I've only gotten about 20 minutes into the video, but I've already hit some things I think I can comment on.

Some of what I'm about to say may come across as apologetics for Paizo, and I want to be clear up front that that is not my intent. I firmly believe that Paizo has made a poor and short-sighted decision on this, and that they've shot themselves in the foot for absolutely no reason whatsoever. But I've also spent the last few years working for a company that's done many of the same sorts of things, and I think I understand what they're doing right now.

For context, I have spent the past decade working as a data scientist and data analyst in the video games industry. My last company was one of these low-profile tech companies that did huge business during lockdowns and instead of using their windfall to prepare for the post-lockdown world, management instead treated the pandemic as their Arab Spring moment (the Arab Spring being the biggest factor in Twitter becoming a household name, and in the evening news turning into little more than a Twitter recap show). The pandemic was not their Arab Spring, though, and they spent the entire five years I worked there chasing that high and fending off their investors as their numbers slipped into the red.

Paizo is not a digital games or services company. It would not surprise me to discover that their business intelligence person is also, like, their accountant or something. The only data they would have that is their own comes from their website traffic and website sales, and their PnL statements. Everything else is either filtered through third party partners, or is totally inaccessible to them. And businesses today live off of LARPing data-driven decision making.

So, what data are they likely to have?

They'd have their website traffic logs, but I actually doubt they track that too intensively. Maybe they're tracking which IPs are landing on their homepage, backlinks, and probably data about logins, but there's probably many analytics hooks until you get to the store.

In the store, I'd expect them to have hooks for viewing a product, adding a product to the cart, checking out, and sales completions.

They would get sales information from Role20 for their various stores, i.e. DriveThruRPG(/Pathfinder Infinite) and Demiplane. For first party titles, we should expect that to be, at the very least, aggregated per-title sales, while things might be more abstract for third party licensed sales.

Then, of course, there are the sales numbers from their distributors -- at least, the ones that are still distributing.

Archives of Nethys doesn't sell any Paizo products, so they're not getting sales figures from AoN. Importantly, though, AoN also doesn't have very many links back to the Paizo website or Paizo store.

If people are buying Paizo products thanks to their usage of the Archives of Nethys website, that fact is invisible to Paizo. Every AoN-triggered sale is actually going to look like they came from Google, and they will be indistinguishable from so-called "organic" sales. They get zero credit for their contribution.

Management, looking at their dashboards -- which, in all likelihood for a place like Paizo is an Excel spreadsheet -- will see that they're spending $X on CnDs, and receiving $Y from Roll20, but $0 from AoN.

For a company that is bleeding to death, this is an issue. They're not thinking about the actual reality of things, they're just looking at what their numbers say, and their numbers say $0 and a miniscule amount of web traffic credited to AoN. Meanwhile, they're spending Z > $0 on servicing AoN (even if Z is small), which starts to look like a rotten deal to someone who is watching their business crumble around them.

It's not real, but they have no numbers in front of them to challenge the idea that it is.

So, what do they do? They cut their lines, and cut their toes off in the process.

I've watched this happen over and over again in my professional life. Management approves something that is very obviously a good idea to anyone watching, management slashes the budget 4 weeks later, a half-baked and half-neutered version of the thing launches with zero fanfare and zero integration, and then it fails to generate revenue. All support for the feature is revoked, and six months later it's removed from the product after 10s of thousands of dollars (or more) have been sunk into it in the least effective way possible. All because they hyper-focused on costs and revenue, and refused to look at the big picture.

I've seen lots of people upset at Paizo for the decision, and I've seen lots of people talking about how the situation with Diamond has caused this, but I've seen very few who seem to be worried about the future of Paizo. But this is the kind of behaviour that management engages in when the ship is sinking. The Diamond lawsuit is going to drag on for much too long, and they are still bound by the exclusivity deal, which means they simply cannot sell their books in major retailers in the US.

But they've also done very little to pivot to new revenue streams. Their eggs are all in this hardcover book business, and they're currently limited in what they can do there. Their regular business model is largely denied to them right now, and they have no backup.

This is a big problem. And everyone is much too focused on the hypocrisy of the company right now, and not the reasons why they're suddenly acting like hypocrites.