Pathfinder 2e creators Paizo end partnership with Archives of Nethys, which offers most of the D&D alternative’s ruleset for free, over legal confusion and paperwork
(Image credit: Paizo (Art by Miguel Regodón Harkness)) Recent updates July 16: Paizo has released an official statement on the situation, explaining that it was mostly a case of tidying up legal disputes...
Recent updates
July 16: Paizo has released an official statement on the situation, explaining that it was mostly a case of tidying up legal disputes: "The use of Paizo artwork on the web also created ongoing confusion about what assets are allowed under the Community Use Policy ... other sites routinely copied those assets and used them for themselves. That created additional work for our legal and licensing teams to draft DMCA and cease‑and‑desist notices."
You can read the full statement in the link above, but this reads as a desire to cut down on the financial strain of legal work. As an extra wrinkle, Paizo says: "We offered a marketing agreement to [Archives of Nethys to] make the change less impactful, but those conversations were not concluded before they chose to publish their notice."
Original story: Pathfinder 2e's developer, Paizo, gets a lot of slack from me—because all told, Paizo is incredibly generous. As a system, PF2e costs basically nothing to play. Every rule, additional class, extra monster, etcetera is available online for free, either through platforms like Demiplane or via its very good Foundry integration.
The only thing Paizo tends to charge for are pre-written adventures and, naturally, the beneficial formatting that comes with having a book with an index, rather than trying to search things on a volunteer-made pseudo-wiki.
That relationship goes on, but diminished, as one of the largest such sites—Archives of Nethys—has announced Paizo is terminating its partnership with it effective July 24. A post to the site goes into more detail:
"We have been told the reason for this decision is that our website has not produced royalties for Paizo. While we cannot go into the full details of our license arrangement, the general details have been publicly known for many years. Paizo would send us early access book PDFs well ahead of release and provided us with their art assets to use on the site.
"In exchange, our team of volunteers would make sure that the rules and content of the game made it onto the website in a timely and accurate manner. Lastly, if we generated enough profit, we would pay Paizo a royalty on that money, as licensed partners typically do. Unfortunately, as of the time of receiving this email, we had not made enough profit in a given month to generate any royalties for Paizo as per this arrangement."
It's a tough blow, though one I somewhat understand on Paizo's behalf. The company is currently suffering from $10 million's worth of inventory being bound in a warehouse somewhere, thanks to a massive legal knot involving the bankrupt supplier Diamond Publishing.
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Despite happening last year, Paizo's still reeling from the cost—enough that it had to lay 12 staff members off last month. Given AoN's model, by its own admission, wasn't generating enough cash to give royalties for Paizo, it's not that much of a stretch to see the cause and effect.
Which sucks for everyone involved, since part of the reason AoN didn't do that was an interest in keeping things accessible: "We've always believed that attempting to monetize the site more aggressively would result in less users and that our real value to Paizo was in the traffic and business we sent their way."
That doesn't mean AoN is shutting down, though—Paizo still allows rules to be shared freely under its community use policy. However, the site will have the majority of its artwork removed, and it will no longer receive material in advance of its release date, meaning players interested in accessing new rules for free close to their release date might have to go to a different site, like Demiplane.
I've reached out to Paizo for comment, and will update this article if I receive a response.
Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.