What I was saying was there are not now and likely will never be enough GM's who find value in a product like RW to support it.

Further I never thought selling content, particularly modules, was going to be a big profit center. The user base is small, uses many different rules sets in different genres and are primarily DIY world builders. They might have made some income offering small items like individual buildings/locations or even villages/towns. Stuff a GM might be able to fit into a homebrew world with minor modifications. But despite them saying repeatedly that they intended to do so none ever became available.

I believe the stated reasons were based on being spread too thin. While I am severely disappointed that Real Works is no currently being developed, I'd much rather that than see LWD implode completely.

I can't fathom a GM who wouldn't find value in this tool.

Is everyone flying by the seat of their pants with pre-written material these days? Sad sad times.

Some people have more time than others, also some people are not as creative as others. I put myself a bit in both those camps. I was planning on using the content market for RW.

I've noticed that every time I hit these forums the Realm Works Discussion board has more people viewing than the HLO board (which is the focus of LW's attention).

And the Pathfinder Hero Lab board has more people viewing than the Pathfinder 2e HLO board.

Just something I wonder if LW even notices or cares about. They seem to be quite literally leaving their customers behind and forging ahead into territory that very few people seem interested in following.

I've also searched for alternatives to Realm Works quite extensively and nothing holds up.

I'm holding out hope that one day LW will return to develop Realm Works or perhaps even another developer will purchase it from them and take over.

It would be acceptable to me if it were a software as a service that you had to subscribe to even log in.

Worst case if the developer went out of business we could just continue using the software in offline mode and backup manually ourselves.

The Pathfinder forum is mostly busy with people writing their own extensions; so until HLO provides this ability its forum will be fairly quiet.

The RW forum is probably being watched by only the same few people all the time...

Generally it seems like its about 50-75 people viewing the Realm Works forums almost constantly.

Considering I used realm works for a couple years without even visiting the forums I would bet its a more valued product than LW realizes. They just failed to properly monetize it.

Edit: especially since they have no real competition. There is not another piece of standalone client-side software that can do what this product does. If anyone is aware of one please point me at it. Scrivener, Onenote, Googledocs, all these things fall terribly short. World Anvil, YARPS and others are all web-based. What happens if you put years of work into a web based campaign manager and the website shuts down? I don't really understand why web-based seems to be the go-to model when its a terrible idea long-term and campaigns tend to be very long term endeavors.

At any rate, I've pretty much come to the conclusion my only path forward at the present is to continue using Realm Works even though development has ended, pray to the gods above it doesn't become too buggy or too corrupted and ruin all my work, and maybe years down the road leadership at LW will turn around and decide to bring the project back under development.

Here's to hoping.

Or some other developer buys the product off of LW, resumes development, or a totally third party application launches with functional RW import.

Lots of long shots all lined up here.

Realm Works is still the best. I hope LWD resume at some point.

Yes, yes, yes!