Hm. It takes one person about 4 weeks to do one book? Would you say that's fair? Besides the LW staff, you're probably the one with the most experience in building data sets...

So you've got paid staff for that month, plus infrastructure/overhead costs. How much is that? How many people purchase said content? Is it enough to cover costs? And remember, you want to recoup your costs at least within the same fiscal year, probably within a few months of release. Anything after that is "gravy", so to speak.

LW is not a public company so there's no way to know how those numbers work out. Therefore, it's not possible to even guess at whether the margin is large or small, and it probably varies for each Paizo publication.

I would not want to be the middle manager responsible for making sure that such development is and stays profitable. :rolleyes:

That depends. A common technique nowadays is to outsource your server processing to a cloud service like Amazon Web Services. There are tiered plans where the customer plays a flat amount, then incrementally based on usage. If usage is low, there's a minimum charge and when usage spikes up, costs go up. There are some big advantages — automatically capacity increases, for example.

But I haven't been paying any attention to any of that, so I'm wholly uninformed regarding how LW is planning to do manage their server side requirements...

Very much an impossible fantasy here.
But wouldn't it be great if Paizo made a deal with LW in which every book they sell comes with a key to HeroLab, and give a percentage of the sale to LoneWolf?
Even at like 1% they'd probably do pretty well.

Has there been any official word about a HeroLab version for the P2e playtest?
I was guessing no, since the rules could change so much for the 2e release, but a friend heard a rumor that there will be one.

Historically playtest has been supported

It was mentioned at Paizocon, but nothing official yet.

There was some mention on the forums somewhere that it will be available on Hero Lab Online (not classic/desktop).

The LW official announcement happened at PaizoCon and was posted by BJ so PF2 playtest is coming to HLO. Based on other comments from LW employees they are hard at work making it happen.

You can see that post HERE.

It would be exceedingly awesome if Paizo, Inc designated Herolab and Realmworks as it's officially supported digital management platforms. From there you would see alot of support for APIs and cross-platforming. As you say this is the dream we all would love to see happen.

That, fundamentally, isn't all that different from what they already did with LW and PF1e. I'm pretty sure LW got early access to new books, and they paid a license fee to Paizo to produce digital forms of their content.

The thing is that while Paizo does give LW early access to things, there is no official endorsement.

I remember way back in the days of innocence when I bought my first D&D3e Player's Handbook that it had a disk in a cover-mounted insert that had character creation software on it. Now I can't remember anymore if WotC actually developed that, or if it was a third-party that got officially tapped by WotC to do it for them, but something like this should definitely be brainstormed by Paizo heads.

I'm not saying give out a free license or anything, but at the back of the book throw in a page that details herolab, its functionality, and offers shots of the UI. Something like this would get LW huge business in my opinion, and Paizo would see a huge benefit in having such a dedicated partner.

The main reason I say that this kind of 'prize in the cereal' approach would be good is that I searched for a good while to find a decent Pathfinder character generator, and I skipped over HLC quite a few times because of the UI in spite of the fact that plenty of people on forums/reddit had mentioned how it was invaluable to them. I did eventually give it a shot and have loved it enough to spend quite a penny or two on it. But it took years for LW to grab me as a customer. Years. That is a lot of lost revenue. That's a lot of time that I wasn't out there spreading the word to other GMs or players.

All of this being said, it's clear that I would love to see an officially endorsed partnership between Paizo and LW. It can mean nothing bad for the Pathfinder community, and I'm all for that.

Now the only issues with this would then be that (HLO at least) would become Paizo's proprietary platform, and LW could then not develop things for WotC products on it (or at least Paizo would be smart to include a stipulation like this.)

My two coppers.