Paizo has formally ended its eight-year commercial partnership with Archives of Nethys, the volunteer-run digital reference site that’s served as the de facto free rulebook for Pathfinder and Starfinder players since 2018.
Paizo would be doing fine if it wasn't for the Diamond collapse stealing 10 million in product.
Every time WotC stabbed themselves in the foot, which they did regularly, the Paizo books would sell out at my friendly local gaming store. But no gaming company can eat a 10 mil loss.
Paizo isn't obligated to subsidize a rules aggregate site, especially if they weren't keeping up their end of the deal with royalties and actively increasing Paizo's legal costs for art IP.
I hate web adverts plenty, but something has to pay the bills and the commie "capitalism undermines our openness" attitude wasn't going to convince a company whose ledger is bleeding out thanks almost as much to their third party contractors as their own commie, woketard employees.
It's also maybe not a good idea in general to give your rules away for free on the Internet when one of the main products you're selling is the rules themselves. Yes, there's setting material and adventures, but those all come with a heavy offering of new rules and stats.
"It's also maybe not a good idea in general to give your rules away for free on the Internet when one of the main products you're selling is the rules themselves. "
In Paizo's case, a lot of that might be--or at least have been--making a virtue of necessity. Their content until a couple of years ago was built on and under the OGL, and the OGL requires that all content you use that is Open or directly derived from Open content must remain open in perpetuity. If you've got something that hooks into the system without being directly derived from Open Content--the point costs for powers in Mutants and Masterminds, Troll Lord Games' SIEGE Engine mechanic--you can keep that closed, but stuff like spells, classes, etc. has to be open.
With WotC's attempt to repeal the OGL a couple of years back, Paizo jumped ship and moved to the ORC (Open Roleplaying Content) license which they built with Chaosium, but I believe that has similar requirements.
Guess I'll just have to stick to ACKS II...
Paizo would be doing fine if it wasn't for the Diamond collapse stealing 10 million in product.
Every time WotC stabbed themselves in the foot, which they did regularly, the Paizo books would sell out at my friendly local gaming store. But no gaming company can eat a 10 mil loss.
Paizo isn't obligated to subsidize a rules aggregate site, especially if they weren't keeping up their end of the deal with royalties and actively increasing Paizo's legal costs for art IP.
I hate web adverts plenty, but something has to pay the bills and the commie "capitalism undermines our openness" attitude wasn't going to convince a company whose ledger is bleeding out thanks almost as much to their third party contractors as their own commie, woketard employees.
It's also maybe not a good idea in general to give your rules away for free on the Internet when one of the main products you're selling is the rules themselves. Yes, there's setting material and adventures, but those all come with a heavy offering of new rules and stats.
"It's also maybe not a good idea in general to give your rules away for free on the Internet when one of the main products you're selling is the rules themselves. "
In Paizo's case, a lot of that might be--or at least have been--making a virtue of necessity. Their content until a couple of years ago was built on and under the OGL, and the OGL requires that all content you use that is Open or directly derived from Open content must remain open in perpetuity. If you've got something that hooks into the system without being directly derived from Open Content--the point costs for powers in Mutants and Masterminds, Troll Lord Games' SIEGE Engine mechanic--you can keep that closed, but stuff like spells, classes, etc. has to be open.
With WotC's attempt to repeal the OGL a couple of years back, Paizo jumped ship and moved to the ORC (Open Roleplaying Content) license which they built with Chaosium, but I believe that has similar requirements.
Ah,n thanks for the clarification. The original arrangement makes far more sense now.