A short one on how you'll get Wildbound and keep it, because "how does the launcher work" will be the first question every playtester asks.
One account, one launcher
Your wildbound.dev account holds everything: playtest access, the demo, purchases and membership. The launcher never sees your password. When you sign in, it opens your browser, you approve it there, and the browser hands the launcher a token. That token stays in Windows' own credential store.
Activate once, then play offline
The first time you play on a PC, the launcher activates it and saves a small signed licence file. The game checks that file itself, offline, every time it starts. There's no always-online check and no background service. Your PC is identified by a one-way hash of its Windows ID; we never collect hardware serial numbers.
- Three PCs at once. A desktop, a laptop and a new PC. To use a fourth, free one from your account or the launcher.
- Members: the game is included. After three paid months it's yours for good, and the licence never needs renewing again.
We're honest about the trade-off. Any check that runs on your PC can be cracked by someone determined. Our aim is to make buying easy and casual copying pointless, not to treat paying players as suspects.
Small updates
A build is about 3.4 GB. Instead of downloading the whole thing for every update, the launcher splits the game into content-defined chunks. It downloads only the chunks it doesn't already have and rebuilds the files on your PC. It checks every file against a signed manifest, so a corrupted or tampered download is refused. If a file ever gets damaged, Verify and repair fixes it from the same chunks.
In our tests on two real builds a day apart, the update downloaded 69.9 MB of 3.42 GB and reused the rest from disk. Bigger changes mean bigger updates, but most weeks should be small.
Channels
- Test: new builds first, for playtesters and for Researcher and Expedition Patron members.
- Release: the stable build, and the free two-hour demo once early access opens.
You switch channels in the launcher's settings.
Windows SmartScreen
Until our code-signing certificate is in place, Windows may warn the first time you run the installer. Choose More info, check the publisher, then Run anyway. We'll post here when signing is live.
Questions? The help centre has more, and support is staffed by real people.