| AFigureOfBlue |
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The handling of the "Fireside Fantasy" sale seems really puzzling to me. I got an email about it yesterday since I'm subscribed to Paizo's emails, but there's been no blog post, no announcement here on the forums, and not even a dedicated page on the store website detailing how the sale works (like how there was for the Black Friday sales). I'm actively seeing people today on Reddit asking if Paizo will be doing a holiday sale this year, presumably because they went looking to find out if there is one and weren't able to find any information about it. I'd guess there's probably a good number of people on the forums here who don't even know it's happening.
There is a banner about the sale at the very top of the store homepage, but it isn't very descriptive at all of what the sale is (on top of being in a small font, on an easy-to-overlook gray background, on ONLY the homepage rather than all the pages of the store that people might land on)... it doesn't specify, for instance, that the sale only applies to physical products, or that to get a discount on 2E products you need to purchase multiple at once. So, even if somebody were to see the banner, and they then went and added a 2E product to their cart, they don't see any evidence of the sale applying or have any way to know why it didn't. I think at that point I'd just assume that the sale isn't working at all.
The sale doesn't even appear to apply consistently; it says it is for 'books', but it applies to some non-book items like the Fists of the Ruby Phoenix Battle Cards, but not to some other similar products like the Book of the Dead Battle Cards. I assume that this is because of how the products are categorized within the webstore (with the latter being an 'accessory' and the former being categorized with its related adventure path), but it's not at all intuitive and makes the concept of what is or isn't on sale and for how much even murkier.
This all, on top of product pages not showing sale prices (even for simpler discounts like the flat discount many 1E products have), strikes me as making it very unlikely that this sale will garner much attention compared to what it could if it were being promoted and described better.
(This all doesn't matter a ton to me personally either way, since it doesn't apply to PDFs and I only really use the PDFs for Pathfinder/Starfinder... but I do want to see Paizo succeed and this all unfortunately just doesn't strike me as an approach that's likely to make for a particularly effective sale...)
| AFigureOfBlue |
Addendum: Another strange thing, while the email (but not the store banner) specified that the sale only applied to physical products, the 40% discount does appear to be applying to some 1e digital products, specifically the Campaign Setting product line where multiple products I added to cart (specifically the PDF versions of "Path of the Hellknight" and "The First World, Realm of the Fey") showed the discount applying despite theoretically not qualifying for the sale.