Use via steam model vs. Licensing model?

[Celebrochan]

Reading over the licensing page I was struck by how... cumbersome the process Licensing model is... why not work out a deal with a service like steam so that people can only access the program files when they are logged on?

[Colen]

It's critical for us that people be able to access their content regardless of where their computer is, or whether they remembered to put it in "offline mode" before taking it to a friend's house. The last thing we want is someone going somewhere without internet (a games convention, for example) and not being able to use Hero Lab because they forgot to enable offline mode.

There's also the question of the time we'd have to invest reworking the product to make it steam-compatible (or something similar - I'm not even sure if Steam accepts products like ours). We only have so many engineering resources, and spending some time reworking our copy protection would have to come at the expense of something else. Our current copy protection mechanics work well for us and our users, so should we postpone our mac version so we can integrate into steam? Delay new game systems? Skip adding new features and fixing bugs in our products?

Our current arrangement gives us a lot of flexibility, and has worked very well for us so far, so we don't see the advantage in spending time changing to a new mechanism and taking resources away from other tasks.

Hope this helps!