You're being fairly cagey on how the steam solution didn't work for you. As a developer myself and very unhappy (with your anti-piracy solution) customer I think more disclosure on why the steam model doesn't work is in order.
Make your tool more of a kiosk client. Logging in through the app from any machine [with Hero Lab or other product installed] with proper credentials should be enough to validate we are an honest customer. Verifying that only one (or 1:1 number of users per license) are logged in at any given moment should help keep piracy at bay, your income in good standing and your customers happy.
If you feel you need a developer to help design this scenario, feel free to contact me. I am a long time pen and paper role-player and a long time professional programmer and there is no excuse other than, an excuse the anger rant, greed and laziness for punishing your paying customers like you are.
And if you really think that the average customer only has one computer these days I'd really like to see the stats behind it. Stats showing that they use only one computer to log in is not a good indication of this fact.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rob
The Steam suggestion is a good one. Unfortunately, the Steam solution has a number of flaws for a product like AB. We've investigated something like it and found it to be no better than what we currently do. All it does it move the issues around, without providing an overall net improvement. In other words, there are some users who would benefit from having a Steam-like solution (such as yourself), but there are others who would be negatively impacted by such a solution.
Even if the Steam approach was the perfect solution, though, we'd need to invest major development effort towards implementing it. For a tiny company like Lone Wolf, we'd have to basically stop further development on all of our products for a protracted period of time while we implemented this mythical perfect solution. From a business standpoint, the benefits of having the perfect licensing solution would have to outweigh the costs of halting all product development for a lengthy period.
In an ideal world, I'd love to conceive and implement the perfect solution. Alas, this isn't an ideal world, so we need something that is also practical, and that means any solution we come up with will have some limitations. If we can come up with something that can be implemented in a practical manner and provides a better overall solution than our current one, we'll put it into place. We regularly explore new options with that goal in mind. Thus far, though, we haven't found something that is substantively better overall.
If anyone has suggestions, please share them! The Steam idea is a good one that we've already explored. What other approaches should we be investigating?
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