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.
Showing posts with label Pathfinder. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pathfinder. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 26, 2018
Friday, May 25, 2018
Pathfinder 2: Incoherent Design
Pathfinder 2 isn't going to do well regardless of how good a game it is, but it's shaping up to be a pretty awful. There is no one especially horrible design choice, but rather a whole pile of small, bad choices that indicate poor management and a lack of direction.
How can I tell? The key is that creators, which includes everyone from artists to engineers, require the firm hand of management to stay on task and put together a coherent product. If you do not do this, your creatives will destroy you. They will continue adding ornaments, frills, doo-dads, and gee-gaws to your product until it is a total mess.
PF2 contrasts with 5e, which has been a tremendous design success because Mearls' team worked from a "less is more" philosophy. When they ran into a problem, they solved it by removing or simplifying features, or rebuilt underlying structures. This is much more difficult than adding complexity and features. The final game was much simpler than the initial test packets (with their "martial dice" and other dropped features), and has benefited for it.
The Paizo team never really talks about any coherent vision or goal. Instead, the language that comes up the most seems to be opening or increasing "the design space" and giving the creatives more ways to play around. This should set off a ton of alarm bells...designers do not need fewer constraints compared to 3.5, they need more!
An example of where PF2 design is falling apart is spell heightening (just look at what a mess the new Heal spell is). In 5e, many spells may be "upcast" by using a higher slot. Each additional level typically adds another damage die or two, adds another target, increases the duration, or the like. In PF2, there are different kinds of heightening. Perhaps you gain something per slot, or per two slots, or the gain depends on both how many slots you increase and how many actions you spend, or perhaps there's a single large gain only at a specific higher level.
Another example is the "3 action economy." This initially sounded promising---getting rid of Swift, Standard, Move, and Full actions in exchange for just "actions" made it sound like they were adopting the KISS principle. But as we learned more, it turned out that they were actually adopting an action point system. AP systems are fine, but they're significantly more complex that simple action systems. So while Mike Mearls over at WotC regards bonus actions as a design failure, since they added what he considers unnecessary complexity, the Paizo team is gleefully cranking out all kinds of ways to modify things by spending 1, 2, or 3 action points. Not only that, but they're writing feats and features to introduce exceptions to the AP system! So a wizard will get four action points, one of which can only be spent to concentrate on a spell. A fighter can take a feat so that moving twice and attacking costs only two actions.
What they're producing is chaos. The less consistent the patterns are, the more time players will have to spend parsing rules text to make sure they get it right. The more complexity and exceptions there are in the rules, the more places overlooked interactions will cause the system to break down (this is why 3.x was an unfixable mess). "Opening up the design space" to give your creatives more space to play around and fewer constraints or patterns to cleave to produces design messes.
At this point, I'm expecting PF2 to be a disaster for Paizo. It won't even make Pathfinder fans happy, let alone attract anyone from 5e or draw in new players to the hobby.
How can I tell? The key is that creators, which includes everyone from artists to engineers, require the firm hand of management to stay on task and put together a coherent product. If you do not do this, your creatives will destroy you. They will continue adding ornaments, frills, doo-dads, and gee-gaws to your product until it is a total mess.
PF2 contrasts with 5e, which has been a tremendous design success because Mearls' team worked from a "less is more" philosophy. When they ran into a problem, they solved it by removing or simplifying features, or rebuilt underlying structures. This is much more difficult than adding complexity and features. The final game was much simpler than the initial test packets (with their "martial dice" and other dropped features), and has benefited for it.
The Paizo team never really talks about any coherent vision or goal. Instead, the language that comes up the most seems to be opening or increasing "the design space" and giving the creatives more ways to play around. This should set off a ton of alarm bells...designers do not need fewer constraints compared to 3.5, they need more!
An example of where PF2 design is falling apart is spell heightening (just look at what a mess the new Heal spell is). In 5e, many spells may be "upcast" by using a higher slot. Each additional level typically adds another damage die or two, adds another target, increases the duration, or the like. In PF2, there are different kinds of heightening. Perhaps you gain something per slot, or per two slots, or the gain depends on both how many slots you increase and how many actions you spend, or perhaps there's a single large gain only at a specific higher level.
Another example is the "3 action economy." This initially sounded promising---getting rid of Swift, Standard, Move, and Full actions in exchange for just "actions" made it sound like they were adopting the KISS principle. But as we learned more, it turned out that they were actually adopting an action point system. AP systems are fine, but they're significantly more complex that simple action systems. So while Mike Mearls over at WotC regards bonus actions as a design failure, since they added what he considers unnecessary complexity, the Paizo team is gleefully cranking out all kinds of ways to modify things by spending 1, 2, or 3 action points. Not only that, but they're writing feats and features to introduce exceptions to the AP system! So a wizard will get four action points, one of which can only be spent to concentrate on a spell. A fighter can take a feat so that moving twice and attacking costs only two actions.
What they're producing is chaos. The less consistent the patterns are, the more time players will have to spend parsing rules text to make sure they get it right. The more complexity and exceptions there are in the rules, the more places overlooked interactions will cause the system to break down (this is why 3.x was an unfixable mess). "Opening up the design space" to give your creatives more space to play around and fewer constraints or patterns to cleave to produces design messes.
At this point, I'm expecting PF2 to be a disaster for Paizo. It won't even make Pathfinder fans happy, let alone attract anyone from 5e or draw in new players to the hobby.
Sunday, May 20, 2018
The Impending Doom of Paizo
Two years ago, I made some predictions about Paizo's ability to survive 5e. I said they had 3 bad options:
They are going with the option I expected they would, the third. The Pathfinder 2 RPG is obviously going to be a failure, and let's get into why (it actually has little to do with the revealed mechanics, which admittedly look pretty bad). The key is to understand what the Pathfinder brand's identity. Pathfinder is embraced by the market as a well-supported, generic knock-off of D&D 3.5. The fundamental problem is that it's a backward-facing brand. The way brands work, the heir to a beloved brand can never come from another company. Pathfinder isn't the successor to 3.5; it's just a repristination. The successor to D&D 3.5 is D&D 5e.
Furthermore, 5e has changed what makes Pathfinder unique. While 4e was WotC's flagship product, Pathfinder's identity was "pretty much everything you liked about 3.5 that 4e dumped." Since 4e dumped nearly every classic D&D-ism that didn't work with 3.5's feat-bloat, that meant a Pathfinder game felt more like "real" D&D than 4e. But the 5e design team not only kept what worked about 3.5, but went back to the sources (a kind of "Protestant Reformation" of D&D, if you will) and restored a number of AD&D-isms and even OD&D-isms that had been discarded over the years. This means that what makes Pathfinder unique in 2018 is "mostly failed design ideas from 3.5."
Because Pathfinder's brand identity is defined entirely in terms of somebody else's product, Paizo has nowhere to go with Pathfinder 2. The revealed design of PF2 has so far been pretty incoherent. Paizo's doubling down on bloated feats, large numbers, fiddly modifiers, and mechanical complexity for its own sake. But that isn't fundamentally why Pathfinder 2 is going to fail. Even if PF2 is a great RPG, it's going to fail because the D&D brand is owned by Wizards of the Coast, and 5e has been a smash success. There is little to no market demand for a game that is "like D&D, but different." Pathfinder only succeeded because it was perceived by the market as being more true to D&D than the official version.
Pathfinder 2 will initially sell seemingly well, but its peak will almost certainly be below PF1's. There will be significant attrition of existing Pathfinder players, as it is so different as to be incompatible with old material, it will lure almost nobody over from other games, and it will not grow the RPG market at all. Within 18 months, even if initial sales numbers seem impressive, there will be significantly fewer people playing PF2 than PF1, and growth will be practically nonexistent.
It's much harder to shrink a company than to grow it, so it's anyone's guess as to whether Paizo will stay solvent.
1. Keep running with the 3E model forever.
2. Update to the 5e SRD.
3. Do something new.
They are going with the option I expected they would, the third. The Pathfinder 2 RPG is obviously going to be a failure, and let's get into why (it actually has little to do with the revealed mechanics, which admittedly look pretty bad). The key is to understand what the Pathfinder brand's identity. Pathfinder is embraced by the market as a well-supported, generic knock-off of D&D 3.5. The fundamental problem is that it's a backward-facing brand. The way brands work, the heir to a beloved brand can never come from another company. Pathfinder isn't the successor to 3.5; it's just a repristination. The successor to D&D 3.5 is D&D 5e.
Furthermore, 5e has changed what makes Pathfinder unique. While 4e was WotC's flagship product, Pathfinder's identity was "pretty much everything you liked about 3.5 that 4e dumped." Since 4e dumped nearly every classic D&D-ism that didn't work with 3.5's feat-bloat, that meant a Pathfinder game felt more like "real" D&D than 4e. But the 5e design team not only kept what worked about 3.5, but went back to the sources (a kind of "Protestant Reformation" of D&D, if you will) and restored a number of AD&D-isms and even OD&D-isms that had been discarded over the years. This means that what makes Pathfinder unique in 2018 is "mostly failed design ideas from 3.5."
Because Pathfinder's brand identity is defined entirely in terms of somebody else's product, Paizo has nowhere to go with Pathfinder 2. The revealed design of PF2 has so far been pretty incoherent. Paizo's doubling down on bloated feats, large numbers, fiddly modifiers, and mechanical complexity for its own sake. But that isn't fundamentally why Pathfinder 2 is going to fail. Even if PF2 is a great RPG, it's going to fail because the D&D brand is owned by Wizards of the Coast, and 5e has been a smash success. There is little to no market demand for a game that is "like D&D, but different." Pathfinder only succeeded because it was perceived by the market as being more true to D&D than the official version.
Pathfinder 2 will initially sell seemingly well, but its peak will almost certainly be below PF1's. There will be significant attrition of existing Pathfinder players, as it is so different as to be incompatible with old material, it will lure almost nobody over from other games, and it will not grow the RPG market at all. Within 18 months, even if initial sales numbers seem impressive, there will be significantly fewer people playing PF2 than PF1, and growth will be practically nonexistent.
It's much harder to shrink a company than to grow it, so it's anyone's guess as to whether Paizo will stay solvent.
Monday, February 22, 2016
Can Paizo Survive 5e?
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.
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, July 6, 2015
5e is Clobbering Pathfinder on Amazon
Wizards has held its sales numbers pretty close to its chest, but Amazon can give some idea of who's hot and who's not. The Pathfinder core rulebook is currently ranked in the 3400s among all books on Amazon, while D&D's Player's Handbook is ranked at 68(!!!!!).
It's also worth noting that the 4e PHB has dropped to 28K, while the 3.5 PHB sits at 26K. I think it is fair to say that 4e is officially dead now. I certainly won't miss paying $75/yr so that my players can have the nice, printed sheets that the Character Builder provided. This handy tool estimates PF core book sales at ~150 per month, and D&D sales at ~1K per month.
I think this bodes well for the future of D&D, which has now resumed its place as the best-selling TTRPG. Pathfinder is a very well-supported product, but because it began life as a fresh coat of paint slapped on D&D 3.5, it has many of the same weaknesses and flaws as that system. The philosophy of "a mechanic for every situation" is a dead-end, and there's a good reason no new RPGs adopt it. 5e is a much fresher, more modern take on the classic game that strikes a good balance between depth and accessibility.
I think in another 10 years, we'll look at Pathfinder as a stopgap measure that existed to give D&D fans who didn't like 4e something to play while Wizards figured out how to take the game into the future.
It's also worth noting that the 4e PHB has dropped to 28K, while the 3.5 PHB sits at 26K. I think it is fair to say that 4e is officially dead now. I certainly won't miss paying $75/yr so that my players can have the nice, printed sheets that the Character Builder provided. This handy tool estimates PF core book sales at ~150 per month, and D&D sales at ~1K per month.
I think this bodes well for the future of D&D, which has now resumed its place as the best-selling TTRPG. Pathfinder is a very well-supported product, but because it began life as a fresh coat of paint slapped on D&D 3.5, it has many of the same weaknesses and flaws as that system. The philosophy of "a mechanic for every situation" is a dead-end, and there's a good reason no new RPGs adopt it. 5e is a much fresher, more modern take on the classic game that strikes a good balance between depth and accessibility.
I think in another 10 years, we'll look at Pathfinder as a stopgap measure that existed to give D&D fans who didn't like 4e something to play while Wizards figured out how to take the game into the future.
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