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Why Port To PC? Shareware Still alive!
An anonymous reader writes "Here is an interesting interview with Tom Anthony, describing why Ambrosia Software are porting their Mac games to the PC market. Do you think their games can really sell after being ported? I thought shareware was dead, but all their games are still using shareware as well."
I'm skeptical as to how well this will work. The mac community is different, chiefly in that there is some sense of community. A certain desire to support companies that develop for the platform.
...wow, that metaphor came out badly.
I know there are a decent number of people who actually bought ambrosia games despite already having the pirated codes to use them.
The Wintel world is a much bigger place, so you're fishing from a bigger pond, but I don't think the fish will be so generous about going after the bait on the hook when there're plenty of other ways to get a worm without having a big barbed spike driven thru your cheek in the form of money.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
towards companies like this afloat. ;))
In the Unix/Linux world, we're used to quality freeware (gcc,kde,gimp) and we look first for a product that is free, and are reluctent to look into shareware. (generally speaking; I know that all you reading this have ordered from and sponsor shareware developers
In the mac and windows worlds, however, there's still a large, thriving market to be had from shareware.
So, in the end, no; this news doesn't surprise me.
I feel the same way. I think more and more shareware is becoming bigger. In the last year or two it seems like devlopers have taken two routes with shareware. Some try to "lock" down their products and tie registeration keys into the actual hardware used, while on the other hand some people don't worry about it and charge a modest amount for thier work. These are the people that I believe are seeing a payoff for their hardwork.
How sure are they that this will work? The mac software market is very different from the PC software market.
While on Windows, the word most commonly associated with 'shareware' is 'crap', this is not the case on the mac. Due to the smaller marketshare, selling boxed copies of software on store shelves isn't a winning plan for anything but the largest players in the mac software biz. Because of this, a great deal of excellent software is released for mac.
Where on windows shareware has long since been given up as a dead end, the mac shareware market is alive and well, producing and supporting a large number of excellent programs. As a mac user, many of your staple programs would be shareware, not boxed commerical (this is one thing that really strikes a lot of 'switchers' as strange).
Just because they can make a good profit selling shareware on the mac doesn't mean it'll extend to windows. They'll probably do better actually selling boxes (bargin stuff, like what you'd find in the checkout line, not alongside the $50 large production games) rather than selling shareware in the windows market, simply because to windows users, a physical box implies that it's a real piece of software produced by a real company (a thought not common among mac users).