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Selling Software - Shareware, Piracy, and Profit?
qjereq asks: "A few months after being laid off from a large corporation early last year, I decided to create some image browsing software to sell on the web and, perhaps later, in stores. Unfortunately, besides competing with hundreds of other similar shareware and freeware products, I have found that the bulk of my product's downloads come from pirate web sites. I have tried unsuccessfully to make my software hack-proof. I have also looked into selling the product in-stores, but I have only heard bad things about this including the possibility of having to eat the cost of returned merchandise. I am running low on cash and am on the brink of giving up, but I know that the product is good. Do any Slashdot readers have any success stories about how they were able to make money by selling software? My product is currently sold as Shareware. Should I consider a combination of Freeware and a Full Version? Is it worth the hassle of trying to get onto store shelves? Help."
posting to well known websites populated by nerds. Perhaps some of them in sympathy will buy your software?
I have often wondered how profitable the $10 software you see in places like grocery stores is. Products that are $10 or less are impulse purchases and so you might make a lot more although you charge less. Also, people who spend only $10 on a package won't expect much (if anything) in the way of technical support. The hard part would be to get into the distribution channel.
There is no way to create a "hack-proof" piece of software. If you have an interesting program, people will figure out a way to unlock it. If you make two different versions available (lite and registered) then the warez sites will make the for-pay version available. *shrug* There's not a darn thing you can do. You can make it difficult, but in the end, the energy spent making the product hard to crack would be better spent on making the product better. Not until we have DRM integrated into the hardware of everone's PC will we be able to fix that particular problem.
James
it might not be the best idea asking for help from a site known for it's advocacy of open source software...
WTPOUAWYHTTOTWPA
What's the point of using acronyms when you have to type out the whole phrase anyways?
There is another theory which says that one of the main reasons for hacking software is because of the challenge of beating the software's protection, and that posting it to the pirate sites is done more for the bragging rights than to let people have the software for nothing.
:-/
If this is true, putting in ever more complex protection schemes will have no effect, other than to make the software an even more interesting target for the hackers.
Hmm.... sorry to sound cynical.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
1. Shareware
2. Piracy
3. Profit!
I have also looked into selling the product in-stores, but I have only heard bad things about this including the possibility of having to eat the cost of returned merchandise.
Simple solution. No returns on opened packages. If it's unopened, then the store can just reselve it, up one for the invintory, and then sell it to someone else.
Besides, I don't know of ANY store that will accept returns on digial media.
-------
Support Indy Music. Buy
Give each user a "key", more precicely, their public key and sign the binary, or some other data file (that contains their registration information, including customer #, date of purchace etc.) and then the program will only run once the users valid key has been authorized.
.exe should validate itself, and a myriad of other application files for checksums, or some other type of authentication. Contact the home server (encrypted) and recieving the PKI gpg/pgp signed / encrypted stream BACK to the users computer and validates them based on their customer information. Validation comes only at a handful of times, and users registration (the fact that they have been authed) is stored somewhere in random, misc places in the computers hard drive/ registry or both!
The
Selling in stores should be easy.
The program on installation will send a request to the servers for the public key (after registration is finished, valid information kept PRIVATE!!!), and is recieved encrypted/signed (the PUBKEY for your software is distributed in the software).
Normally I wouldn't suggest such iron fist tactics, but being a programmer myself, I tend to think of security and encryption at the forefront of any application development. Any change in the state of the software and it's rendered useless.
Better to have software that wont' run, then run and ruin your machine or others.
Pirates be damned!
But is it too good of a price? Maybe you need to raise your prices. (Seriously) It would seem that your software would have a pretty small market, but is very good for that market. Maybe you need a price range of 25-30 so you can make a profit with the sales. Is piracy the problem? To be honest, I doubt it. I think those that are willing to support a program do it. Those that do not don't. Simple as that. Best thing you can do actually, is to create a community, if you do not already have one. Making it personal is the best way to get support on the Internet.
Basically, your problem has no solution. As has already been pointed out, there's no such thing as "hack-proof", the full version WILL end up on warez sites, and shareware rarely makes money. In the end you just have to trust in human nature. It's hard to believe, I know, but most people don't get their software from warez sites. In fact, most people prefer to do the "right thing" in most situations.
Don't waste time, effort, and resources trying to make your software "hack-proof", spend that time instead on making more reasons for someone in a store pick your box up off the shelf.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
at least if you don't want someone to make a keygen or give his key to other people..
instead have another version of the software available only for registered users, this alone would cut the amount of freeloading(instead of just trying to find the key he/she would have to find the whole software which is generally much harder than to just find a serialnumber/key). also you should make buying much easier than freeloading(evilpaypal&etc), if it's easier to find a serial and download it than to buy it many people will choose the not buying option. you could also include some phone-home system that connects to the server occasionally when the user is online when running the program and checks if theres dozens of people using the same key (inform the users about this though, and this wouldn't be a very good solution since it's easily deflected by having outbound fw).
but really if you find a _good_ solution, screw your image browser, start selling that solution instead.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
besides competing with hundreds of other similar shareware and freeware products
Well, there you have it. Why should anyone buy your software? Is it unique in any way? Were you the first to get it to market? Does it satisfy a particular niche? Is your product of superior quality?
You're always going to have a certain level of piracy. You can see this as negative (lost sales) or positive (free marketing). Most people who pirate weren't going to pay for it in the first place. You have to hope they'll recommend it to someone who will. Software protection is an illusion that reduces sales.
I have a friend who wrote a fairly simple utility. He did it well and did it early. He sold it as shareware (no longer though) and was turing over $500K a year lat I heard. So it can be done.
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
Very little can de done against it. So the real question is how do other companies like say supermarkets get us to pay for their products. Yesterday on my way to the dentist I walked past the back of a supermarket and totally unprotected where stending several loafs of bread. I could have saved myself A. some money B. the time standing in the que. I did not take the loaf. Why the risk was not worth it for me.
With software however we feel that "stealing" it is not so much a problem when we consider it stealing at all. You think differently? Cute from a guy who calls his image browser software "abc" I am sure acdsee has something to say about this. Software is easily "stolen" and the risks are non-existent.
So the answer? Well look to a different way of doing business. Opera, you got their icon on your page, seems to be surviving despite the fact that it gives its full browser away for free. Oh yeah they got add banners. Even if you are to lazy to find a serial for it you probably filter out the ads at the proxy.
I don't think it is really possible to escape pirates anymore. The cracking has become so fast that games are out cracked before they are in stores. How is a little shop like you possibly going to compete. So go the way of some game companies. Don't bother. Quake without any protection nonetheless was a huge seller. It can be done. But try to stay away from overzealous copyprotection.
Why? Cause the only ones you hurt with all the stuff like serials and calling home functionality are the legitemate users. Not a single company so far has succeeded in keeping popular software out of the warez scene. Not microsoft, not acdsee and neither will you.
Concentrate instead on making the program superior to anyone elses. Then hope that enough people will simply buy it because they find "stealing" wrong to support you. Plenty of free software projects get funding without any obligation to contribute anything.
Remember there is no law wich says you got to be able to make a living. If this doesn't pay your bills then though. Get a J.O.B.
But the real question to you is. Did you pay for opera? Did you make a donation to Apache and all the other OSS software you are using? In short did you fully pay for all software you ever used? No then shut the fuck up. You steal we steal. If you did, then give yourselve a pat on the back, there will no doubt be a place for you in heaven, with just a little bit of hell for infringing on acdsee's trademark. :P
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If you need the bread, work as a consultant. There's quite a bit of work available if you look in the right places.
If you want to get your stuff out to a grateful audience, find a specialized field to learn about then use the newsgroups to find out just what people want.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
they started using a key scheme that gets checked every so often against their server; when a key starts having a couple thousand users checking in, they disable it.
Much like stores have to plan for losing 2 - 5 % of their inventory to theft ("shrinkage"), so too must software companies accept that someone, somewhere is going to hack your software if anyone likes it. If they have all of the bits and bytes of your system sitting in front of them, and they have no need to communicate with your server, they can always strip it out. Your purpose should be to encourage the maximum number of users to pay for the full version, not to have the minimum amount of piracy.
A freeware version is a good idea, as it will raise your visibility... If someone is so cheap that they would use a pirated version, you might convince them to become a customer by offering freeware, then enticing them with the full thing. Most of the copies of WinZip out there are the freeware version, but there are a heck of a lot more paid copies than if they didn't offer the free one.
A 15 day trial is too short. You are not just trying to show users the full value of your software, you are also trying to get them so used to using it that they are willing to shell out the cash to keep doing what they are doing. Most people have settled on 30 days, but 60 days wouldn't be out of the question.
I'd also charge more for the software, as price creates a perception of value: 25 - 35 dollars should be sufficient. At 15 dollars you are putting yourself in the realm of cheaply made, junky Visual Basic apps.
You've probably heard the following, but as an avid digital photographer I would find your software difficult to use. For one, you don't have an intuitive, on-screen way to navigate through folders. There is a reason every other piece of image software out there has this... it's much easier to manually search your image collection, which is why you have a browser in the first place. No real image collection is a flat folder.
The single-level Thumbnail filmstrip is also a cute analogy, but it makes it difficult to, once again, search your pictures. There should be some way to have multiple filmstrips to facilitate easier searching.
On one hand, whatever algorithms you are using to handle large file databases is solid... ABC took a 10,000 image file folder with only a 5 second pause on this P3 800. And now that you have a solid program, the last bit of polish required is what brings in most of the money.
On the other hand, as you mentioned you are competing with literally thousands of other products, such as ThumbsPlus, SuperJPG, ACDsee, and many others which are all highly professional, tremendously polished, and mature products. Spidering websites is a good first step, but you need to differentiate yourself if you are going to see real success. Are you going to be the online viewer of choice, with auto-import from camera / auto-export to HTML via FTP features? Are you going to push yourself onto OEM machines as a simple, easy-to-use viewer for regular people?
And if you haven't read Steve Pavlina's excellent article on selling shareware, I strongly recommend you do so now.
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
No offense, I am sure your program is very good. But trying to break into a market so heavily dominated by top-notch programs like ACDSee and iPhoto is insanity. Espectially without doing anything significant to differentiate your program. If you plan on continuing your current route, perhaps your next piece of software should be a .zip file manager. Or perhaps a web browser.
In order to take something from scratch and play catchup in a market like that, you need to either significantly out-invest the other guy by bringing a ton of talent onboard and really Doing It Right(tm) -- ACDSee did this to L-View Pro, many years ago -- or your competition has to stumble and lose their direction (see All-Seeing-Eye vs. Gamespy).
Basically, all I'm trying to say here is that the reason you're not successful is because, as you said, there are hundreds of other similar applications. The pirates are not going to buy your software if your software is uncrackable. They will just use a similar program that is crackable. Even if we lived in a perfect world and all the programs were uncrackable, it's unlikely they'd buy your program, they would probably just go without or come up with their own.
I'd suggest you find a niche, somewhere where you see a need that is not being fulfilled, and fulfill it. That's the easy way to be successful. The other way, taking an existing market and making your product stand out, that'll be a severely uphill battle for you. Good luck, whichever you choose, but don't blame your failure on piracy.
Random and weird software I've written.
If you intend to sell your product at any store larger than the Joe's Corner Computer Mart, you'll have to get a barcode for it. This is not cheap (a few thousand dollars, as I recall). Further information is available here.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Wow, what year is this? You actually think you can make money when 1) open source software exists; and 2) your product is the same as hundreds of others?
I read your story and thought to myself "good, another bit of chaff is being shaken out of the market".
You need to either 1) make your product open source and forget making money off it; or 2) make it worth paying for, so that you have a loyal user base that pays the shareware fee. Then you won't care so much about the "piracy". Or 3) have your software pre-loaded on the computer. Good luck on that last one!
There are few pieces of software worth paying for. The only ones I've paid for are Mac OS X, a few Mac OS X shareware programs, and VMWare, because they are WORTH it. Anything else has a perfectly good free alternative.
It's tough make a lot of money selling something like software these days. 9 times out of 10, there's a free version available. I think this is a GOOD thing.. why pay for something that costs little to copy, AND you don't even get to modify it or give it to your friends? Open source has raised the bar.
And selling physical copies in a store?? HA HA forget it!
You need to write an amazing piece of software, or you need to write custom software on a work-for-hire basis. I follow the second route myself, and I make good money, and I don't care what happens to the software except that it works.
I thought the page looked pretty good, so I hopped on over to Kazaa and downloaded it. Thanks for the recommendation!
Make the software trivial to crack, but put in a bit of code that detects the crack and removes vital system files from the cracker's system.
Hey, as long as it's in your EULA, it's ok, right?
While I applaud your attempt to do something like this, why on earth would you develop a product for a field that by your admission is flooded with competitive (and free at that!) products? How did you intend to differentiate yours from all the rest? I can understand if this was just something you were doing for your own use and later decided to sell it, but you said you developed this with the intention of marketing it.
I'm a bit puzzled by how you expected to make money doing this.
You have to face the fact that 99% of the people who would get your software illegally would not purchase it anyways. These are not really lost sales as those individuals wouldn't even think of buying it in the first place. I'm not saying it's right, but that's just the way the world works. If you want to entice people to buy your software, you should really release a free 'lite' version, and a pay version with many more features. This seems to work for alot of companies out there (ACDSee, Paint Shop Pro, etc....). And if you want to compete with these pre-existing companies who release similar products, you should offer something/features that they don't. Or else you're just another small fish in a huge pond.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
2. After checking that out, if you haven't wised up & are still willing to invest more money in this venture, you might reconsider your strategy of distribution via the usual shareware channels. I have ZERO business or marketing experience, so take this suggestion with a big ol' chunk of salt, but have you thought about trying to license your program via hosting companies, for use by their customers? (In other words, they include the program as a "free" utility on a CD provided to their customers creating and managing their own webpages.) I'm sure it would be difficult to pull off this kind of deal given the amount of competition you're up against, but it would have the advantage of reducing your exposure to losses from crackers and such. If this isn't realistic, I'm sure you can come up with better ideas, given that you're closer to the problem.
I am one of the people that pays for shareware on occasion. At present, I have at least ten pieces of shareware on my computer that I have paid for.
Requirements for me to pay for shareware:
1) Best in class: I paid my $29 for iCab. Why would I do that when I can get it for free? Simple - iCab offers the best feature set for a web browser. I have yet to see any web browser that offers the filtering powers iCab offers in an easy-to-set-up manner.
2) Great software: I am currently shopping for an OS X IRC client. Right now I am using iRC which is good, but not great. It is shareware, but I am not going to pay for it since I can easily imagine a better client out there.
3) Annoying, but not obtrusive reminders: I paid for GraphicConverter for OS X because it has a simple "Click Here to Run the Program" dialog box when you start it off. it reminds me every time I used it without paying for it just how often I was using it.
4) Full feature, unlimited demo: At the same time, with GC, it offers all of its features for as long as you want to put up with the nag screen. Since I use a program for a couple of months before deciding if it is worth paying for, a timed demo never gets my money (it stops working before I get a chance to fully evaluate it in my day-to-day life). Not giving me the full features also prevents me from fully evaluating my need and, as a result, will never get me to pay for something.
5) Professional company/website: I paid for a shareware type of BBEdit, and paid for the MissingSync. The web sites for these companies offered a lot of help and support, and made me confident that I was not going to get ripped off. Since I hate PayPal, any shareware that only uses that form of payment will not get my money.
6) Unique and worth money: I paid for the MissingSync because I needed it to sync my Clie with OS X. It was the only software that would allow this (PalmDesktop now offers this built-in). If a piece of shareware competes with a freeware alternative, the shareware software had better be significantly better than the free alternatives.
7) Good upgrade policy: This is a big one. GraphicConverter and others allow free upgrades for a *very* long time once you pay. I am not going to hand over money for v2.1 of some software if I know I am going to have to pay for v3.0 in three months and then v3.5 three months after that. I would say that, in general, I am willing to pay for a paid upgrade every two years or so.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
I can't help you with any software success stories, but I can give you my first impresion of your product, for what it's worth- At first glance it comes across like any other image viewer, which is not good because I already have irfanview, and am quite happy with it, so why should I pay for yours? Well, after going over the features, there are a couple of things your product offers that most image editors don't offer. Don't market it as an image editor. Sell it as a "Network Image Grabber". Organize your list of features under categories, like Networking features, Editing features and Thumbnailing features, and make the most unique categories the most prominant. As far as hackers stealing your work, consider opening up the source code under the GPL. At least that way you would stand a chance of getting something in return(improved code), for what is already being taken. You could give the code away, and still sell the binaries.
I wouldn't worry too much about pirating. Remember that 99% of those who are using it without paying wouldn't use it if they had to pay.
I think the only way to make money out of shareware is to make it ubiquitous first, then extract the money. Really try aggressively to get it onto people's hard disks. Approaching magazines to put it on cover CDs (ideally reviewing it in the mag as well) seems the obvious way.
Once it's well known, then try to tie it up with registration codes or whatever. People are a lot more likely to pay for shareware if they already believe they can't do without it. If you can't imagine people believing they can't do without your program, give up now. I don't use Windows much, but I've not seen a windows image viewer as good as gqview, so you may be in with a chance.
Of course, you say you want money now, but I don't think that's realistic. It takes time to build market share for any product. You've written a program, but you don't have an employer so you're running your own business. My advice would be to hit the library looking for books on sales and marketing, because all that rambling I've written is really someone who doesn't know what they're talking about, and a lot of people make careers out of knowing how to sell stuff.
Here's possibly one of the best sites on the net about the philosophy of designing shareware. Note that copy protection is not the answer!
http://semicolon.com/ShareSuccess/Shareware1.html
Basically, the author does triage. There are 3 types of people: those who will always pay, those who will never pay (pirates), and those who might pay. He focuses on trying to convince the latter group, and doesn't waste time with copy protection schemes that will just annoy the honest users and not stop the pirates.
What's wrong with copy protection:
http://www.toad.com/gnu/whatswrong.html
Some typical attack methods:
http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/Barracks/3030/co pyfail.htm
http://fravia.anticrack.de/advanced.htm
You might want to read all of these before deciding if your efforts on copy protection are really worth it in the long run.
http://semicolon.com/ShareSuccess/SharewareLinks.h tml
The author of the first link has a page of more links that are also very good.
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
Sorry to say it, but from a quick glance, there doesn't seem to be anything special about your software. Whatever you think is most unique, you should probably emphasize more strongly.
Maybe you should try and hook up with some smaller digicam or scanner manufacturers to bundle your software. I have no idea what kind of revenue ACDSee gets from each unit, but their software seems to be included with a lot of gear. High volume, probably low unit revenue, but definitely good for getting your name out there and you get a few bucks to boot.
According to this you helped enslave a previously Free site to the Dark Side. What's next? Spyware in the cut down 'free beer' version?
2) ???
3) Profit
Finally, the missing step is found to be:
Ask /.!
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
Have you considered shopping your software around to various publishers? While you lose creative control (unless they hired you to continue work on it), it might make you a tidy sum, and free you from having to deal with the minutae of shipping it yourself.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
Personally I'd port it to linux (this should be number 1 on your agenda, regardless of the rest), open source it, and leave up a paypal link on the site. Also make it a bittorrent download link so it mostly scales with the traffic.
But that's just me, if you want to go with the sharewaare model, stop worrying so much about piracy.
Your best off just making a token effort at preventing piracy. Piracy is the same for you as it is for microsoft, as it is for programs like winzip and all other software which can be pirated. It's advertising.
As a small application your biggest problem is that nobody has ever heard of it (you may have cracked that a bit by getting slashdotted, but that's not going to help as much if you don't port it to linux!). Let's say 1000 people pirate your software, and only 10 buy it... the rest pirate it. And lets say each of those 1000 get a couple friends to use it. That's another 2000, and at the same ratio another 20 people purchasing it. And continue this scenerio on. What am I saying? I'm saying maybe 10 people out of a 1000 have enoug concience they'll cough up a 10 spot. I'm pulling those out of arse but that's about as much faith as I have in mankind.
There is another side effect however... the more people who are using the software, the more popular it is... the more it will be mentioned in websites and through word of mouth, those people who do pay aren't going to be giving out pirated versions like the first users. They spawn more paying users.
Look at winzip, winzip has this down to an artform, it's possible to put a key in winzip but the protection is smoke and mirrors... winzip starts counting up the days you've used it after it expires and displays a nag, nothing else. Winzip is probably the mostly widely used piece of shareware there is. It's also I'm sure, the app which has the most paid for copies in the shareware world (in terms of people who've coughed up some cash, not ratio of paid for to pirated which doesn't matter).
Port it to linux, make it so that only those who have paid can have the source (it'll be leaked but refer to shareware argument... winex has been leaked too, but most pay the $5 anyway). Then pray you can get slashdotted again because you should have done these things BEFORE getting mass advertising to OSS loving linux using freaks.
I had a look at the product's website. Something I thought was odd was that I couldn't find out what the hardware and OS requirements were. The page you linked to says (not very prominently) that it runs on Windows, but doesn't say which versions.
The people who are saying that you can't stop piracy are, I'm afraid, right. Your efforts would be better spent trying to get the more honest users to buy the product. In the days when I bought shareware (I mainly run Linux now), something that always encouraged me to buy was having more features in the registered version.
I didn't like nag screens (one when the program started was OK), or arbitrary limits on the number of objects you could process, or the amount of time you could use the program. Being a programmer myself, I had a fair idea of how little code is involved in applying these limits. Asking me to pay you for a program that's identical to the one I already have, except that it has that small amount of code removed, seems rather cheeky.
Just another wannabe fantasy novelist...
If you had checked the market before starting, you would have saved yourself a lot of time ... a latecomer to a crowded market can't be "good", it has to be superb. The pirated copies aren't losing you any sales ... if you had made it absolutely hack-proof, the pirates would be distributing someone else's hacked software.
Cut your losses, consider it programming experience and start hunting up a job.
- A demo copy is available for free, but it has limitations like a reduced number of objects you can model and maybe reduced options for saving and exporting.
- The full copy is locked and requires a user-specific key to unlock it. I don't know how hard it would be to crack, but presumably not very hard for someone who knew what they were doing.
- The program is relatively cheap (<$50?) and is available online. The purchase and key generation are totally automated. You type in your credit card number and click OK, and in a few minutes you get the key emailed to you. This means it's probably just as easy to buy the program as to crack it.
- He spends time on the newsgroups, mailing lists, etc. related to the product and the programs it plus into. People there know he's a real person who understands the product domain and is willing to answer lots of questions, which seems to make them more inclined to pay him.
I think he originally considered publishing the plugins as shareware but decided against it. With shareware there's just not a big incentive for people to pay for the program after they already have a full, working copy.I find it funny that the truth is considered a troll.
RMS does believe this.
If you added a "check for updates" feature that would talk to your server and download new versions, that'd give you an opportunity to try and winnow out cracked copies or duplicate keys.
if I was you, I'll put some sexy blondes into this screenshot
seriously, you should entertaining your potential customer, not scare them off.
Wow, thanks for all the feedback, good and bad. As I write this, there are 87 posts discussing my original post and I have read all of them. Here are the main points that I have gathered (and agree with or at least appreciate).
1. I picked the wrong type of program to attempt to sell.
2. Attempting to create hack-proof software is futile.
3. I should greatly differentiate my feature-set (i.e. more web-spider-type functionality), go open source, create a community, sell the product to an established company, or give up on this program altogether.
I also read some posts that suggested porting to Linux, but then I would just be competing with a different set of apps.
Did you look into getting it bundled with scanners, probably only get a buck or so a sale, but that would be with no piracy.
When you said at stores I don't know what scale you meant, but a scanner vendor is probably no harder then a big store.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
to stay on focus, here's how this goes.
You convince a store to buy X copies at Y dollars apiece, with 1.5 - 1.6Y as the MSRP.
Then, someday, should you decide to discount the software, so that it costs, say Y - Z dollars for the store to buy, every store will expect you to send them Z dollars for each copy that remains unsold. This is called "Price Protection"
Additionally, eventually (like when the product is on the $5 rack and still not selling) the store will expect to return all remaining unsold copies to you for a refund of what they paid for them (minus any "Price Protection" payments made on that item).
Additionally, if you want your software on an end-cap, in the weekly ad, or even turned facing forward instead of sideways in some stores, you will be expected to pay a certain fee.
Incidentally about 20-30% of all software sales, and an even larger percentage for games specifically come from Wal-Mart stores. Not stores like Wal-Mart, but that one particular chain itself.
When dealing with Wal-Mart, they are in charge and make all the rules. They try to be honest and fair, but they are strict. For instance with few exceptions (most notably Blizzard's Diablo II) they will not accept games with a Mature rating.
I mention this here only because most nerds I talk to about these things don't realize how important to the software business this one particular store is, and so most ignore it.
I hope this helps. If not, well, it didn't cost you much to ask, now did it.
Liek the TV repair people programmers are rapidly becoming extinct. They're "elite" programming skills are rapidly becoming "basic" skill taught in grade school (BASIC is taught in my local elementry school) through highschool (Ending in Visual C++, ASM, Perl, VB, and even Fortran). Programmers are now cogs in a wheel. I just finished up transferring 900 programming jobs from the US at on avarage $40 and hour to an India consulting firm resulting in an avarage rate of $8.50 and hour. Our field, IT, MIS, etc is going the way of the TV repair man. Instead of acting like a bunch of stubborn factory workers bitching about their jobs being lost to machines perhaps we need to accept reality and leave the industry. You cannot make money as a 1 man (hell 5 man shops even struggle) programmer.. Computers are more like the Auto industry then anything else. Unless your programming a small niche item your doomed. I suggest a health DOSE OF REALITY.
Honestly who writes a program to sell when there is over 200 competitors out there including some huge competition. I also suggest a college education in business before trying to "wing it." Yet another Computer Science major confusing his degree with a Business Degree....
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Its cumbersome and somewhat crackable but not widely distributed. Plus if it is cracked, you'll have Macrovision to fight the battle for you, and maybe to hold accountable. But it's probably way overpriced.
I think that on one hand, you'll never stop warez guys and other nefarious types from distributing your stuff. I just don't think it's possible; even companies that use dongles to control who can run their code are susceptible to workarounds, and I don't think you want to tinker with product activation. Even products which have successfully used key codes in the past, like Winzip and WSFTP eventually get cracked, and some warez kid tells everyone what key values work.
So what are you going to do? You have to treat warez and other cheats as part of the "cost of doing business", and hope that the majority of your users are honest (I know how bad this sounds, but if you think about it, it's true).
Instead of putting download versions of your code on the website, why not just let people order a CD? Imprint each install file with a unique, long, embedded serial number which doesn't do anything (thus won't be as likely to be detected) and keep track of your users by serial number. When a warez copy shows up, download it, fetch out the serial number, and get the warez guy on the horn. You might not be able to prove anything, but at least you can annoy him. Got a rape whistle? Blow the thing into the phone. Start calling him at all hours of the night. Be annoying. It won't do any good but it'll be satisfying.
And, offer a nicely done CD with the software. Maybe print up a little manual, and ship in a DVD case. Make it nice enough, and people will prefer having the CD to having a pirated download. At least you'll have some sales, right?
But as long as you're letting people download from your site, they'll be tempted to download it from someone else's. I say sell CDs. And, get that rape whistle.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Try here, these guys know both sides of SW cracking and protection. Look around, lots of "stuff that matters". http://www.searchlores.org/cgi-bin/search?query=so ftware+protection&submit=Search%21&max=20&result=n ormal&sort=score
~hylas
On copy protection: The best advice I ever heard was that one should create copy protection to keep the honest people honest. A person who's going to pirate will pirate, and there's nothing you can do about it. A person who is genuinely evaluating your application may not register if you don't give them some sort of little prod.
What I did was to limit my evaluation version to a certain number of entries. It was enough that the user could see and use every single feature in the application, yet since the number of entries was limited it forced a user to make a choice of whether or not to purchase after not too terribly long.
I also had a freeware version available. I didn't hear that it actually helped sales, but it might have.
On distributing in stores: I seriously doubt it'd be worth it. It's a high initial cost for a none too sure return.
It's very hard to distinguish yourself in a large field of competitors. My sales dropped dramatically when others with higher bugdets came into play -- I went from making around $700/month to $30/month when two or three new competitors entered the field. Even new versions haven't increased sales significantly.
It can be worth it, however.
Sean.
This sort of technique is definitely still in use. About two years ago there was a lengthy article on Gamasutra (since moved to the members-only area) from the folks that implemented the copy protection in "Spyro: Year of The Dragon".
Developers know that a game will be cracked soon after it comes out, sometimes within a few days; but also that most of the sales are going to occur right after release as well. So the goal is to hold off and confuse the crackers for at least long enough to get past the sales peak. Among the (many) strategies they used was that if a crack was detected, it wouldn't have any noticable effect until a few levels later. For example one of the pickups you'd need to complete a level might not be there. Delaying the effect made it harder for someone cracking the game to figure out when and where in the code the detection occurred.