Lulz

So I just had a talk with a dude who used to work at Paizo, the guys who make Pathfinder and he told me some lulzy shit. Gonna copypasta some of it for posterity

"But back then Lisa Stevens hired MMO developer Ryan Dancey to develop the Pathfinder MMO, in spite of Dancey's horrible track record with games. This was a purely personal move because they're old friends. It's one of many bad decisions that basically led to the state Paizo is now in and why I left.

Pathfinder Online was developed by the independently owned (but Paizo-backed) company Goblinworks, and Paizo invested a VERY substantial sum of money in the company. Way too much.

So as a result of this investment, there were no bonuses allotted to salaried employees that year. I wouldn't be surprise if they're still denying everyone their bonuses.

Goblinworks failed to deliver the promised product and, in spite of months of us trying to warn upper management that Pathfinder Online was fucked, the plug wasn't pulled on Goblinworks until the 11th fucking hour, way past the point of being able to salvage the company. By this point Paizo pumped so much money into Goblinworks that they were entering financial dire straits. The Goblinworks folks tried but Paizo just gave the fuck up, which I can't blame them for. It's way too little too late.

Paizo became so short on finances that they were unable to maintain the development of the VTT software or essential upgrades to their proprietary forum/store back-end.

I heard that since my departure Paizo's started to intentionally delay payment of contractors (artists and freelance writers) in order to juggle financial burdens from month to month in a pretty blatant breach of contract.

Nah man I've heard some of the last she shit is thousands of dollars per contractor. Some past-due payments wouldn't even be delivered if the contractor "didn't notice" and as a result some payments were out more than a year because folks didn't notice they were getting fucked.

Oh and get this. Following a change in the way salaried employees hours are tracked in Washington State, with regards to overtime hours, Paizo cut salaried employees hours down and assigned them additional contracted "freelance" work to make up the dividend. Paizo employees often work 12 hour days (or more), for an average of $35,000 annually with few benefits. And that's on the high end of salary.

Not counting Erik, Lisa and Vic

Pathfinder product lines are a constant juggling of resources. This is what culminated in the decision to develop the 2nd Edition of the Pathfinder RPG I mentioned before

Pathfinder v2 (or the Revised Edition of the Pathfinder RPG) development started in-house a while back and substantial resources are allocated from other departments (normally handling campaign setting, player companion, and other product lines.)

Increased financial burdens meant that no additional staff could be hired, obviously, meaning salaried employees were effectively working double shift to meet project deadlines. It's almost like in other games companies isn't it?

After I left Paizo it was pretty clear their diminished revenue lead to an increased reliance on licensed products (comics, novels, audiobooks, teleplays, etc). Starfinder RPG looks and sounds like a pretty blatant marketing scheme for licensing. I'd bet Pathfinder 2 either became Starfinder or Starfinder is a stealth beta for what they were working on with PF2.

There's so many other glaring problems I could mention like the GenCon industry insider fiasco which blew me away when I heard a it it. But, frankly, I'm tired of it. "

I've heard it from good sources that Paizo was behind 9/11 AND the JFK assassination. It's because they're all SJWs at Paizo.

True story.

Fuck, I kinda like PF. Too bad to hear they put all their money down the drain for nothing

This doesn't seem hard to believe considering Paizo's track record. Pathfinder as a brand just isn't that powerful. You would think that with how loosely designed the game is that producing it wouldn't cost that much outside of art. What was the deal with Pathfinder Online and the GenCon industry insider fiasco?

>GenCon
Looks like they set up some kind of seminar series. They get people in the industry to talk about things. Paizo has four employees on that list of insiders. That's all I can glean.
>Pathfinder Online
I don't know, but they haven't updated their events calendar since August.
Of 2015.
Also looks like they're transferring development to someone else.

The RPG bizness's a hard bizness. It breaks a man's back, it does.

Good maybe Paizo will die and take the 3aboos dreams with it.

Basically they had some female authors get invited to be guests at GenCon and then said lol no and brought their male staff members instead. So the women held a gofundme because their employers were too cheap or something.

But aren't Paizo SJWs? That would be unthinkable.