Shareware Amateurs Vs. Shareware Professionals?

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to a Gamedev.net article called 'Shareware Amateurs Vs. Shareware Professionals'. The article, by shareware game developer Steve Pavlina, starts: "Why is it that some shareware developers seem to be hugely successful in financial terms, growing their sales from scratch to generate tens of thousands of dollars in income, while the vast majority struggle to generate even a handful of sales? The answer can be found by exploring the difference in mindsets between both groups."

Comments

No thank you to shareware

[amorsen]

I find WinZip to be hugely bloated and I do not find its interface at all intuitive. Pretty icons though. Fortunately I do not use Windows much, but once in a while I need to unzip something on a Windows machine. I really think that (the GUI for) archive handling belongs in the file manager. Besides, I tend to be helping someone else when I need to open archives. Buying licenses for all of them is not an option, and neither is putting up with the nag screen. Ah well, at least there are good free command-line archivers.

This brings me to a larger point. Everyone who scratches an itch on Windows releases the corresponding tool for $25 as shareware. Then they discover that noone buys their product. Just take a look at the archiver section of TUCOWS. A million different GUI's for zip, all shareware. What exactly do the authors expect? They cannot compete with WinZip on features and generally their user interface is even worse. If I had to buy an archiver, I would buy WinZip. A $10 saving over WinZip is not going to make me buy something with no reputation whatsoever.

Most software today except games is shareware anyway. You can get time-limited demos for pretty much anything that does not come from Microsoft. So what does "shareware" offer that regular commercial software does not? All I see is having to go through 20 crappy programs on TUCOWS to find one that may be slightly useful. And then having the author abandon it a month later.

Give me proprietary software or Free Software anytime.

Re:$0.02

[PainKilleR-CE]

So what's the moral of this post? People (me, my mother, joe user, whomever) buy software because (they percieve that) it's the best in it's particular field.

Which is why I have not purchased either of those products, and only use one of them. As another poster already mentioned, WinZip is a rather horrid product to use as an unregistered user. I don't reward people for giving me nag screens unless their product is truly exceptional, and WinZip is not (I use WinRar myself, although the interface isn't much different, it did have context menu shortcuts before WinZip).

mIRC really just happens to be one of the only fully-featured IRC clients for Windows that is still maintained to some degree. I've used much better IRC clients that simply had small problems that got worse with lack of continued development (ie problems with Xircon such as memory leaks which became crippling as I moved to 2k and started leaving my system running for months instead of weeks). The only thing I really like about mIRC that I haven't seen in most other IRC clients (on Windows) is the floating window mode for chat windows (separating the chat windows from the main interface), but even then it doesn't handle the interface very well (as far as managing the floating windows).

Perhaps it is all about perception. However, I consistantly see the same perception that these two programs are the best, when in fact they're simply the most widely used and recommended. Many people don't even know that there are other IRC clients (and many frequently refer to IRC itself as mIRC), just as many people are willing to put up with WinZip's nag screens when there are so many other options (many of which support more compression formats and easier interfaces).

Re:A rather weak article.

[Sir Robin]

Well, tell you what. Find a successful shareware author (which I will arbitrarily define as "someone making their sole income from selling shareware that they develop") who will rebut each point, and perhaps I'll listen -- to them.

As for He should have called it, "Lazy and Ignorant Shareware Authors vs Motivated and Knowledgeable Shareware Authors. ... Well, yes. The whole article deals with how to move from the former to the latter.

Not all amateurs are lazy and mercurial. Not all "professionals" are smart, savvy, and dedicated.

... Speaking of neither new nor particularly interesting ...

A better question is

[Ratbert42]

When did time-limited demos and crippled products become "shareware?"

A decent article

[Sherloqq]

And I kind of agree with the title, too. To me, a professional is someone who not only knows a lot something, but also uses that knowledge to earn a living (e.g. a pro photographer). An amateur is a person, who does something as a hobby, as pointed out by another poster. IMHO, a shareware developer, who fits the "amateur" characteristics described by the article's author, will have a hard time earning much from their work, and most likely not enough to sustain themselves, thus falling into the amateur bin (ok ok, let's call it the "unsuccessful pro" bin, if it makes you feel better).

That issue aside, I think the author has hit a lot of nails on the head there. When I compare myself and my lofty business ideas with those of my brother-in-law, then look at where I am and where he is, there is no doubt which one of us is a pro. What amateur like me must realize is that there is a way to become pro, and Steve Pavlina outlines the stepping stones to get us on our way. Focus. Drive. Determination. Perserverance. Diversity. Research. Goals. Deadlines. Discipline. All those good things that we really don't like to do unless absolutely necessary. Try it. Find a role model. You'll see. I already have mine.

Re:Most insulting article ever

[CKW]

I found the article highly useful as a personal development tool - to illuminate the things in life I could do differently to better my life - and I'm speaking IN GENERAL.

You sound like you assumed that the author was placing you in the one of two groups. He's in all probability not an a**h*le, so that assumption simply can't be right.

Place yourself in his shoes. He wants to list the things a person *could* do to increase their odds of eventually succeeding, and as an excellent counterpoint list the opposite, the things that will decrease your odds of succeeding.

Just because he's seperated it up into these two camps, doesn't mean he's accusing you or anyone else who isn't "successful" of being a brain-dead paranoid retard with *all* of those listed failings. But he is trying to list some of the things you could do to increase your chances of success.

>Isn't is possible to write good software and have it sell without huge amounts of thought about marketing

Sure, it could happen. If you want to leave things to chance and to whatever random assortment of luck and personal attributes you've been handed in life - you can do that.

But if you want some ideas to try and exceed whatever random thing happens to your effort, there they are. Pick and choose whatever bits you think might help you.

Re:A rather weak article.

[metamatic]

Amateur works are frequently (but not always) constructed more poorly than professional works, but there are certainly exceptions.

Well, maybe my perception is different because I'm a Mac user, but I generally find it's the other way around. Proprietary software is much more likely to be a buggy half-assed port of a Windows application, and is much more likely to be dropped by the maker within a year of your buying it.

Excluding games, I've bought more shareware on the Mac than I've bought commercial software. Too many companies exhibit clear signs of having basically zero commitment to the Mac, yet expect Mac users to be so grateful that they develop for us at all that we'll buy it regardless. I'd much rather buy shareware from someone who only develops for the Mac, and who isn't under commercial pressure to ship as quickly as possible no matter how many bugs there are.