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Shareware Amateurs Vs. Shareware Professionals?

Posted by simoniker on from the are-you-slipshod-or-not? dept.

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."

3 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. No thank you to shareware by amorsen · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.

    --
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  2. A better question is by Ratbert42 · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

  3. Re:Most insulting article ever by CKW · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.