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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
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I posted Paizo's blog about this. It is more than that there have been zero royalties produced in 8 years, but the other costs associated with maintaining the license.
And it likely all stems from the Diamond/JP Morgan debacle.
Oh whoops, sorry. I didn't see that when I was looking this morning.
Yeah, it undoubtedly stems from Diamond's theft. I've seen some people saying they suspect ulterior motives. That this is about getting more money from Demiplane by being able to offer them an exclusive contract. Personally, I don't think that's what's going on here. I'd rather assume incompetence than malice. I think they've looked at a balance sheet, seen that it costs them a non-zero amount to manage the deal, seen AoN isn't directly sending them any cash, and said "we're desperate, we need to cut this."
Ignoring the fact that some of that cost they're associating with AoN is the cost of fighting freebooters who copied images off of AoN...ignoring the fact that those same images are also on Demiplane, who will continue hosting them after this, and so those images will continue to be freebooted at roughly the same rate as previously, requiring the same amount of legal work to fight.
And ignoring the insane amount of value that AoN provides to their brand by providing such a premium experience completely free of charge. It acts as some amazing marketing for Paizo that they don't have to pay a single cent for.
That was brought up on their Bluesky post.
As Paizo had to recently lay off multiple people, them cutting costs is logical. Maybe it is not the best way to go about it. When I closed my business I was not making the best decisions near the end. But I did what I thought was best at that time.
I suspected it might.