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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."

5 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. $0.02 by chota · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. A rather weak article. by Soulslayer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    Once more unto the breach dear friends...
  3. umm nah by toddhunter · · Score: 4, Funny

    The answer can be found by exploring the difference in mindsets between both groups

    The answer can be found by realising that some people release great software and do well, and others release crap software and do badly.

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

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