Per the bl8g thread this week, Paizo said rpthat they will be dropping support for Foundry as part of their reorganization. Has there been any discussion with Smiteworks on the future of Paizohrre?
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Per the bl8g thread this week, Paizo said rpthat they will be dropping support for Foundry as part of their reorganization. Has there been any discussion with Smiteworks on the future of Paizohrre?
I don't think that's quite the case. If I remember correctly they announced they'll shortly stop producing Foundry content for Pathfinder/Starfinder society scenarios, but they will keep producing APs and other stuff (can't remember what the other stuff is).
As snupy said, they are not dropping support for everything on Foundry, only for the Organized Play scenarios. Below is the quote from Paizo regarding this.
We’ve invested heavily in Foundry VTT modules for Organized Play scenarios, but sales have not covered development costs. We will finish the current season, then pause VTT support for new Society modules until we can either reduce costs or increase revenue.
Here is the full Paizo blog announcement regarding this.
https://paizo.com/blog/paizo-restructuring-a-difficult-update-about-our-future
So this is my understanding. If someone has better information, feel free to correct me.
Converting VTT content from InDesign & PDF files is a time-consuming endeavor. This is more complicated the more complex the VTT is, and the more features it needs to support. As a simple example, a converter needs to define all the walls, doors, windows, etc. and add lighting for each map. Many modules will rarely clarify what the lighting situation is in any given area. That is up to the converter to decide.
Fantasy Grounds does all its own conversion work either directly or through our community developers. For Paizo products, this is almost entirely handled by our community developers and the efforts are overseen by Trenloe (another community dev). Our pipeline and toolset support for converting modules is fairly robust because we want to make this complex task as easy as possible. As a result, we have nearly 4000 modules available and around 1000 available for Paizo products. Modules we sell from Paizo pay a hefty royalty back for each product sold to Paizo. From the remaining share, we pay the community developers a commission on products they convert and maintain. Every module sold is at least as good as a sale in a bricks and mortar store for Paizo. We also have unlimited inventory since these are digital products. Paizo sends the files to SmiteWorks, SmiteWorks distributes those to community developers, does QA on the modules, releases them to the store, and then sends royalty payments for any sales to Paizo each quarter.
For Foundry, I believe they have a better royalty rate for products sold on their platform; however, they don't do any of the work. Paizo has an internal team of developers who do the conversion work for Foundry. From what Paizo has publicly shared and what other publishers have privately shared with me, this work is extremely time-consuming and ends up costing them a lot of time and money up front. Supposedly, they sell fairly well on the Foundry platform, but it still is not enough to cover the costs of development because it is so high. As a result, Paizo is discontinuing the line of products for organized play because those are the worst-performing products. Those products were also given away for free to VC's within the organized play group, making it even more likely that they would lose money for Paizo.
This change should not affect Fantasy Grounds negatively in any way. We will continue to convert current and back-catalog content for Paizo, and we will continue to do our best to be a good partner, supporting Paizo in any way we can.
Thank you for always being clear and helping people understand the mechanics of making a company be able to provide these products.