everposter's page

Where there's smoke there's fire.

My attention was called to recent matters.

First, I suspect Jeff Alvarez is not rightly placed as a villain here. He's likely a solid CFO turned President that has very clear marching orders on what to do with Paizo Inc under his custodianship. The doxxing on the forums is clearly not desirable behavior but this is Jeff's first turn steering the ship and these sorts of mistakes get made.

There is an overwhelming body of evidence that former Paizo employees are thrilled to have departed a toxic workplace. Beyond Sara and Diego, Liz shared her stories upthread and beyond the "founding group", most of the veterans have departed and Paizo is largely manned by those original ~10 or so employees and new, junior members. It's not a good sign when universally former employees dislike their former company so greatly.

Now, it's important to note that gaming (both video, like Blizzard of recent) and tabletop (Paizo) are like Hollywood. They easily fall into cultures of pseudo-slavery where you grab these young people enamored with the creative end product and you take advantage of them to fill the pockets of the investors/sponsors/shareholders. Hopefully truly horrible physical things are not happening behind closed doors, but the culture of exploitation is real and scary in its own right.

So let's roll this back to evidence over the years where Paizo has been shedding veteran (and potentially higher earning) employees, bringing in "fans" as staff, raising prices, lowering the work product quality, re-using content, etc. Books are printed in China, not the US or Canada where a "good company" would be trying to fulfill product and giving up some on margins to reward a Country with better ethical and climate standards. There's an obscure system to cancel orders, and probably somewhere in Paizo there are emails that suggest if they let people cancel subs easier they would collect 1%, 2% or some nominal lower revenue as gamers easily forgive receiving an extra shipment and paying for it. Yes, we gamers are very easily exploited by companies that master the art of gamifying experiences (whether that's logging in as a MAU/monthly active user or having to "collect it all" on Golarion source material).

The images of Lisa & Vic's home with potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars of Star Wars memorabilia and a movie theater are certainly telling. I would hypothesize that they, as owners, have a good chunk of a preferred stock in Paizo that is currently paying a dividend to support their lifestyle. And really, as Paizo's revenue has diminished from the peak there are demands that the revenue stream continues, at least until an acquirer of Paizo could be found. I'd further speculate original team members who I won't name but have weathered the full journey are reasonable holders of Common stock (behind a preference they may not fully understand) and are holding out with that ownership (and maybe even a little bit of royalties revenue themselves) that prevents their exit to greener pastures. There's citations to Paizo sticking with its current web stack relating to Vic's income when there's amazing low cost or open source alternatives.

Now, Jeff's doing some great work. The work with Owlcat to license Paizo IP into the Kingmaker and Wrath video games means pure revenue for Paizo. Very little marketing expense (none if they should choose, I imagine). No operations, customer care, fulfillment, etc. They could probably get by just giving Owlcat some time with James Jacobs from time to time. Now, you have "Unlimited" whereby anyone can write content in Golarion and Paizo collects their royalties. These are the kind of smart moves that setup a company at the stage in its life that Paizo is at in order to collect revenue without having to worry about its own direct employees or its own direct customers to manage. This transforms the company into a higher margin "machine" and with those higher margins comes a better valuation if they are seeking to sunset the company to enable the retirement of its shareholders.

As far as I can tell, the signs are all there by the evidence presented by folks here and on a handful of other forums.

The trick is the people who have poured all their blood sweat and tears into the company are truly more powerful than they realize. A union is impractical at this stage, but they are definitely able to take a weekend and meet up, set up a Kickstarter and seize on an opportunity themselves and understand the community supports them as individuals.