Paizo Partnership Status Update
We come to you today with some bad news. For nearly eight years, we here at the Archives of Nethys have been a licensed partner of Paizo Publishing and have proudly served this community as an official reference for all of Paizo's game systems. A few weeks ago, Paizo sent us an e-mail stating that our partnership has been terminated, effective on July 24th.
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.
Admittedly, Paizo's decision comes as a bit of a surprise to us - it was always known that our business model, for lack of a better word, was reliant on donations and ad revenue to support the website. Our primary expenses have only ever been server rental costs (both for the website and for elasticsearch, our search engine) and so long as we made enough money for that, we were happy. Everyone who works for the website is an unpaid volunteer drawn from the Pathfinder/Starfinder communities. 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. After all, one of the first things often said when pitching the game to a new friend is "the rules are free". Sadly, Paizo's decision has still been made.
With all of this said, the Archives of Nethys will continue to support this community. Paizo has even encouraged us to do so under the Community Use Policy (CUP) instead of our partnership license. This will, however, necessitate some changes going forward. As of July 24th:
- We will be taking down all artwork that is not compliant with the Community Use Policy. This will be the majority of our artwork, leaving compatible art such as the iconics, religious symbols, and anything else it covers.
- We have been hosting the original Paizo PRD up until now, under legacy.aonprd.com. With the partnership dissolving, we will be taking this site down.
- We will no longer receive books early, so after Bastion of Blasphemies & Dead God's Hand (PF2e), along with Secrets of the Swarm (SF2e), we will have to go back to acquiring our PDFs the more traditional way. This means that our ability to release content on street date will cease. We will still aim to get our content online as quick as we can, but we will no longer be able to target the street date.
- Nethys
2026-07-14