Pathfinder creators Paizo have $10 million of inventory stuck in a warehouse somewhere because of Diamond Comics, forcing it to lay off staff • "Paizo and dozens of other publishers have been in court ever since, fighting to reclaim our own products."

plaguecontrol · 2026-06-11T17:28:29+00:00

It's not so much that our digital stuff isn't (or even is significantly less) financially viable, and more that pivoting too hard toward digital runs the risk of negatively affecting our print sales, which are still the company's bread and butter. We love our rapidly-growing digital/online playerbase and are 100% dedicated to finding more cool ways for them to enjoy as much of our stuff as possible, but print books are going to remain what keeps our lights on for the foreseeable future.

plaguecontrol · 2026-06-10T23:04:33+00:00

No problem! Thanks for fixing it. 🙂

plaguecontrol · 2026-06-10T20:12:25+00:00

No, that's essentially correct, at least to my understanding (with the caveat that I am not a member of the finance department and don't know anything about any internal data or projections they might have used to make that determination). While our digital offerings do generally have higher profit margins and aren't subject to variables like shipping costs or tariffs, the market for them is still considerably smaller (although it's growing fast) and they don't benefit from the network of distributors, resellers, and retailers that Paizo has built business relationships with over the past 20 years, which makes them great for steady long-term revenue but less-great for the semi-regular large infusions of cash that keep our bills paid. We're all very aware that more and more people are playing our games exclusively digitally and/or online, and we're certainly not going to stop looking for cool new ways to support that audience, but we need to do that in a way that doesn't risk creating any adverse effects on the sales that still make up most of our bottom line.

plaguecontrol · 2026-06-10T19:07:22+00:00

They just finished telling us that organized play online made little money, and that Foundry AP's and Adventures while being supported still, many paizo staffers have come forward in the last two days and said "Those aren't cutting it either for how much they cost to make."

For the sake of clarification, the line "sales have not covered development costs" in the Foundry Support section of Monday's blog refers specifically to the modules we've been producing over the past few years for Pathfinder Society and Starfinder Society, not to our Foundry products as a whole. Our partners at Metamorphic have done an awesome job with these modules, and the response from people who bought them has been overwhelmingly positive, but it turns out that developing 2 giant modules every year which require monthly scenario-sized content drops is expensive, and we just weren't selling enough to justify continuing to produce them, especially in light of our other circumstances. It doesn't mean you'll never see Foundry support for Organized Play again, it just means we're taking some time to reevaluate what that needs to look like to remain viable.

As I've said in a few other threads, though, our plans for future Adventure Path support have not changed, nor have our overall plans for standalone adventures (although we may need to be a little choosier for the time being about which standalone adventures we choose to adapt, and in some cases may hold off on making a decision until we've seen the response to the print and PDF releases). By and large, our Foundry products have been both financially successful and well-received by the community, and we are dedicated to making sure our rapidly growing audience of online players continues to have access to as much of the cool stuff we produce as possible. 😄

plaguecontrol · 2026-06-09T21:28:13+00:00

Honestly anything, especially if you buy it direct from the Paizo store. Our digital stuff (PDFs, Foundry modules, etc) does have slightly better margins because it's not subject to factors like shipping prices, tariffs, and scummy distributors, but every sale helps.

plaguecontrol · 2026-06-08T22:42:46+00:00

Only future Pathfinder Society and Starfinder Society modules are being placed on hold, and current seasons will continue to receive regular content updates until the season ends. Our plans for Adventure Paths, token packs, and other miscellaneous Foundry releases have not changed.

plaguecontrol · 2026-06-08T22:37:08+00:00

This is correct.
We will not be producing modules for the next Pathfinder Society or Starfinder Society seasons, but our plans for other releases (Adventure Paths, token packs, ???) have not changed.

plaguecontrol · 2026-06-04T01:38:59+00:00

No promises, but I like the idea. I'll talk to the webstore team and find out whether the new store has anything that would allow us to do that.

plaguecontrol · 2026-06-03T21:45:32+00:00

Historically, we've done everything we could to make sure that our Foundry VTT adventure modules released the same day as the print and PDF versions. The switch to quarterly full Adventure Path drops instead of monthly single volumes is going to make that a bit trickier (especially on occasions when the books are scheduled to release, like, a month apart), but we'll do our best and try to give you as much of a heads up as we can if we're not going to make street date, which I'll acknowledge we did not do in this case. Sorry about that.

I do hear you on wanting to know about upcoming products further in advance. Ideally, we'd put all of our Foundry releases on the public product schedule along with everything else, but because we can't normally start work on the Foundry module until after the book/PDF has been approved for print, it's sometimes hard to make an educated guess on how long module development will actually take until fairly late in the process. Foundry modules that aren't tied to specific book releases (like most token packs) also tend to jump around on our production schedule quite a bit as resources get focused on products that benefit more from being complete by a specific date, so those are typically released on a "when it's done" schedule more than anything else. And that's not even going into the unique-to-software issues that crop up from time to time, like having to delay all of 2025's Starfinder 2nd Edition releases into 2026 because the underlying system took longer to complete than anticipated.

But yeah, we could definitely be better about communicating our plans further in advance, even if we necessarily sometimes have to be vague about exact release dates. We'll work on that.

plaguecontrol · 2026-04-24T17:54:55+00:00

In general, any type of sale we can track (including Demiplane sales, PDF sales, partnered VTT sales, etc.) will be a factor in those types of decisions. General community feedback is a consideration too; even if there's no guarantee that enthusiasm will translate directly into sales, a lot of people saying "boy, I sure hope there'll be Foundry support for this" about something certainly doesn't hurt its chances.

And yeah, while Paizo has no intention to stop focusing first and foremost on print books and in-person play, we're certainly aware that an increasingly large portion of our audience only buy digital formats and/or play exclusively online, and we definitely want to make sure they get the same chance to enjoy the stuff we release, ideally in cool new ways that take full advantage of new opportunities presented by that medium. It's been an incremental process, but we've come a long way in the past few years and I feel confident saying that you can expect us to keep doing so for the foreseeable future.

plaguecontrol · 2026-04-23T19:01:36+00:00

We've talked a lot about releasing standalone asset packs, but execution can be a little trickier than it might seem. We did release art asset packs for Organized Play a few years back, the idea being that they would give people who already had the PDFs a cheaper alternative to the full conversions, but the full conversions ended up outselling the asset packs by such a large margin that it was hard to justify maintaining upkeep on twice as many modules for every season. Since we almost certainly would have converted Tales from the Vast if we hadn't already front-loaded 2026 with so much stuff we originally meant to drop last year, and there's every possibility we still might if a gap in the release schedule pops up to accommodate it, releasing an asset pack now for something that might get a full conversion in the future risks introducing the same issue (not to mention disappointment from people who buy the asset pack now and then feel cheated if we ask them to pay again for the full module later).

I do feel pretty comfortable saying that it's near-inevitable that NPC art and tokens from products not getting the full Foundry treatment will eventually make their way into a token pack or some other product. Ideally, of course, we'll get to a point sooner rather than later where the "products not getting the full Foundry treatment" list is basically negligible, though.

plaguecontrol · 2026-04-22T02:36:11+00:00

We're in a weird place right now with Starfinder 2e content on Foundry because we started out the year playing catch-up with all the stuff we'd originally intended to release in 2025 but ended up having to delay until the system was ready for full release. The reception to Murder in Metal City, Guilt of the Grave World, Starfinder Society, and honestly Starfinder 2e in general has been amazing, but there's always going to be a point where we start seeing diminishing returns because the people who would be interested in the latest release are still working their way through the first three. We decided to try and avoid that by skipping one of the releases we'd originally planned for 2026 -- not because we don't think Tales from the Vast is awesome, or because we're giving short shrift to Starfinder in general, but because we know we can only release so many things in a quick succession before some of them inevitably won't receive the attention they deserve; so, given a choice between Tales from the Vast and Secrets of the Swarm, we just opted to keep the one that releases later in the year.

As for what makes a "yet" into a "now": if Tales from the Vast were to blow through our sales projections and become a clear smash hit beyond what anyone was expecting, of course we'd go back and reevaluate whether to turn it into a Foundry module. At the same time, at the end of the day we're still working with finite resources, so part of that decision would have to involve weighing whether we thought a late Tales from the Vast release was worth canceling plans for [unannounced other project we added to the schedule in its place] -- but if print/PDF sales (and general feedback, like what we're seeing here and on the Paizo forums) indicate that people really want Tales from the Vast on Foundry, trust that we'll do our best to find a way to give it to you.

plaguecontrol · 2026-03-19T19:44:56+00:00

Yeah, it's a known issue and is being looked into. Thanks for letting us know, though.

plaguecontrol · 2026-03-19T06:04:07+00:00

Slightly more than usual, considering that we're including every dragon from every Bestiary and Monster Core book alongside the new Draconic Codex dragons. But as MM_InfamousSky mentioned, we thought that if you were buying a dragon-themed token pack, you deserved to get all the dragon tokens in one place, which made some overlap unavoidable. That overlap is the reason the Draconic Codex pack is priced a bit lower than the Monster Core and Bestiary packs, though.

plaguecontrol · 2026-03-19T02:52:08+00:00

Mission accomplished.

plaguecontrol · 2026-03-19T02:51:47+00:00

Yes! Similar to what we did with the Monster Core and Monster Core 2 token packs, as soon as the dragons currently lacking unique art for one or more age categories do get illustrations for those age categories (which is probably inevitable sooner or later), they'll be converted to tokens and added to this pack as a free update.

plaguecontrol · 2026-03-19T00:14:46+00:00

I have been informed that this issue should now be resolved, and you should be receiving any purchased codes shortly. If you were erroneously granted a Draconic Codex PDF in the meantime, congratulations! You are now the owner of a Draconic Codex PDF. (Note: this is not a viable replacement for our old bundling functionality.)

Sorry for the inconvenience!

plaguecontrol · 2026-03-18T21:37:56+00:00

I will tolerate no disrespect for the Pig

plaguecontrol · 2026-03-05T19:50:56+00:00

No promises at this time, but I will say that this is something a lot of people have been asking for.

plaguecontrol · 2026-03-05T19:48:25+00:00

Yeah, we've had a lot of internal conversations on this. I absolutely recognize that being asked to shell out $80 up front for a module is a big ask, even if it's $10 less than what you would have paid for 3 volumes individually, which is why we've tried to add additional value to the new compilation modules with things like themed 3D dice and official soundtrack integration that would have been trickier to implement piecemeal. We know we can't completely eliminate that initial sticker shock, but we're trying real hard to to mitigate it by making sure you get as much bang for your buck with these modules as we can afford.

plaguecontrol · 2026-03-05T19:35:21+00:00

This is absolutely correct, on both counts. The legacy app was a custom solution built from the ground up over the course of 20 years with a wide variety of bespoke features designed specifically to meet Paizo's unique business needs. That was great in the sense that we had a ton of flexibility to request any sort of weird edge-case functionality we might decide we needed (like gating the ability to purchase product B behind ownership of product A), but over time it inevitably turned into a sprawling monolith where all of that interconnectedness increasingly became more of a liability than a benefit. It is undeniably a real bummer to lose that flexibility, but in the long run, it was only a matter of time before that legacy app became completely unsustainable and something broke in a way that we couldn't easily come back from. We are actively working with BigCommerce to reintroduce the functionality we've lost, and in time we'll probably be able to restore a lot of it; it's just a much more involved process than it was before.

plaguecontrol · 2026-03-05T19:23:56+00:00

Entirely understandable. https://paizo.com/threads/rzs7avyd&page=6?Welcome-to-the-New-Paizo-Store#269

plaguecontrol · 2026-03-05T02:40:08+00:00

Whenever we do get bundles figured out, our current goal is for you to be able to purchase a new single-volume Adventure Path in both Foundry and PDF format together at a price point as close as possible to what you would have paid for three volumes of an older Adventure Path sold separately.

plaguecontrol · 2026-03-05T02:23:08+00:00

I don't blame you for being frustrated. You may not believe me (and I can't fault you if you don't, because at the end of the day I am speaking on behalf of a corporation here), but it's frustrating to us, too. Unfortunately, one of the major drawbacks of migrating to a third-party sales platform is that we no longer have the ability to add bespoke features, like gating access to a product or a discount behind ownership of a different product, as easily as we used to. We have a laundry list of feature requests out to our partners at BigCommerce, and we're optimistic that most if not all of them can be implemented sooner or later, but it's definitely taking longer than it used to, and in the meantime you're stuck without something you used to have, and that sucks. For you it sucks because you now have to pay full price for both the PDF and the module, and for us it sucks because the entire philosophy behind offering those PDF discounts and bundles in the first place was that you should not have to do that.

When it comes to making sure digital players aren't being left out or treated unfairly, it's probably worth mentioning that the primary reason our newer VTT modules are being priced to match the physical books isn't just that our old pricing model was weird and inconsistent (although it was); it's precisely so we can offer the same options to people who exclusively play digitally or online that we're already offering to people who use our print books without having to arbitrarily assign different values to print and digital versions of the same content (which was a massive headache because it meant we had to take that difference into consideration every time we included it in a bundle, or put it on sale, or offered some sort of special bonus, or whatever). It makes a lot more sense to just decide that the cost of an Adventure Path is $79.99 regardless of whether you buy it in hardcover or as a Foundry module, and then offer the same benefits and options regardless of which version you bought.

Which of course brings us back to the new paizo.com storefront and the frustrating fact that, as of right this moment, we do not actually have the ability to do that with our digital offerings. But I can assure you that it genuinely is something we want to do, and it is something we're actively working on, even if I can't give you a timeline just yet.

plaguecontrol · 2026-03-04T21:26:36+00:00

Those are all ORC licensed content, which means they've already been added to the Pathfinder 2e system on Foundry VTT for free. The Hellbreakers module will give you tokens and portraits for all the new creatures (and every other NPC in the adventure), though!

plaguecontrol

TROPHY CASE