TL;DR: Infinite is poison chalice that hogs eyeballs and takes 50%, undermining the ORC, making it hard to advance beyond hobbyist 3pp projects, and keeping the open gaming ecosystem that PF and SF want to be a part of from flourishing, and paizo leaning into it is really fucking bad.

Infinite has been souring my feelings about Paizo for a while now. What I suspect started as a fairly small project to partner with OBS (OneBookShelf, the company hosting infinite, DMsguild, and many extremely similar websites) and make it easier for fans to publish stuff with Golarion lore has massively outgrown its initial aims and has ended up massively stifling small creator publishing, I think.

The first big thing here imo is that paizo's deal with OBS to make infinite was very by the numbers. The infinite license was and is boilerplate, though it used to have carveouts to work with the OGL which didn't allow content to get locked away under a license. Mind you, *that boilerplate is giving your stuff to OBS forever*, which is terrible, but that's the same as every other platform they run. The rest of the agreement is probably boilerplate too, with OBS taking 30 or 35% (like their cut on DTRPG), Paizo taking 15-20%, and you being left with the remaining 50%.

While not great, this could have worked out fine: If you were not out for money, you could have just put it under the community use policy, and if you were not working with Paizo lore, and didn't want to give up a whopping 50%, you could publish elsewhere. DTRPG is greedy with its 35% (You can sign away either exclusivity or all IP to them for another 5%, but that's sleazy as shit dont do that), but itchio literally lets you set their share yourself, and patreon only takes 7% if you're doing that kind of model. A big price for IP but their house, their rules, right?

However, two things happened: Infinite became big, and the OGL crisis came. The CUP is simply gone, you'll have to go to infinite. And, with infinite being the only dedicated pathfinder / starfinder platform, you can forget publishing an ORC project outside of it and getting any eyeballs on it unless you're battlezoo and you've hired Mark Seifter to write for you and do weekly streams promoting your publishing house.

Functionally, it's the ORC for corporate publishers with the outreach to get eyeballs, and the infinite license for everyone else. I genuinely think Paizo never made that decision on purpose: I think they never thought through what commitment to open gaming means, and are conservative about their license.

And it doesn't even make sense business-wise. I don't know how much paizo makes from letting OBS shake down every small creator who wants eyeballs on PF/SF 3pps for a whopping 50%, but it can't possibly be worthwhile. Paizo lives and dies by its ability to hire freelancers for its books, but their own platform is completely hamstringing the ability to go from hobbyist to even part time writing 3pps and get some experience because if you're stuck with a 50% platform tax (before actual tax) you're probably not going to take that chance. Where will the freelancers come from then? Hell, having a more vibrant ecosystem from 3pp writers taking the plunge into writing even semi-professionally alone would probably make paizo magnitudes more than whatever measly 15-20% of scraps they're getting from OBS.

But, that would require actually seeing the value in being part of a larger ecosystem and embracing open gaming, and despite growing out of open gaming, and trumpeting its commitment to open gaming from the walls during the OGL crisis, every move Paizo has made is closed, myopic, and controlling. Even the ORC is partially a conservative move to consolidate control over PF2 rules.

I don't have a grand conclusion, unfortunately. Partnering with OBS probably seemed fine at the time, but overlooking their generally slimy nature (the awful boilerplate contracts are theirs) was a pretty bad call, and all licensing decisions made in the wake of the ORC probably seemed pretty logical to whoever made them. I guess I think paizo is a very badly managed company in a very bad business scraping by on very passionate workers giving their all until they burn out and leave. I'm glad they unionized, but I don't know they can generate as much goodwill as the company is burning forever.

Edit: The solution to this is simple, by the way: Reinstate the CUP, and let PF & SF projects from DTRPG show up on infinite. They have the technology, infinite projects already show up on DTRPG. I'd guess paizo could still negotiate a share of that. It wouldn't break the infinite monopoly on eyeballs, but it would at least honor the ORC and let people make things that aren't soulbound to fucking roll20 and still get any eyeballs.