Announcement from Anthony Valterra

[Twin Rose]

I appologize for missinterpreting what you wrote, but even with this clarification I am still confused as to what exactly you suggest we pay for. $5 for large groups would be ok (Splatbooks, FR, Star Wars, Dragon) but $5 per source would be excessive as that would come to $50-$100 dollars per year for the material that is being entered and tested by the community for free or is WotC going to start doing the work themselves.

With Campaign Suite, we come out with fully licensed products from companies all the time. Some of these are 'for sale' and others (such as Wild Spellcraft and Arms & Armor) are free. We also try to include as MUCH usable text in each product as we can - in many cases, people don't *need* the book to be able to use the information. This isn't always the case, though, and of course many people buy the books or already have them anyway.

The expansions are good sellers, though, and encouraging enough to have more in the future.

 

[Brown Jenkin]

With Campaign Suite, we come out with fully licensed products from companies all the time. Some of these are 'for sale' and others (such as Wild Spellcraft and Arms & Armor) are free. We also try to include as MUCH usable text in each product as we can - in many cases, people don't *need* the book to be able to use the information. This isn't always the case, though, and of course many people buy the books or already have them anyway.

The expansions are good sellers, though, and encouraging enough to have more in the future.

I am willing to pay you or another company for your labor and intelectual property. My point was that with PCGen there is no labor cost. The information is being entered and tested entirely by volunteers. To pay $5 a source for nothing more than licencing fees seems excesive. If you are only colecting licencing fees I would go only as high as $1-$2 a source depending on how much material is included.

 

[Mynex]

Not likely. Mynex, straighten me out if I get this wrong:

PCGen is released as Open Source. It's free. You can't charge anything for PCGen. And since it is Open Source you can't use any part of it in something you charge for. So they can't say the current version is free but future versions will cost X (not so sure on that one). Unless they completely rewrite the program. It seems very unlikely to me that Wizards will invest anything in a product they can't make money on.

Maybe they would get around that by charging for new lst files perhaps? I'm guessing the open source license would let them do that.

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What I wonder is whether the negotiations are to open up the splat books for all third party software developers or is this just a Wizards & PCGen arrangement?

I'm hoping it's the former as the later would make a real mess of the already messy software market & licenses.

You hit it dead on Todd, PCGen is Open Source, and unless it were _totally_ rewritten, there would be no way to charge for it. And just to reassure people, there are _NO_ plans to completely re-write PCGen.

Now, yes, in theory, we could charge for data files, but as others pointed out, they're done for free labor now, and charging for them would be morally wrong, so that's not an option.

In short, hang out and see what happens... should be more to say soonish.

 

[Knightcrawler]

I was thinking of $5 for all forgotten realms resources, $5 for all CoC sources, etc, etc, etc. Not $5 for each individual book. That would be ridiculous. Even WotC only charges like $3.95 for dowloads of their books.

 

[KenM]

I bought etools, hated it complete waste of money, no support whatsoever. LOTS of bugs. I switched to PCGen. Its slow but it works. WOTC finally got a beta "patch" out. It just adds new features and does not fix ANYTHING, so its not really a patch, IMO. Its been beta for like a month. No word on the full version of patch. But if you install the beta, you have to uninstall it when the full version is done. I wish they would just announce what theis big announcment is at the right time, instead of making us wonder.