Hello everyone!
My apologies for the delay on this one! It’s entirely my fault, I was in and out of the office this week recovering from a hospital stay after an allergic reaction. Apparently, new medications are my kryptonite. Sadly, our new Director of Communications didn’t have the knowledge to answer this thread while I was indisposed and catching up with all the other items that needed my attention.
I honestly don't have a lot of information on the features you'd like to see here. I certainly wish I did! I would love to see calendars in place myself. Really, I have dreams where we have provided calendars and the world is a happy place. Which are preferable to the nightmares where you all chase me around with pitchforks and threaten to burn me at the stake for not having them.
The simple truth is that we are focusing on the Content Market because Realm Works has to make an income to pay its devs and we can't let the product go under trying to create a better calendar or other highly desired feature. We have to help pick the paths forward that make sense from a business perspective. Please understand, we are in no way abandoning Realm Works or work on future improvements to the program and we have a lot of dreams and goals in store for it that go well beyond where it is now.
I am a fan of Realm Works and I want to see it succeed. To do that, we need it to start bringing in a better revenue, so we can have more people to work on it and make it everything the company originally hoped it would be. I assure you, the Realm Works devs are focusing on Realm Works. They are currently working to fix a few of the bugs I have pointed out to them that are stopping consumers from using the program entirely and getting the workaround in place for the API issue. They are a very small team, so all these things take time and that has been part of the problem all along.
As I said a while back, I can’t change the past decisions made, all we can do is move forward with what we can realistically do given the resources we have, give honest answers, and try to get the past all wrapped up so we can move on to bigger and better features in the future. We have to launch the Content Market to fund all these items everyone wants to see. I get frustrated right along with you when I see the wonderful ideas you have here and I realize we simply don’t have the staff to make them happen right now.
While we would love to launch the Content Market as is, we simply can't for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons is that a market with just 3PP content is going to seem awfully small and be a poor representation of what we have to offer the world. That is not the only reason, but it is one of them I will share with you. I am also pursuing other licensed material while we wait for the devs to fix the API issue. Hopefully, that will make for an even better market in the future as well as speak to more of our consumers, making it even more likely we will be able to expand our team. While it’s true we have hired people lately, we have had very little actual team growth as we’ve mostly hired new people to replace others and improve our customer service. As we look to the future, our goal is to expand so that we no longer have to struggle so long to put new things in place.
As for the API, we thought everything we needed for it was in place a year ago and that turned out to be inaccurate. We didn't discover this until we were ready to launch the market and Paizo is understandably busy with their own house. We aren't throwing them under the bus, we are happy with our relationship with Paizo, we are just trying to find our own path while we patiently wait for their aid. Our system isn't the same as Fantasy Grounds, but like them, we will have to use a workaround that will take time to create.
As far as the backer content, we will have more items out to you as soon as possible. I can’t answer that thread right now because the people who I need to get a status report from to do so aren’t in the office today due to the Holiday, but I’ll try to come back around to it tomorrow.
I hope that clears up at least some of the questions. I greatly appreciate all of your patience to date with the program and the company and I understand your frustration. I’ll keep working to accomplish everything I can for you but please understand that like everything else, reorganization takes time.