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Hmmm. Sorry to revive an old topic here, but I'm feeling exactly the same way.
And I know you've been around for years. I bought Army Builder back in 2005, and some friends did too on my recommendation.
Now I am perpetually stuck on version 3.2d instead of 3.5c unless I want to pay for it again. Had I not been such an early adopter I might have caught the 2012 expiry freeze - I’m not sure why that wasn’t applied backwards to all purchasers.
Your licensing does not encourage me to buy more of your products. I've since started playing pen and paper too, and I would rather like to try out HeroLab. If it was a $20 one off, 'normal' sort of license, I'd snap it up, and I'm sure plenty more would. But it's not.
I'd have to pay $30 to start with, with the associated worry that it'll be rendered irrelevant by future changes, and the headaches of activation.
Then $20 because I play 2 game systems. It's not like I'm using HeroLab twice as much, I just happen to only play 1 game each in 3 different systems (1 of which isn't even supported anyway). Lots of people might play 3 games in 1 system - why do they get it cheaper?
And then I find I have to fork out another $10. Because I have the audacity to want to run it on my desktop, my laptop, and my windows tablet. Then the associated headache of having to transfer licenses around should I want to reinstall or change any of those. And that's not even counting if I wanted to pop it on my work PC too.
Back in 2005, it kind of made sense. But we live in a cloud connected age. I, like lots of other people, have and use a load of devices, in a load of places. You've made some progress - an ipad app is nice, I guess, if I had an ipad or played pathfinder. But not enough.
Rejig and reinvigorate. You're still on top, with no direct competition, and the actual product is sound. If you want to keep that advantage and be around another decade, you need to revise a lot of things. Cloud storage, either host it yourselves or support more than just drop box (google drive would suit me!), needs to be integrated into the app seamlessly - so you can look at the same sheets / rosters / campaigns / decks on every device. Android apps, for phone as well as tablet. A web interface tapping into the same database would be a great perk. And of course... a reformed licensing model.
Some recognition of geeky people wanting more than 1 of your products might be nice too - where's the bundle deals or existing customer discounts?
Get it all right, and I think I, and many other people, might even buy into an annual subscription - something like $50 annually for the use of all your products. I think that might actually net you a lot more in the long run than the current model!
In the meantime, I'm off to go and choose between Roll20, Obsidian Portal and BeyondTabletop instead!
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