RW software without cloud service?

[The One]

Originally Posted by rob

Users retain full access to all their content on their computers. The cloud is an OPTIONAL place to store your data.

That conclusion is dead wrong. It's not simple at all, as there are some extremely complicated issues involved. Yes, we could have spent an extensive amount of time to solve those issues. We opted not to, allowing us to instead focus our efforts on additional features and capabilities. Since users can easily pre-create however many realms they want, users can easily avoid ever having to be inconvenienced by the need to connect to the server when they don't have a connection handy.

I appreciate that you took the time to reply, having worked for a software development company, I am aware that design decisions get made which force limitations into the software.

I do feel that you are overlooking the biggest cause for concern though, what happens if something happens to Lone Wolf? If you go out of business? If you have a disaster such as a fire, or on the less drastic scale, what happens if the software stops making enough money to justify the server costs.

Effectively, Realmworks comes with a limited lifespan, beyond which you can't create new entries, only manipulate existing ones. It also raises the question what happens when you start selling licences for new content alongside Realmworks (such as Pathfinder Adventure Paths), will that too be tied into using "the cloud", without which your purchased content is useless?

[rob]

Fair questions and wholly understandable based on the way a lot of unethical (IMO) companies have operated over the years. Allow me to address them...

1. We're a "distributed" company, with staff working across multiple states. Everything of importance lives on servers hosted by reputable companies. It's also backed up to other places in case of disaster situations. So something like a fire could cause some setbacks while we recovered everything and got it all back into place, but nothing would be lost.

2. The likelihood of Lone Wolf going out of business is pretty darn low. The company has been going strong for 20 years now. We've continued to grow and thrive by developing quality software tools for tabletop gamers.

3. We've continued to support products long after most other companies do. For example, we've even maintained support for Army Builder V2 for the past 10 years after superseding it with V3 in 2004.

4. If you are truly worried about being able to create realms in the future and the product being shut down, there's a simple work-around that we've advocated in our FAQ. There is nothing stopping you from creating a couple dozen realms right away. After that, they exist and you can allocate them for your own use at any time. If the product disappeared overnight, you'd still be going strong.

5. We stated this during the Kickstarter and in other threads, and I'll re-state it here. If we ever abandoned Realm Works, we'll make sure everyone can continue using the product and/or get their data out before doing so. That's just the decent thing to do.

6. I'm the controlling owner of the company, so I'm not making empty promises that some faceless board of directors could overrule.

Happy customers is how we've thrived all these years, and treating customers responsibly is the best way to make them happy (besides putting out a good product, of course).

Hope this helps!