There's a bunch of mentions for Paizo and I've mentioned them before in other threads, but we should bear in mind that they're, by the rpg industry standards, a very big company (in terms of staff paid to produce rpg rules and support material, I guess the biggest after WotC, and expanding). They ran Dragon and Dungeon and the Star Wars magazine and when they lost those (Star Wars earlier on, but Dungeon and Dragon in the run-up to 4e) they rolled the large, expensive dice on continuing their APs as their own product (something akin to a combination of Dungeon and Dragon) and then they rolled the dice again, after the GSL was late, on their own version of 3.x. They've had a lot of money go through the company and they had a fair amount to start it, I think.
I don't think anyone else, including WotC, can match Paizo's output; they have a large body of staff and they have monthly newstand magazine experience at just about all levels. What they do from the fans' point of view which can, I think, be matched:
1) Excellent fan outreach from the top on down (Lisa Stevens posts a fair amount on the Paizo boards, as do the rest of them, and several can be found in the unofficial chatroom from time to time).
2) Relatively little slippage in release dates (it happens, but it's not terrible).
3) Pretty good relations with the bricks-and-mortar stores even though they're selling subscriptions through their own operation, plus selling their core rules as pdf for $10 a go and the entire ruleset is OGL. Thus, plenty of material in stores.
4) Pathfinder Society organised play, plus and including great presence at cons. It's easy to get a game of Pathfinder just about everywhere.
I think ICE is getting better at 1) (and John does a good job in particular in that regard), 2) is I think achievable although harder with freelancers than with salaried staff (although Paizo does still use freelancers, it has a set of full-time editors and also on-staff writers), but 3) and 4) seem to me to be pretty tough; Paizo had a springboard of 3.x, which was well-known, relatively well-liked and very successful, whereas Rolemaster seems to me to have been treading water since sometime in the 90s whilst at the same time losing it's huge setting hook (I love Shadow World, incidentally, but I am pretty sure that Middle-Earth was a bigger selling-point for a lot of people).
Still, I don't think anyone involved with ICE expects it is going to make them substantially richer, so hopefully they can muster enough effort to bring Rolemaster up to a point of sufficient prominence that the game's qualities -- and I'm assuming that the new game will be decent even if I don't play it (I have RMC, which I love and for which the Middle-Earth stuff is basically written along with MERP) -- will drive more sales. Hopefully we can see a lot of new people brought in through games played in games stores -- although they tend to be much more OK with that if they can sell the supporting material, obviously, in hard copy -- and conventions. I doubt my contribution will be much use in that regard -- I'm an RM2/C guy and I use RMX to bring new people in -- but if there's a clear path, via a basic introduction, to the next version of RM then if there's any way to persuade sufficient numbers to GM the games for new players then an approximation to my points 3) and 4) can happen, too.
The recent candid blogs Lisa Stevens has been doing, one monthly for each year of Paizo's now 10-year existence, have been really interesting; it's not been remotely plain sailing for them and they've had at least three big blows, taken a bunch of risks and seem in the end, finally, to have raked in a large pay-off. I hope ICE's story in a few years, even if it's not as large a scale as Paizo's, also makes happy reading.
