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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."
Well...
I must say I disagree with most of the stuff presented in the article. Let's take a look at two examples.
WinZip: I bought WinZip (way back when they were NicoMak Computing) because it was a good product. It was (and I think still is) a solid product with an intuitive interface. Basically, I bought this product because it the developers knew its role. WinZip is a means to an end (unzipping files), not the end itself. Now I'm not sure, but I don't think that WinZip 1.0 had a 200-strong developer team behind it, or even what Mr. Pavlina would call a "Shareware Professional."
mIRC: (Yes, I'm a Windows user.) I purchased a license for mIRC because it's a good product, and, for my purposes, "best in show" for IRC clients.
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.
Not to say that Mr. Pavlina's article doesn't hit on some good points; namely, that developers need to improve their products as a whole and not just improve "what they're good at" (design, programming, what have you). But seriously, something that was lacking in this article was the fact that, if you want to make money on software, you have to actually make software that does its job well, and that the end-user can actually use.
Then again, I could be full of hot air.
An amateur is defined as someone that is either not as skilled as a professional or someone that engages in a particular activity as a hobby rather than a profession. Amateur works are frequently (but not always) constructed more poorly than professional works, but there are certainly exceptions. And in general the entire shareware market is seen as an amateurâ(TM)s field with professionals not deigning to sink so low (this is a market perspective really, not necessarily my own).
The linked to article fails to address any new or particularly interesting aspects of shareware development and as a whole contains a lot of rather flame inducing, silly, generalizations. He should have called it, "Lazy and Ignorant Shareware Authors vs Motivated and Knowledgeable Shareware Authors." Of course then there would have been little point in writing the rest of the article.
Not all amateurs are lazy and mercurial.
Not all "professionals" are smart, savvy, and dedicated.
Once more unto the breach dear friends...
It should be noted that Mr. Pavlina only cites his own experience in the article. Since I don't have a business or economics background, I couldn't begin to agree or disagree on his points. However, his lack of comparative figures, that is, citing other shareware successes and failures based on his criteria, makes his process more of an opinion than a thesis. I'd be negligent if I based my entire shareware concept on this. However, it is thought-provoking. This looks like a great concept for an series of Slashdot interviews of shareware professionals, whom I will classify as those who sell their own shareware as their primary source of income.
Although the parent comment comes off as a troll a bit, the question is actually an interesting one I think. Sometime during the last decade there has been a shift in what we consider shareware. It is now pretty commonplace to move beyond simple nag screens in shareware - especially games.
The definition of shareware as per the ASP is "a marketing method, not a type of software or even strictly just a distribution method." So you could say that although there has been a shift to more than nag screens, the basic definition of shareware is still the same, and it differs from box products with demos (for instance) because it is more than the demo. It is a marketing tool, a distribution tool, and (hopefully) a pretty functional version of the product that you can evaluate.
As a rough estimate based on no real facts, I would guess 1996. I remember during the successful launch of Escape Velocity there was a lot of talk of the sell-through rates of time-limited or functionally impared shareware vs. perfectly functional shareware.
Unfortunately, if you want to increase your overall sales significantly, you must provide value to the customer above and beyond the simple emotional satisfaction of "doing the right thing." Disabling the product after a length of time is a popular tactic with Windows Shareware authors, though not so much on the Mac where it is easier to bypass. Adding value to a shareware program can include features such as additional levels, additional abilities, or other such things that leave the unpaid version "crippled" in comparison. Many authors combined the two into time-crippled shareware. Recently, there has been a shift to adware products, whose incentive for registration is a removal of annoying ad bars.
Either way, it is all about incentivizing the registration process to raise total income, and it has long been an accepted practice in the shareware community (not that the shareware community exists anymore).
The ______ Agenda
It's tended (particulary in the past) to be easy to modify reasorce application forks to get around this sort of thing - using Apple's own freely downloadable reasource editing tool, ResEdit (or using a similar 3rd party reasource editing tool).
/System/Libraries/Extensions/Driver/Foo/Bar.ktext) and alter the hard coded line data to work with UK ADSL lines, but it was just an XML file being used for the driver definitions so was fairly trivial).
:)
Years ago I once took a game demo off a cover disk (some sort of Global-Thermonuclear-Warfare-WWIII-type-stragegy sim) and made it into the full version by just tweaking around in a reasource editor, enabling hidden and disabled menus and options (so you could save games, and start other levels).
The same sort of thing is true of Mac OS X apps (though in a slightly different manner). A few months ago I downloaded a USB Alcatel Modem driver from a US web site.
The installer refused to installed because this was version 2.0 of the installer, and it required 1.0 to be installed first (which was no longer avalible). I opened up the installer, hacked the file which did the checking for this existing version (it turned out to be a bash script embedded in the installer) and installed it. Once it was installed I found I had to find the driver (it was somewhere like
This is where the 'Macs are easier to use' idea comes from - it's not just easier on the surface (obviously Microsoft have made quite a few gains in this department, as has free software) - it's that they are nice to work with from a developer standpoint.
If your coding your program 'normally', using Reasource Forks (OS 9 and lower) or XML files (OS X and above) in the usual way, then you'd normally impliment something like time limiting in this manner, though obviously, as it's realatively easy to work around so many developers use obfuscation.
It's just to do with alternative paradigm for development that makes everything easy to open and edit. For example, with ResEdit, you can edit any applications menus and change the names, layout and shortcuts for a menu, colour the menus, graphically redesign the applications dialog boxes, change the layout and graphics for tool bars, even change all the spites, text and sound in a game and have it still function perfectly.
Obviously, this approach has big advantages for developers and users, I know many non technical users who just like to be able to add/customise menu shortcuts.
You could even hack the Finder to change the Window Manager style or trash can icons, most fun was hacking an actively running copy of the Finder!
That can cause *very* funky and amazingly weird things to happen!