I'm just wondering, is there any reason why Paizo can't produce a strictly OGL d20 adventure magazine, similar to Dungeon, and with a few elements currently found in Dragon thrown in?
While the Adventure Paths are an excellent tool for a continuous campaign which the Pathfinder series will cover in the future, my campaigns and personal DM'ing style don't work well with the "perfectly plotted" format. I like a mix of homebrew, purchased modules and cherry picked Dungeon adventure and what was always most appealing about the magazine was that each issue provided a few unrelated adventures with different flavours for different levels that I could use as is or cull great ideas from. Pathfinder may provide a lot of additional background information and new monster entries but it won't provide the same diversity of selection.
So I got to wondering why Paizo won't be publishing a magazine of their own that fills the niche that Dungeon once claimed? Wouldn't a strictly OGL d20 publication fall outside the restrictions of any "no competition" clause -- after all, anything WotC produces, whether online or on paper, will be D&D not OGL d20.
Plus, Dungeon and Dragon were apparently doing well financially so wouldn't a new magazine stepping up to the plate have a good chance of doing the same (especially given Paizo's excellent track record)?
Jenni
Creative Director
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The details are posted elsewhere (either in our FAQ or on a board post somewhere), but the basic problem with doing a magazine is that we can't use Dragon or Dungeon anymore. Those magazines had built-in distribution, customers, subscribers, and were firmly entrenced in the magazine market. To start a new magazine, we'd have to start from scratch, and that would require a SIGNIFICANT amount of money (I'm talking millions of dollars here), and would require us to rebuild everything Dragon and Dungeon had in place over the last 3 decades. Since we already have built a highly succesful channel into the book and hobby markets, it just made more sense to sell Pathfinder as a book and sell it into those already established locations.
some of those details...
We're taking this opportunity to move away from the magazine business because it's just plain terrible to be in. It's one thing to continue publishing an already successful magazine with awesome name recognition, great circulation, and advertisers lined up to buy pages, but it's quite another to launch a new magazine.
We tried it twice, just a few years ago, with two very different magazines: Undefeated and Amazing Stories. And what we learned from both was that we'd have needed to dig a seven-digit hole in our bank account before we'd start seeing a decent return on them.
Many have suggested we should just replace Dragon with a clone, but it just doesn't work that way. "Manny's Cigar and Magazine Depot" carries Dragon because he's sold Dragon for decades. He's never heard of this new "Flagon magazine" but he's pretty sure he's never sold a copy. Should he buy it? Well, how much does it sell? Zero copies? Manny can't afford the risk right now. Come back when it sells tens of thousands per month. (Chicken, meet egg.)
And the big guys? You have to buy your spot on those stands. And you have to ship them more copies than they can possibly sell, and what they don't sell, they destroy, and you don't get paid for. If you start to sell more copies, they order more, so they can have some to destroy. They adjust their buying levels to ensure thay they're destroying more than they're selling—because if they don't have too many, they can't sell more.
And when you do sell copies, that money goes into what the magazine distribution business calls a "reserve against returns," which is held by our circulation company. Stores have the better part of a year to report their unsold issues, for which they get their money back, so until that time is up, the circulation people keep most of the money. (Actually, they parcel it out based on historical percentages, so it trickles in throughout the year, but the point is, you don't really know how much you've made until the issue has been off the stands for a...
The rest of it is here towards the bottom. Its an interesting read into how magazines are sold.
Steve G.
Project Manager, AvatarArt