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I'm an old Pathfinder fan finally converting after the last few months of being told how much cooler Pathfinder 2nd is then all of the other kids at the playground and went to buy all of it that was released when I ran into a few weird problems.
1. This place is set up like a forum. Finding anything relevant is difficult. Some links go to something that seems like what I want but isn't, and others aren't really labeled fully as 2nd edition products, making me kind, a slightly older dude with some eye issues, have a bit of trouble. More over, the Subscription thing is pretty badly explained. It seems to imply that you can get prior issues somehow by the line 'never worry about missing a release' and it also seems to think that people are stupid. In the comments, there is literally an employee saying 'Hey, we didn't like the idea of you being able to sub once a year (because we don't want to make it cheaper like yearly subscriptions usually are) so we've removed the option. Probably because the cost of the books, despite not seemingly deviating, is not set and you don't pay a fixed fee every month. Very, very shady s!#@. Just set it to 30% of 19.99 a month and accept that the digital products that cost you nothing to reproduce is only going to make you an amount of profit that is egregious instead of leaving yourself open to throw in a 50 dollar book every now and again and making other peoples bank accounts?
2. I was willing to and probably going to pay it (the other issues are now as much a factor as this one), but I have never understood why a company thinks a digital product should be worth anywhere near the cost of a physical product. The prices should at least be halved and the lack of any decrease in price over the years is also fairly bad. I'm willing to give Paizo a lot of credit for being a largely honest company that isn't very large and doesn't make much, but there was literally no point toward this price tag other then 'even more profit' and that kind of mentality needs to go. How many more people would be jumping into 2e if it were cost effective to do it digitally? I know of at least three table groups (mine) that would have.
3. The cart does not feature a total or subtotal. This is weird because it used to. So either a chance accidentally removed it, or this is another weird 'profit' choice. Looking a lot more like Wizards when I don't get told how much I'm spending until after I enter my card in the process. The fact that I can skip ahead is also not apparent, so that's just a flimsy excuse. Online companies do this a lot to confuse people and keep them from thinking about their costs. Again, highly scummy.
I was legitimately in on this. Paizo definitely framed themselves in the public eyes as being different. But having BEEN ON THIS SITE BEFORE I know some of these changes are intentional and are made by people who think exactly the same way as Wizards.
I don't know how much in digital goods I was going to buy from Paizo, since it always had some decent third party releases too, but I can tell you how much I'm going to buy now. I'm afraid I'm going to need your card info first though.
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Can I ask why you think writing, art, editing, and layout are worth less when they’re not in print? A PDF at the standard of something like a Lost Omens release is touched by dozens of hands, and costs a pretty penny to make.
“Why does this cost so much?” is pretty much always gonna be tone-deaf.
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How many more people would be jumping into 2e if it were cost effective to do it digitally? I know of at least three table groups (mine) that would have.
Uh... you do know all the core rules are free online, right? Achieves of Nethys generally has most of the rules content from books fairly quickly after a book's release.
It wouldn't be too difficult to run a game by buying only adventures. If the GM makes their own adventures - you could easily jump in for the low low cost of $0.
I don't think there's anything nefarious going on, but the website could use an uplift. Push through, and all will be well. Welcome to the best iteration of the game from another old timer.
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I was willing to and probably going to pay it (the other issues are now as much a factor as this one), but I have never understood why a company thinks a digital product should be worth anywhere near the cost of a physical product. The prices should at least be halved
Aren't they? I'm seeing 50-60 dollar hardcovers and 20 dollar PDFs.
Plus as others have mentioned, all the rules are free online too.
I will agree the website is kind of crusty though.
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We all know Paizo's site is a hot mess. Attributing it to nefarious intent because you wanna Karen about something is frankly embarrassing though.
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Hi Karen.
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Paizo literally gives their game away with Archives of Nethys, so not sure what you're talking about.
I'm amazed they can give the game away and still do well as a company. I do tend to buy the module APs I like, but I've only bought a Core Book and a Bestiary then usually use Archives. Paizo is a damn generous company when it comes to RPGs.
Wizards has never been as generous with content or to their fanbase as Paizo. So you sound pretty crazy making these claims here. All you need to do is look around a bit to see how much Paizo gives to their fans between free player's guides, full digital rules on Archives of Nethys, and the upkeep of these forums.
You can criticize things you don't like as it's a free country, but Paizo not giving a ton of free content to their fans isn't provable at all. Paizo is one of the least greedy gaming companies I've seen.
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Could be OP actually didn't know about the archives. If one weren't familiar, going through Pathfinder -> Rulebooks -> Online System Reference doesn't exactly scream "This is where we keep our full library of rules" if you don't already know. Even then, AON isn't the easiest place to read about the entire game from the beginning.
It's great, don't get me wrong, but it's a difficult replacement for a core rulebook, if nobody at the table has one.
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Late Feb to early March there was a Humble Bundle that offered what the OP wanted here.
Some $400+ worth of PF2E content in PDF form for $25.
I got it, I already had most of the stuff in print form. After I got it, I became a PF2E subscriber and now... I get the print and PDF together for the price of the print - 15%.
There are routes to save on the cost. You have to either catch a sale, be a subscriber, or... actually look at the prices on this website:
After all... if you feel the PDF books should be cheaper than the print... they are.
Here's the Bestiary:
Add Hardcover $49.99
Add PDF $19.99
$30 savings...
Core rulebook:
Hardcover $59.99
Add PDF $19.99
$40 savings.
What... exactly... is... the... issue?
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Could be OP actually didn't know about the archives.
I suspect that as well. It doesn't help that the 'archives' website is not named 'pathfinder srd' but instead 'archives of who exactly?'
To OP:
https://2e.aonprd.com
- all the rules free.
https://pathbuilder2e.com
- Free online character builder.
https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Pathfinder_Wiki
- Most of the setting free
https://www.dungeonetics.com/pfnames/
- Name generator
https://discord.gg/pathfinder2e
https://discord.gg/pathfinder
- Community run discords
https://discord.gg/foundryvtt
- Foundry Discord
Could be OP actually didn't know about the archives.I suspect that as well. It doesn't help that the 'archives' website is not named 'pathfinder srd' but instead 'archives of who exactly?'
To OP:
https://2e.aonprd.com
- all the rules free.https://pathbuilder2e.com
- Free online character builder.https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Pathfinder_Wiki
- Most of the setting freehttps://www.dungeonetics.com/pfnames/
- Name generatorhttps://discord.gg/pathfinder2e
https://discord.gg/pathfinder
- Community run discordshttps://discord.gg/foundryvtt
- Foundry Discord
Huh. I didn't know about some of those. Thanks!
The Archives, as far as I can tell, do not feature the vast majority of material released. Specifically and most importantly they do not seem to host any of the Adventure Paths, which would have been the majority of my purchase due to how many books there are and how they are priced.
As of yet everyone's reaction within the paizo community is 'but archives of nethys' or 'it's a bug' or 'they're better then WoTC'. Everyone outside the community that I've spoken to is telling me to drop it and recommending other RPGs. As someone still running Pathfinder 1e, I did want to give 2e a legit chance. But these issues make it difficult to even justify.
This website is either intentionally and maliciously or ignorantly/accidentally designed to be manipulative right now, as is their business strategy with subscriptions, as is their pricing on the digital goods. It's a lot of accidents to happen but a lot of people vouch for the owners of this company personally, so I'm not certain how to feel.
I do know that a duck quacks and that a company that seems shady probably is, if they've had years to fix it and haven't.
Could be OP actually didn't know about the archives.I suspect that as well. It doesn't help that the 'archives' website is not named 'pathfinder srd' but instead 'archives of who exactly?'
To OP:
https://2e.aonprd.com
- all the rules free.https://pathbuilder2e.com
- Free online character builder.https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Pathfinder_Wiki
- Most of the setting freehttps://www.dungeonetics.com/pfnames/
- Name generatorhttps://discord.gg/pathfinder2e
https://discord.gg/pathfinder
- Community run discordshttps://discord.gg/foundryvtt
- Foundry Discord
The actual is that I've done supply work, I've done production work and I've been a manager for multiple businesses. And a 19.99 dollar price tag on a good that costs nothing to produce is the wet dream of any business man. I regularly buy from indie publishers, some people printing their books out of their garage, and they charge less for their physical products then this company does for their digital.
As someone whose worked for years with both decent and s$$&ty businessmen and women, and for companies much smaller then paizo, and I can tell you right now that the price is exorbitant. They probably made the money on the books initial cost back on the physical copies alone, or they should have if they are competent. Anything from the digital is pure profit. And when you have a product that is pure profit and you upcharge it that much, you only do it for one reason.
Studies show that a large majority of people that would buy their product at 2.99 will buy it at 19.99.
That's it. And I think that's scummy. I grew up selling things for my time and their worth, not some made up price tag.
And a lot of people say the Paizo owners wouldn't do that, that this is what they need to do to make the money they do. All I can think to that is 'how desperate for money are they that they NEED to charge 19.99 on a 4 year old product that likely sells only a few times a week at this point?'
Everyone is calling out WoTC for their scummy practices. I'm here to support a company a lot of people like, that I used to support hard, and I see some problems that make me not want to spend upwards of a s@!! ton on this site, some problems that have been here since the beginning and could have been fixed by now and some that have been added to. And I see a community rushing to their defense against a guy who really has no personal stake in this other then being an old fan of the company.
You can say you don't like my opinion, but it's not fake, and neither are the facts I'm presenting. You can tell my AoN makes it all better and I can disagree, and that's an opinion, but the fact is that their site is either trash or manipulative and their prices are trash out of greed or out of poor business choices.
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You are of course entitled to all your opinions and for all I know (since I don't work for Paizo and can't say for sure) some or even all of them may be right.
But what I can speak to is my own group... Over the last 10 years besides myself and the DM, no one else has ever given Paizo a dime because they use AoN and Pathbuilder. So the prices that those of us who patronize Paizo pay subsidize those who don't buy anything but still play the game.
I imagine that something less than 10% of Pathfinder players subsidize the other 90%. That, I think, is the business model, like it or not.
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I've been a manager for multiple businesses.
I really feel bad for those multiple businesses, I hope they recovered.
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20$ is basically the industry standard for PDF copies. Go on DrivethruRPG and sort by price sometime.
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A reminder that for who knows how long Archives of Nethys was just one dude and maybe a few other people doing all the work for free just because they wanted.
Paizo then decided to make them the official SRD given how popular they are.
That explains why the name isn't just "Paizo games SRD". ;)
I wondered if it was fan run, Paizo supported, Paizo run, or something.
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Could be OP actually didn't know about the archives.I suspect that as well. It doesn't help that the 'archives' website is not named 'pathfinder srd' but instead 'archives of who exactly?'
To OP:
https://2e.aonprd.com
- all the rules free.https://pathbuilder2e.com
- Free online character builder.https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Pathfinder_Wiki
- Most of the setting freehttps://www.dungeonetics.com/pfnames/
- Name generatorhttps://discord.gg/pathfinder2e
https://discord.gg/pathfinder
- Community run discordshttps://discord.gg/foundryvtt
- Foundry DiscordThe actual is that I've done supply work, I've done production work and I've been a manager for multiple businesses. And a 19.99 dollar price tag on a good that costs nothing to produce is the wet dream of any business man. I regularly buy from indie publishers, some people printing their books out of their garage, and they charge less for their physical products then this company does for their digital.
As someone whose worked for years with both decent and s*!&ty businessmen and women, and for companies much smaller then paizo, and I can tell you right now that the price is exorbitant. They probably made the money on the books initial cost back on the physical copies alone, or they should have if they are competent. Anything from the digital is pure profit. And when you have a product that is pure profit and you upcharge it that much, you only do it for one reason.
Studies show that a large majority of people that would buy their product at 2.99 will buy it at 19.99.
That's it. And I think that's scummy. I grew up selling things for my time and their worth, not some made up price tag.
And a lot of people say the Paizo owners wouldn't do that, that this is what they need to do to make the money they do. All I can think to that is 'how desperate for money are they that they NEED to charge 19.99 on a 4 year old product that likely sells only a few times...
"Costs nothing to produce" So you do not believe writers, editors, and artists deserve to be paid for their work?
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PDFs of the core rulebook are probably more useful than my first printing physical copy now, what with all the errata.
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The Archives, as far as I can tell, do not feature the vast majority of material released. Specifically and most importantly they do not seem to host any of the Adventure Paths, which would have been the majority of my purchase due to how many books there are and how they are priced.My admittedly limited understanding based on talking to others is that this is intentional and is in fact Paizo's business model for PF2E. Give the rules for free, make you pay for the adventures.
I really don't understand what the OP wants.
They seem to be demanding both the rules and adventures be given to them as fully fleshed out, illustrated, top quality production PDFs for free.
What business model do they expect Paizo to take here?
No one actually even needs any of the adventures or adventure packs. Not even GMs. We get them because of their quality.
To make that quality means putting in time and effort for a lot of people. People who need to get paid because they don't live in the 1960s USSR so they have bills...
I'm pretty sure $20 for a PDF was normal even 20 years ago when the print books were almost the same. Inflation has caused the print stuff to keep going up, yet we're lucky that PDFs have remained constant.
It also takes "absolutely nothing" to "produce" another copy of a AAA video game. They can just copy the file and send it to you. So all games should be free right? It takes $0 to just "send you a copy of a movie' to your smart TV, so all movies and TV shows should be free also right?
Let's just completely ignore all of the production costs, salaries of people, costs to host and serve files, and so and so forth.
Like... what is the notion here?
As someone who is in technology and designs the architecture of large online applications - that stuff isn't free. Digital files are not free. Bills exist that need to be paid and even if we made all of the labor "free" by forcing us all to work for nothing; somebody's still gotta pay for the electricity.
Their PDF prices recently went up from 10 to 20 dollars. I would imagine it's because a lot of people buy the PDF and just email it to their friends. With it being 20 now, they'll at least get more for it. It also makes the free pdf with subscriptions seem more attractive.
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I did a little research. As best I can tell, the more a product costs to print & ship (that is, the higher page count and whether the book is hardcover or softcover), the greater the is discount Paizo offers for PDFs.
This is especially true for rulebooks, the PDFs of which cost the same as 76-page Pathfinder Adventures despite having many times the page count. The 540 CRB PDF is 66% off. Other rulebooks are 60-63% off.
I do suspect that Paizo does make more money from a PDF than from most of its print products, especially if they have in fact raised their prices as Ched Greyfell says. Unlike books, PDFs don't have exorbitant printing & shipping costs and never run out of inventory.
However, I disagree with the OP. I don't think Paizo's pricing of PDFs is at all scummy, since they do discount their PDFs significantly (to say nothing of offering a consumer-friendly PDF to begin with, or posting rules content & art online for free).
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OP, I have been playing since '81, and I am a third party publisher. Your view of pricing structure and TTRPG business practice is unrealistic and frankly toxic. In the history of publishing in the industry, Paizo has a fair track record. They're not perfect (looking at you paizo.com cookie corruption), but they're a positive force for the hobby that my company tries to emulate.
You should self reflect, and if this community isn't for you, that's fine.
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The actual is that I've done supply work, I've done production work and I've been a manager for multiple businesses.But apparently you have no experience with businesses that have fixed costs like building and equipment leases, nor with businesses that have overhead costs like customer service departments, marketing departments, IT departments, and folks who earn a salary.
Costs that need to be shared fairly by every customer, not just the ones who buy the manufactured items.
Your idea that the marginal cost of production is what drives the price of a product also needs some synching with reality. I can tell you from personal experience that the marginal cost of producing a high-quality PDF from the files you send to a printing plant is not $0.00
But it is an interesting argument from OP that PDF's cost nothing to produce and should therefore be given out for free. Of course, it is not true that the PDF's cost nothing to produce---the marginal cost of each copy of the PDF is merely zero. When marginal cost is zero, companies do still have an incentive to price based on profit maximization. This is likely why we see PDF's priced where they are as opposed to malicious or manipulative intent.
Also, I know people have mentioned Archives of Nethys, but I just want to add that I know people who have played or run the game for years using only AoN. Sure, you don't get pre-written adventures on there, but there is nothing stopping you from homebrewing your own adventure. I do not think it is an unreasonable line to draw that the core mechanics and character options of the game are available for free but pre-written adventures and setting materials need to be purchased if you want to use those.
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Paizo is already absolutely having their lunch eaten by Redrazors Pathbuilder which undercuts their ability to make money on their products (which for the life of me I don't understand why they never took pains to ensure they get a cut of the App store money the dude makes), giving away free PDFs would only further damage their bottom line. Paizo is awesome for allowing certain things to be free but giving away the whole-cloth books in PDF form is financial suicide.
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Paizo is already absolutely having their lunch eaten by Redrazors Pathbuilder which undercuts their ability to make money on their products (which for the life of me I don't understand why they never took pains to ensure they get a cut of the App store money the dude makes), giving away free PDFs would only further damage their bottom line. Paizo is awesome for allowing certain things to be free but giving away the whole-cloth books in PDF form is financial suicide.
The people who use Pathbuilder (read: players) are people who wouldn't buy Paizo books anyway. I play PF on regular basis with some 20 people, out of which 3 buy Paizo books, 2 of them are GMs and just one is a player who likes having books. Everybody else is just using AoN/PB.
This is how things always were - ttRPG sales are 75% GMs, 25% players, in a rough nutshell.
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As someone who buys the books and uses Pathbuilder, j don't really see how the two are competing with each other. A book doesn't calculate math for me and Pathbuilder is an inferior way to understand the full scope of the game.
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I mean, the RPG industry has always been predicated on "one person can buy a book then play a game with their friends."
A group that attached to the game will likely eventually buy something, but as far back as I can tell it was good enough to not have all the books, to loan books to a friend, etc.
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I believe he means that someone who buys pathbuilder is less likely to buy a PDF.
Maybe.
On the other hand, I know pathbuilder has been specifically responsible for thousands of dollars in book sales that wouldn't have otherwise happened, just in the community I'm personally involved in.
So I think it's hard to say how the math really shakes out.
Pathbuilder is a good character builder but I wouldn't want to use it as a rules reference.
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Paizo is already absolutely having their lunch eaten by Redrazors Pathbuilder which undercuts their ability to make money on their products
Pathbuilder is a character creation tool. It makes getting into the game a lot easier. If anything it helps people get over the early learning curve while at the same time realizing the wealth of opportunities to be had in character choices.
I know for myself at least, seeing things in there has motivated me to buy the books on a given subject.
I suspect the player who would use Pathbuilder and not buy a book aimed at players would likely not have bought that book to begin with.
It's much more of a 'virtuous circle of connected benefits' for the companies involved.
Paizo <--> Pathbuilder <--> Foundry
Each of them makes the others more useful and a better idea to buy into.
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Paizo trying to mess with Pathbuilder's groove would have been a huge blunder, and definitely something WotC would have tried to do.
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All I am saying is Pathbuilder 2e (forget the original or SF version) earns more for one person (unless RR hired an assistant) alone than the entirety of every item sold on Pathfinder + Starfinder Infinite day after day, month after month and has been doing so for years. These Apps earn more WAY income for him than the salary of anyone on the payroll at Paizo.
I've never been a "hate the player hate the game" kinda guy so I can't blame him personally so I put the loss of income generation and a proper License for it squarely on Paizo, though to be fair, there isn't really too much I think they could have even done to prevent that from happening but you folks seem to seriously underestimate just how much money is being raked in duty and royalty-free by these unlicensed Apps.
But yeah, I see why they DIDN'T act, that much is blatantly obvious, fans would have thrown a fit that their free toys are being trifled with, not to mention the whole wild west aspect where you can't legally protect game mechanics which would have made it fraught to try to pursue in the first place. My main point is, at the end of the day, is that Paizo lost a TON of money by allowing someone else to get to the market on their own by not commissioning someone with a proper license (or hiring someone on staff as an App developer) to make their own freemium App with ads to rake in the dough. It is what it is though, just figured I'd make the point as it's one that many people are pretty ignorant of and it felt relevant enough to the discussion so as to help drive the main point people are putting out there in the thread that Paizo isn't a money hungry corporate behemoth that tries to suck up all the air in the room even when they could or, in some ways, I feel they SHOULD be, if only so they could properly compensate their creators and other staff which as many of us know, is something of an ACTUAL problem that many of us fans wish could be fixed.
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Okay, sure here's your source, and even a free reliable one at that. The kind of traffic PB2e gets they rake in around 10k per month, adjusted annually that's at least 120k income gross per year just for that one app which hasn't been in operation for too long, but add in PB that's about another 2-5k-ish, about half that for SB and you've got a whopping 200k. Nobody at Paizo makes 200k or even CLOSE to that. Additionally, if you don't believe me go ahead and try to research this yourself even with the free tools available and information that is public. I'll openly admit that is not the only info that informed ME but then again, I'm not you, you're not me and, after all, to most everyone here I'm just some rando on the internet so why would you trust me, but you asked for a source so there is one.
On the topic of PF/SF Infinite income, that's SUPER easy to do too, look at the sales, the advertising of the items listed there, the best-selling book as of last aug had reached 500 copies and the general trend on PDF sales is that while it remains steady the annual sales tend to drop off. Assuming the OGL 1.1 debacle in Jan created a spike they almost certainly have seen a spike but I'm skeptical that many 5e refugees that created the huge demand first instinct was to jump into PF/SFI rather than the free resources *cough Pathbuilder cough* or the 1st party books. The median cost for PFI/SFI products is ABOUT 6 bucks that means the programs would need to sell around 3000 PDFs per month in order to even come close to gross income and that's not even accounting for the MASSIVE cost of HOSTING the files, paying authors, artists, bandwidth, and the dozens of other costs involved with every item offered for sale there... all that compared to the paltry cost of just one person importing data scraped from their own PDFs, manual input, time, the use of tools that are also free and or built by the individual(s?) involved in the lone business (which by the way seems to just be registered simply to in the name of the creator and not even a proper business which suggests RR is still more or less doing most of the work alone) and other free resources such as AoN... it's not even a race at that point, it's a 100-meter dash sprinter versus the Falcon 9 2-stage rocket.
As for operating costs, those typically cost between 250 and 1000 per month to keep the lights running. If you want, you COULD justify that his personal income/salary from the business doesn't or shouldn't count I suppose but that's extremely shaky footing for someone to argue from.
Listen, I get why folks are apt to jump to defense here, it's a cherished tool and it objectively makes accessing the game easy as pie, esp for new players, it's simply something that I think SHOULD have been done by Paizo internally and as to WHY they didn't, I couldn't say, maybe they thought it would be too hard, maybe "office politics" or bureaucracy made it "impossible" to do, or perhaps they just didn't even THINK to do it in the first place. Again, RR isn't to blame here and the Apps are spectacular for players but from the perspective of Paizo, they are getting absolutely rinsed for the loss of income they could have generated from doing the same thing or even, something BETTER than that has the rights to the setting info. It was essentially the free space on a bingo board for Paizo to capitalize on, esp early on, but they didn't realize they could blot the center of the card early enough and somebody else jumped up when their last number was called so them jumping up to try to claim the prize after someone walked to the stage to claim the reward would reasonably look shady and underhanded, it's just... a shame.
Don't know what else to say, it's like a time travel regret situation kinda thing you know, like, if personal anectodes mean anything back in 2009 I had JUST heard about Bitcoin and leaned enough to mine some and I did, ended up with I think 18 BTC and subsequently just forgot about it, had some computer trouble and ended up wiping the HDD and selling the PC, all of it lost forever to the ether. A decade plus passed and I saw what had happened to the asset and since then I kicked myself as my thoughtlessness ended up losing me an actual fortune simply because I didn't know or care.
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Okay, sure here's your source, and even a free reliable one at that.
The login wall suggests otherwise to me.
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It costs more than "250-1000 a month to keep the lights on" — taxes, for one.
Taking what you say at face value 200k is not really a boatload of money for a small business. In fact, I would put money on him being underpaid for the talent he clearly has.
it's not like there are buckets of cash to make in TTRPGs.
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BTW not sure if you noticed but Paizio isn't a software development company.