's Handbook is, of course, #1 in fantasy gaming and #15 in all books. If you want another proxy, Pathfinder's fallen to under 10% of online games on the platforms Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds.

At this point, there is no longer a Pathfinder product in the top 50 on Amazon. The CRB now sits at #77 on the gaming list and #8,114 overall. That's not to say Paizo has stopped publishing books. They just released a new world splat on Christmas (a book of minor deities nobody asked for), a new set of pawns, more flip-mats, a rules expansion for martial arts, and more stuff like that. But the rankings are abysmally low. This stuff isn't selling, and the proliferation of it makes Paizo look more like late-era TSR than a healthy company.

Oh, and they've got more coming! Pocket editions of everything, more splats, more accessories, a new AP, and essentially more and more junk to suck the last few whales dry of their cash for a game nobody is buying anymore.

Buzz for Pathfinder 2 seems to be bordering on nonexistent. I've scaled my forum usage back to zero in the last few months, but a quick perusal shows the obsessive nerd-world of RPG forums is just not really interested in talking about Pathfinder 2. This bodes ill for its sales, because unlike D&D, Pathfinder has zero brand recognition outside of the dedicated nerds. There is no chance that the game will bring in huge numbers of new players the way 5e did.

It doesn't take a genius to predict PF2 is going to sell poorly. It's a product without an audience. But what we can add to that is that continuing with PF1 is no longer an option. If PF2 is a sales catastrophe of significant magnitude, Pathfinder is over.

And really, that might be a good thing. Unlike Pathfinder, Starfinder isn't a me-too product with a generic setting shamelessly cribbed from the most popular bits of somebody else's product. Paizo will have to lay some people off, of course, but there's more sustainability in a unique product than the Fruity Frosted O's version of D&D.