Player Edition Cost?

[AutoDMC]

I realize the "Player Edition" is still being worked on, but has a decision on cost been made yet?

I did a quick search and only found one thread that referenced the player edition cost; the question was mostly answered but the actual question about the cost was not directly responded to.

This is really my major concern in using your product. It's a great method of organizing my thoughts, but that only gets me so far. The cost of the player's edition will decide just how much I can really use your product. Low enough and I can happily recommend it to my players or subsidize the cost. Too high, and RealmWorks simply becomes a planning tool which I use to stock another tool my players can use, either Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, a wiki... essentially all the tools you guys set out to get rid of will not only still exist, but be extra chores!

The TL;DR question here is... how much are we looking at, seriously? Five dollars? Ten dollars? A buck? Most products subsidize the cost of the viewer with the cost of the authoring program. Adobe Reader was free, to sell copies of Adobe Acrobat. Flash Player was free, to get an install base to sell Macromedia Flash. The concept of free clients to access paid creation tools or server tools is pretty standard in the industry. Being as the player edition would be useless without a GM running a GM edition, AND paying a recurring cloud fee, I personally don't see why the viewer should be too expensive, but again, we don't know for sure.

Like other users, the main draw for me is the ability to build a grand universe where the players can explore undirected, without the railroading of classic campaign development. Already my players expect to be able to drop a mission thread to go elsewhere.

As the game universe is Fallout, it had come to mind to develop a "Pip Boy" website, where players could view their current mission objectives, other quests encountered, main NPCs they've interacted with, locations, history, documents...

...essentially RealmWorks, right? So I bought the product. It's great, and it help me get my game organized, but while the player view is a nice online alternative to handouts (I use Google Hangout to game, so I can screenshare the Player View window) it doesn't provide me what I really wanted to provide my players: the ability for them to access their knowledgebase to make decision about quests and actions without having to ask me what they know.

Maybe I should be "making them write notes" like the good old days, but right now, even with Player View, my players have to ask me "What do we know about Overseer Reed?" and then I fiddle with the product a bit to pull up the display. It's still superior to me just trying to remember (or having to write up a hand written dossier like in my first campaign) but it still breaks the game flow when somebody's curiosity about the designs they saw in the walls of Vault 42 halts the entire session.

However, when I find myself having to set up and configure Semantic Mediawiki anyway to provide my players the tools they need, and then manually dump the content I painstakingly entered into RealmWorks into another piece of software, the question is quickly begged why I'm not just doing the work in Semantic Mediawiki in the first place. My planning time is finite, as as much as I'd love to use RealmWorks due to the tools that provide me focus, if I have to lose planning time to copy paste, I'll find myself just ad-hoc planning in Mediawiki, just like I used to.

And this all hinges on the cost, to my players, of buying software. Simply trying to get a pool for a six pack of beer was difficult enough when we played at a table, asking my players to spend money on a viewer application, where the killer app part (Fog of World) is only really an experience on the GM side, is going to be pulling teeth, UNLESS the cost is low enough it can be easily subsidized or absorbed.

[Farling]

Perhaps you should be waiting for the web-based player view, which will be free :-)

[mirtos]

I think they said 10.00, but I could be pulling that number out of my ass.

I get the "pulling teeth" thing... it depends on the income of your group.

[liz]

Originally Posted by AutoDMC

I realize the "Player Edition" is still being worked on, but has a decision on cost been made yet?

Cost hasn't been officially announced. We have been considering the concerns you outlined in our discussions. Once the pricing is finalized, we'll announce it on our website and share it in our monthly newsletter. I'll also make sure to share it in the forums too.

[mirtos]

Ignore what i said then. Apologies Liz.

[Acenoid]

As I understand starndard-tier-cloud services (or higher) are also necessary to make use of the player tool, otherwise there is nothing to view in the player version. Correct?

[liz]

Originally Posted by Acenoid

As I understand starndard-tier-cloud services (or higher) are also necessary to make use of the player tool, otherwise there is nothing to view in the player version. Correct?

Correct. The cloud service is what makes it possible for the GM's content to show up in the player's version of Realm Works. Now, only the GM needs to pay for the cloud service. It's not an additional cost for the players to worry about.