So I did a little check and I noticed in the last 11 days since I released
Classes of NeoExodus: Machinesmith there have be
27 Pathfinder 3pp products released; 5 for free and 21 for a specific retail price. That means 2.36 Pathfinder 3PP products were released daily on average during that time period. 1,542 Pathfinder products are currently available at RPGNow. I wonder what that number is going to be in six months? What does this mean, well to me? This is what a Pathfinder "bubble" sounds like when people are blowing it up. I just wonder how many 3PP will be here after the bubble pops? I guess we will see. Talk to you later...
We don't have a bubble, we may have market saturation.
ReplyDeleteThe value of these products are not out of variance with with their intrinsic value (what I see are good products, vs the bad products of the 3.0 age), If anything we have PDF products that are undervalued (average price is less than $2.00. Also your only looking at PDF, retail print distribution (in FLGS, not just at paizo.com) is extremely limited (no one is putting out even a single print book in to full print distribution a month).
What you may have is market saturation in the PDF market. A situation in which a 3PP product has become diffused (distributed) to 90% within the PDF market; This will vary widely as we don't know consumer purchasing power; competition (which is high in PDF but low in Print, and its not cut throat as I don't see attack ads), prices (for PDFs they are extremely low), and technology (the adoption of laptops and tablets at tables, hero labs, PRD and d20pfsrd.com).
Can I only gain market share at the expense of other publishers? Shrug, I don't know. Anything I say is guess work, I don't have access to advanced market data from every company. But because i know this can happen is why I have diversified reaching out to markets beyond pathfinder. We have a FATE game and a Diceless game in the works.
80% of our customers for these lines were new customers.