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For one, people with taste. People with no taste will always settle for slop. There is a reason I used AoN PF1E over d20PFSRD. Because even though d20PFSRD runs better, having the better context of AoN PF1E was simply more fulfilling. There is a reason people buy Lost Omens books despite them being relatively unimportant. Because I know full well, many players, who don't touch Golarion Lore. They run off and make their own worlds. I know others who AI Generate a big breasted waifu to be their character. I also know players who, despite all of these resources, buy physical books, and use Hero Forge, often with a subscription, to handcraft their own characters, who commission actual artists to make their character, not just once, but multiple times. There will always be people who will settle for slop, and there will always be people who will buy the genuine.
Plus, if I was a player, and if AI was such a big deal. I'd ask one thing. Why even have a GM? A GM who relies too much on generating slop will soon make his players realize he's replaceable, and he'll either be converted to a player, or he'll be left behind as the players start just going to an AI GM instead. In the end, all they're doing is furthering their own obsolescence instead of making themselves more valuable. Meanwhile, I put in a lot of personal work crafting and personalizing my adventures, and you know what, a lot of my players want ME, specifically. While a GM with no taste catering to players with no taste will suffer their tasteless players replacing him with something simpler.
Now you're getting it. At some point in the future, these younger folks who you can refer to as classless all you want will build AI DMs that generate adventures in real time, now the rules perfectly, and generate mobile maps where you type in "Move Morog the Fighter 30 feet ahead" and the AI moves it for you.
Yes, you are understanding. If you are making the "classy" choice, it's unlikely this whole younger generation as AI gets better with some company making AI RPGs you can talk to or write in a prompt to generate everything will play those.
This is the start of more advanced AI. Just the beginning, And it's already able to do all this stuff. It's going to get better and better and better.
Paizo has to position for this reality.
You know what. It also may be they are planning to go with a site where you have to pay for the rules. Now that they Remastered everything, they also have more control over the rules. It might be very reasonable for Paizo to make a web site for rules delivery and charge a subscription fee to make money.
Puts their stuff behind a paywall for AI and allows players to pay a subscription fee to keep updated on the books.
That might a reason too. Wouldn't a PF fan pay 5 or 10 bucks a month for the PF2 ruleset including constant updates?
Then they could buy some company like Foundry, then make their own subscription based online PF2 game.
Why let so many other companies eat from their trough when they can make a high quality web site and tools then sell a subscription to it themselves.
...Plagiarizing base rules content to make adventures doesn't sound like a problem, because that's the point of licensing in the first place, to grant the rights to use base rules content to anyone else using the license. A human 3rd party can already do that all they want. If anything, all it does is force the AI to use the ORC license from a legal point of view, as it needs to act like a 3rd party, and inject any of its innovations back into the licensescape to legally be allowed to participate.
If it's taking the content without ORC, the company can be sued. And if it's taking the company within ORC, the license is doing as its designed to do, and it in return grants Paizo access to its content.
Granted, it's not to say it's not a problem for 3rd party adventure writers. But this isn't a Paizo problem.
Who is going to buy adventures if you can generate them at home including full maps, pictures of monsters, and AI video within minutes?
It's not just the rules. It's also the maps. It's also image. It's story text.
If you sit down with an AI, you can generate everything yourself within minutes that used to take months or weeks of planning, design, coordination, up front costs, and planning a how many copies print for a run.
Now some DM sitting at home goes, "Draw me an orc chieftain with a cool axe that leads the Deadskull tribe."
"Make a video of the the chieftain shouting 'I will kill you all'"
Draw a map of the orc chieftains throne room and a little orc outpost dungeon.
The orc is in there because he's leading his tribe to conquer the local village Wildwind. Write me a narrative for that. Toss in some NPCs appropriate to a fantasy village.
Minutes later you have this whole encounter with pics, maps, videos, and narrative.
Anyone can do this at home using an AI search engine. You don't think the Paizo people are looking at this going, "This is not good, not good at all."
They pay money for monster art, maps,
I don't DM with AI. My group likes PF2. I like Paizo modules still. I am a big reason why we'll stick with PF2.
The other players might not care though.
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It's always been possible to draw your own maps and come up with your own creatures and stories. It doesn't make any difference to Paizo whether or not someone does that with their own imagination or if they get hallucination-and-plagiarism bot to alternately hallucinate and plagiarize some stuff they'll have to edit anyways to fix things like 'the rules don't work that way' and 'this map has a bunch of doors to nowhere and the hallways make no sense.' 'Speed' doesn't matter because the time taken is going to be at the pace of the actual human players.
Also these suggestions for how Paizo should use AI are pure nonsense. They have artists who like making art; they do not need AI to regurgitate what they have already drawn. And "AI videos with PDF downloads for NPCs" is just word salad.
Paizo is a business. It does matter if someone else can produce something they produce cheaper with enough quality to act as a fungible product replacement.
The RPG community always seems to forget that though this is their fun hobby, it's also a business.
That's why when Paizo pulls the curtain back sometimes, they explain business planning such as print runs to their customer base.
If something can be produced cheaper and faster that streamlines their business and you want to stay in business, you don't go all John Henry and the steam drill spending all your time and resources to compete with new tech that makes your business more cost efficient and profitable. And kill your business to try to compete using inefficient, old school tech.
You have to adapt in business to new technology that makes your business more cost efficient and profitable. That's why Paizo was initially successful because they adapted to a RPG community that wanted open content. Now the industry is changing again with new tech and Paizo must adapt to that.
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Also, way to undercut Impossible Magic hype. Regardless of the "financial" reasons for this change, it was deeply, deeply stupid to announce on the release of a hugely anticipated book. The sunreddit is stacked with posts about AoN and all the impossible magic is being buried.
Good job Jim!
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I'm just another poster here with zero power, but may I ask that you please stop 'subtly' shilling for AI in this thread? It's a massive derail based on vibes to get people to talk about the 'inevitable awesomeness' [massive citations needed] that is AI. AI pretty clearly has has nothing to do with AON or this move.
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Also, way to undercut Impossible Magic hype. Regardless of the "financial" reasons for this change, it was deeply, deeply stupid to announce on the release of a hugely anticipated book. The sunreddit is stacked with posts about AoN and all the impossible magic is being buried.
Good job Jim!
As loathe as I am to defend paizo's decision making at the moment, in the interest of fairness, AoN were the ones to announce this, not Paizo...
But Paizo definitely should've coordinated with the AoN team to ensure this level of fallout at least had a solid reason to blame.
Also thirding Primus
I think the aspect you're neglecting is you don't even need AoN for this. You can literally just go on the Paizo Store, spend a few thousand buying some PDFs, feed them into the AI, and multiply that investment as the AI chugs out solutions on it while customers pay you subscriptions. Once you're caught up, the upkeep to buy a new PDF to feed back into the system is minimal. No 50-200 a month? Chump change for a business, really. And even if it's not AoN, there will always be other unofficial ones that take it, like how D&D5E has 5ETools and 5Ewikidot. Those will be scraped from there. Or they can just purchase a subscription to Demiplane and scrape that. And if they are that adamant about about not paying Paizo, the AI user can just resort to piracy. In short, the only protection from AI is not releasing any books or content at all.
Someone has already done this. I remember when pirating of Paizo products was a problem. Paizo made sure to bring down a bunch of the pirate sites.
The question is more how will Paizo adapt to this changing time. You have this tool that makes producing content far, far more cost efficient to mass produce.
What do do with it? Let your competitors take advantage while you try to go it old school or adapt to changing times and make your business more cost efficient so you can stay in business?
I think this is being asked by a lot of companies including Paizo in this new compute era.
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I'm just another poster here with zero power, but may I ask that you please stop 'subtly' shilling for AI in this thread? It's a massive derail based on vibes to get people to talk about the 'inevitable awesomeness' [massive citations needed] that is AI. AI pretty clearly has has nothing to do with AON or this move.
I'm not shilling for AI.
I'm just not a person willing to close my eyes to the reality of what Paizo is dealing with. I've seen it with my own eyes.
You can't put your head in the sand and hope it goes away. It won't. You have to adapt your business to changing times.
Whether anyone likes it or not, AI is a real threat to Paizo's business. A real painful threat.
That is why they banned any use of AI on these forums. I understand why they banned it.
We'll see what they do next. One thing Paizo can't do is put their head in the sand to changing technology that affects their business. They have to figure out how to adapt to it and continuing as a going concern.
I'll post one last message from my perspective as a Paizo customer and user of AON:
I get it Paizo. This is a rough time in your business. You been dealing with hell for quite a while now from the forced Remaster to all the other stuff I won't mention in the last six to eight years.
Do what you gotta do to get your economics right in this changing environment.
If you go out of business, the rules are gone anyway or some archive site with no updates. So are the forums, the adventures, and everything else including your livelihood.
Make the necessary moves to boost your revenues and income in these changing times.
You're not a non-profit RPG company making stuff for free. You're a business with a responsibility to your employees and customers to remain a going concern. If that requires some changes to get revenues moving in the right direction, make the changes.
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Yeah, I will never give another penny to Paizo if they commit to some "AI venture." Shutting down AoN won't stop AI companies from scraping Paizo's copyrighted work since AI companies just don't care about copyright (and this is how we should kill them, but Paizo isn't in position to do that in the way that like "Disney" is.)
It's possible that they figured that there was really no need to keep giving AoN the books and the images since they don't make money (directly) from it, but paywalling the rules just isn't possible in how I read the ORC.
I wonder if this is a sign of something to come for Pathbuilder.
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I wonder if this is a sign of something to come for Pathbuilder.
Pathbuilder is already on the CUP that AON is being moved to. But if they’re this petty and shortsighted about AON and get away with this they might go after the CUP again like they did last time… my trust for Paizo is now at a real low.
I wonder if this is a sign of something to come for Pathbuilder.Pathbuilder is already on the CUP that AON is being moved to. But if they’re this petty and shortsighted about AON and get away with this they might go after the CUP again like they did last time… my trust for Paizo is now at a real low.
Pardon my ignorance but what is a CUP?
And what do you mean "like they did last time?" What happened?
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This plus Paizo breaking its pledge to not use AI by using AI art in its marketing for its Titan Forge minis has convinced me that Paizo is going in very bad direction as a company.
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I'm a bit disappointed considering all of this. I made liberal use of art assets on AoN to make tokens for monsters and I still can, I own most of the books, but it's certainly going to be a bit more time consuming.
Otherwise, I never really would've taken the leap to even try PF2e without AoN's exceptional quality. It made running the game a much simpler task than it ever was for D&D 5e. Of course, it'll still be available to do such, but that's why it sort of puzzles me as well. If anything, a slower update cycle on the website, similar to how it was immediately post-remaster, means folks will just check Demiplane or Pathbuilder. Which at the end of the day are more inconvenient, but if someone wasn't buying books already and was relying on free sources like AoN, I don't see any reason for why they'd buy books now rather than just use an alternative that updates earlier.
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And what do you mean "like they did last time?" What happened?
Likely referring to this, where they replaced the Community Use Policy (CUP) with a more restrictive one: https://paizo.com/blog/new-and-revised-licenses
It got reinstated in the end. This reddit thread talks about it some with links to some discussions:
https://old.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1ey8bgr/the_new_paizo_fan_content_pol icy_affects_more/
This plus Paizo breaking its pledge to not use AI by using AI art in its marketing for its Titan Forge minis has convinced me that Paizo is going in very bad direction as a company.
This one is news to me.
This plus Paizo breaking its pledge to not use AI by using AI art in its marketing for its Titan Forge minis has convinced me that Paizo is going in very bad direction as a company.This one is news to me.
The Justice: How Paizo’s “No-AI” Policy Became a Marketing Lie
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This plus Paizo breaking its pledge to not use AI by using AI art in its marketing for its Titan Forge minis has convinced me that Paizo is going in very bad direction as a company.This one is news to me.
It was inevitable. AI isn't going to go away, and even if Paizo stands by its policies, there are surely people among their ranks who are willing to ignore the anti-AI policies to make their lives easier, particularly if they think they can get away with it.
I guarantee you they're in every company now, whether the powers that be like it or not.
And what do you mean "like they did last time?" What happened?Likely referring to this, where they replaced the Community Use Policy (CUP) with a more restrictive one: https://paizo.com/blog/new-and-revised-licenses
It got reinstated in the end. This reddit thread talks about it some with links to some discussions:
https://old.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1ey8bgr/the_new_paizo_fan_content_pol icy_affects_more/
Yep, I was indeed referring to this. Thanks.
All this definitely reads me to as "company needing to maximise short-term balance sheet no matter the cost", which in the context of everything else, makes me worry that paizo won't be a going concern within 1 financial year, which then makes me reconsider whether its even worth the personal financial risk of any spending on pathfinder/starfinder when they could be orphaned at any moment mid-lifespan, meaning a loss of resources and infrastructure to support play.
This plus Paizo breaking its pledge to not use AI by using AI art in its marketing for its Titan Forge minis has convinced me that Paizo is going in very bad direction as a company.This one is news to me.It was inevitable. AI isn't going to go away, and even if Paizo stands by its policies, there are surely people among their ranks who are willing to ignore the anti-AI policies to make their lives easier, particularly if they think they can get away with it.
I guarantee you they're in every company now, whether the powers that be like it or not.
It's clear that AI will be used after laying off a truckton of people...
I would love to know why Paizo hasn't done anything to get refunded since Diamond's closure, like the other publishers. Even if they did in the coming months, they wouldn't backtrack on their decision...
What's next? PDF files will be sold at the exact same price as physical books, just like digital games are being sold as expensive as their disc or cartridge counterparts?
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My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
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If you are contacting Paizo's Customer Service Team in response to this news, please consider adding "No response needed." to the end of your email.
Our emails in response will increase the workload of the Customer Service Team, but we might be able to lighten that workload by clearly stating we don't need the Customer Service Team to respond.
I trust the Customer Service Team to forward emails to the appropriate internal parties. I don't know for certain this will lighten the CST's workload, but it might help. Just something to consider
Given how baffling this is, I’m wondering if a bigger cut of Demiplane was negotiated in exchange for some form of “exclusive” partnership.
It would be a fantastic opportunity for Demiplane to kill off what must be their biggest rival.
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Also, way to undercut Impossible Magic hype. Regardless of the "financial" reasons for this change, it was deeply, deeply stupid to announce on the release of a hugely anticipated book. The sunreddit is stacked with posts about AoN and all the impossible magic is being buried.
Good job Jim!
Paizo didn't announce it: AoN did. And that's kind of baffling in itself since apparently this was decided "a few weeks ago" and we've got nothing from Paizo whatsoever about it.
Like, did Paizo management think no one would notice or care? They should have been way out ahead of this and explaining it weeks ago to get it over with before the new book hype.
Instead they made AoN do it, who pretty much had to because there'd be ten thousand people asking why things like the art vanished and why rules are late going up if they didn't.
That's a complete PR failure entirely of Paizo Management's own making, and I really don't know if management just doesn't realize how important AoN actually is to the community or what.
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Given how baffling this is, I’m wondering if a bigger cut of Demiplane was negotiated in exchange for some form of “exclusive” partnership.It would be a fantastic opportunity for Demiplane to kill off what must be their biggest rival.
Pretty sure that's Pathbuilder, and good luck with that without ending the community use policy entirely.
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There have been times where I think higher-ups at Paizo have made decisions motivated by greed, as with trying and failing to abolish the CUP, but this looks like the kind of desperate measure one makes when under heavy pressure to cut losses in the short term. I suspect Paizo are fully aware of how important AoN is to the community, which is why they did not publicize this change on their side, and I also suspect that the hope was for the backlash to either be smaller or happen later on. That it happened full-force right on the release of the company's newest major product is pretty much the worst outcome.
What upsets me as well is that this is already starting to affect people at Paizo negatively, and will likely affect more if this translates to a financial downturn. However, this is especially likely to affect the people least involved in the making of this poor decision, and least likely to affect the decision-makers. What also upsets me is that this tarnishes the company's reputation, particularly its post-OGL brand as a bastion of good ethics, when there are plenty of people in Paizo who genuinely believe in those ethics and embody them in their excellent work. As understandable as the motivations may be, this decision benefits no-one.
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I wonder if this is a sign of something to come for Pathbuilder.Pathbuilder is already on the CUP that AON is being moved to. But if they’re this petty and shortsighted about AON and get away with this they might go after the CUP again like they did last time… my trust for Paizo is now at a real low.
Pathbuilder isn't on the Community Use Policy - it cannot be, as it is (partially) a paid product. That's why Pathbuilder doesn't have any Lost Omens-specific terminology - it has to rename a bunch of things. I'm pretty sure Pathbuilder is just using the ORC/OGL licenses to reference the rules free of any references to Paizo IP. AoN going to the CUP will still allow it to use Golarion lore, though there may need to be a rewording of some descriptions if they're currently taken directly from the book.
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The confusing thing to me is the lack of commentary from Paizo regarding this. I can understand this move being downstream of the diamond fiasco, and their layoffs. it's not like they're getting fully hostile to AoN, but but the silence from a company that is usually very communicative to it's community is disappointing.
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I don't mean to dismiss anyone's reaction to all of this so I'm looking for some clarification on why this is such a major deal.
So far from what I've understood in AoN's statement is that all we would be losing is:
- some art
- the original Paizo PRD site (not sure if many even uses this)
- (near) street date access to new rules
Am I missing something here? It seems like everything else with AoN will be staying the same.
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Well, servers aren't free, so any strain on them could affect people who use it. It doesn't sound like it is one, hopefully.
I also just get concerned when even companies with good reputations start pushing boundaries and making rash decisions.
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Pathbuilder isn't on the Community Use Policy - it cannot be, as it is (partially) a paid product. That's why Pathbuilder doesn't have any Lost Omens-specific terminology - it has to rename a bunch of things. I'm pretty sure Pathbuilder is just using the ORC/OGL licenses to reference the rules free of any references to Paizo IP. AoN going to the CUP will still allow it to use Golarion lore, though there may need to be a rewording of some descriptions if they're currently taken directly from the book.I wonder if this is a sign of something to come for Pathbuilder.Pathbuilder is already on the CUP that AON is being moved to. But if they’re this petty and shortsighted about AON and get away with this they might go after the CUP again like they did last time… my trust for Paizo is now at a real low.
Oh, you’re right. I mixed them up.
I don't mean to dismiss anyone's reaction to all of this so I'm looking for some clarification on why this is such a major deal.
So far from what I've understood in AoN's statement is that all we would be losing is:
- some art
- the original Paizo PRD site (not sure if many even uses this)
- (near) street date access to new rules
Am I missing something here? It seems like everything else with AoN will be staying the same.
You’re not missing any bullet points, but you might be missing all the compounding ramifications of their unpaid volunteers with busy lives and sparse free time not even being able to start inputting data from new books until street date instead of having months of lead time. This is a huge blow.
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The immediate effect of this might not be huge, but pulling support from a community site that is such an integral part of the game sets a bad precedence. AoN costs paizo basically nothing as far as I can tell, while their support and endorsement for the site was hugely positive publicity for a long time and brought many new players to the game.
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...That it happened full-force right on the release of the company's newest major product is pretty much the worst outcome. ...
From the AoN statement it seems like Paizo decided when the agreement would end so the timing would seem to be a deliberate choice on Paizo's part.
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I don't mean to dismiss anyone's reaction to all of this so I'm looking for some clarification on why this is such a major deal.
So far from what I've understood in AoN's statement is that all we would be losing is:
- some art
- the original Paizo PRD site (not sure if many even uses this)
- (near) street date access to new rules
Am I missing something here? It seems like everything else with AoN will be staying the same.
The last bulletpoint I think isn't quite correct: right now, AoN gets early (and presumably free) access to Paizo's products so that their data entry team can get all the material up and ready as early as possible, which usually ends up being a few weeks after product launch. Having to purchase the material on release means that material would only be up much later on AoN, which means many players will only be able to read that information much later on. Because this will widen the gap between product launch and its release on AoN, I also suspect this will cause some players reliant on AoN to forget about the product by the time its content gets shared there. I know for a fact that some players have purchased Paizo products because they read up on some of their contents shortly after the product released, so this may very well have a tangible negative impact on Paizo's bottom line.
From the AoN statement it seems like Paizo decided when the agreement would end so the timing would seem to be a deliberate choice on Paizo's part.
It's true that the agreement end date is a week before Impossible Magic's release, so it's quite possible that the timing was chosen to avoid giving the book early to AoN as part of a new internal strategy (though I suspect AoN likely got that book, especially as subscribers have access to it now too). There's unfortunately not much to go on here given what little communication we've received, but my conjecture is that this is very much an attempt to cut what is perceived as a short-term loss, which hopefully means that the immediate and significant player backlash will invalidate the benefits of this strategy and force Paizo to reinstate the agreement.
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Ditching the partnership with AoN is a disappointing move, and I think it won't be great for the long-term health of the game, either. I have purchased multiple books because I saw some art on the archives and got curious. The ancestry images, for example, are really useful as a way to grab potential players, and discarding that's gonna cost a fair bit long-term.
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Pretty sure that's Pathbuilder, and good luck with that without ending the community use policy entirely.Given how baffling this is, I’m wondering if a bigger cut of Demiplane was negotiated in exchange for some form of “exclusive” partnership.It would be a fantastic opportunity for Demiplane to kill off what must be their biggest rival.
Killing pathbuilder would almost certainly destroy paizo (literally drive it bankrupt). You think people are upset now, just imagine how upset they'd be if told "so sorry, pathbuilder is dead. But we have this wonderful replacement demiplane so all is good"