I came up with the idea of an external free terrain builder software for World Machine terrains.
Basically you’d be able to share a terrain made in World Machine with a 3rd party which doesn’t own World Machine and this 3rd party would be able to build the terrain on his machine and adjust some “exposed” parameters. This would be really useful for people working on terrains as commissions for all kinds of customers, this would greatly reduce the file size of those commissions and give the customer a lot of control over the final result.
The Substance Suite has a free program like that called Substance Player, where you can load in substances made in Designer and build them on your machine, with endless seed variations.
This may reduce slightly the potential future userbase for WorldMachine, but I’m not sure, maybe it will also attract some new users who after having checked out a terrain in the free software realize how powerful World Machine is.
I also don’t know how this would integrate with the 2 price models for WorldMachine, since with the Indie version your build cores are restricted, I guess in the free software they’d also be restricted.