Quote:
Originally Posted by rob
We have a full license from Paizo for doing ALL Pathfinder material. So it's just a matter of prioritizing what we do first. An army of users will absolutely get stuff done faster than we can, but there's also the question of quality, consistency, accuracy, and quite a few other words ending in "y". 
Any content that users create and share under the OGL is perfectly fine. And it can co-exist with anything we do. The two co-exist peacefully on the Hero Lab side. Lots of users will want the artwork (not OGL) and the "official" material that we've put the time and testing into. Lots of users will want to save some coin. There's a place for both.
The one big concern I have with our revised Content Market approach is that it may become "the Wild West" for a short time. The original CM model positioned us as sort of "curating" the available content, since users could not share content outside of our ecosystem. Without that chokepoint in place, I can see multiple users providing the same or overlapping material, and it could even become "competitive" on some level. That's going to be confusing (and very annoying) for everyone. So we (Lone Wolf) may have to become involved in the process to some extent. I'm just not sure how that will unfold yet.
This is something that I'm definitely losing sleep over these days, as it's going to have a qualitative impact on the overall experience for everyone. This is probably the one biggest drawback accompanying the revised plan, but we felt the pros far outweighed the cons, and it seems the user community agrees with that view. We're still working to figure out how best to handle this wrinkle. |
Thanks, Rob.
In a way, LoneWolf is pretty much in the position Adobe was in when Acrobat was premiered. A little-known product that offers a new medium for publication.
The difference is that RealmWorks is dependent upon the servers at LoneWolf. That's a more closed-system operation than PDFs were back then. That carries the responsibility to police the closed environment, as you mentioned; the opening up of that environment does have other risks.
Unlike Adobe, who "only" had to worry about establishing PDF as a standard, RealmWorks' consumers are bound to LoneWolf by that closed environment. The gaming market is niche enough that, even if RealmWorks becomes popular within that population, it is not like that is a large enough population (right now, anyway) to support an independent "hosting" environment.
So... fasten your seatbelts... it's going to be a bumpy ride.,
On the plus side, the OGL community has had some time to mature. You may see a few ambitious amateurs pop up, and some may even "make it big", but I'd like to think it won't be quite as wild as the past.