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MacHeist "Week of Mac Developer" Causes Schism
ernesto99 writes "MacHeist began selling a software bundle of ten highly sought-after OS X applications last week with the stated goal of raising the profile of Mac shareware developers. 25% of the money brought in goes to charity. The bundle sale will go down as possibly the biggest success in Mac shareware history, as total revenues are approaching $650,000 after only six days. But some observers, including Daring Fireball's John Gruber, have called into question the ethics of MacHeist. MacHeist advertises itself as 'The Week of the Independent Mac Developer,' yet the MacHeist organizers stand to make vastly outsized gains relative to the very developers they have championed. Gruber calculates that MacHeist will record double, if not triple, the profits of all ten participating developers combined. (In fact the promotion has done so well that the promoter-to-developers profit ratio now stands at about four to one.) In an interview, Delicious Library developer Wil Shipley defends his involvement in MacHeist, saying that the publicity and reach of MacHeist has already paid him dividends. The whole affair has created a heated dialogue, resulting in a direct clash among some of the biggest names in the Mac community."
I normally do not spend money on Mac shareware, but MacHeist offers one price for a bunch of apps which makes it worth it, because the odds that I'll end up using frequently one or more of them is high.
On the other hand, I would not have bothered to download and try each of these sharewares individually, because I hate using crippleware. I don't think crippleware (unpaid for shareware) really gives me a good idea whether I'll use it or not. In fact, normally I won't use crippleware because it is annoying.
I bought the bundle and I'm very glad. It was clearly worth it for me.
Like me, I suspect most people who bought the MacHeist bundle would not have bought the software on normal terms. I think that the developers should be glad, since it brings them more revenue without any expense on their part.
The number listed on Macheist.com is the total raised for charity, not the total sold. To get that you need to multiply by 4.
Right now it's at $160,062. That comes out to $640,248 of shareware sold at greatly discounted prices. That's a LOT of sales.
I think the largest part of the gain for the participating developers isn't actually the money they'll make through the bundle selling well. It's going to be more through the fact that when you get over ten thousand additional users of your program, some percent of them will click the buy button when a "Version 3.0 is now available. Would you like to upgrade?" pops up a few months down the line. They also stand to gain more sales at regular price due to the "wow factor" when people who bought the bundle show off the beautiful programs like Delicious Library to their friends. Macheist is centered around the power user demographic, and there are a lot of average people out there who will want this stuff.
...what he perceived the financial situation of the MacHeist promotion to be, even though he admitted multiple times in the article that he didn't have any first-hand knowledge of how the thing was actually structured.
Has anyone actually claimed that it was structured in a more equitable way?
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
While the MacHeist promoters have gone out of their way to actually _move copies of OS X shareware_ and move them swiftly, Gruber is being nothing but a negativist naysayer, and he's among the MacOS advocates that make me ashamed to be a Mac user every time he opens his mouth. Worst of all, at a fundamental level, he's engaging in this behavior in order to drive up hits to his blog, and drive up his profile in the community. It's all about increasing his personal revenue at the expense of others. He's nothing more than a John Dvorak-style rabblerouser for the iCult. I miss the days when NeXTStep was a largely disused platform, because back then, you could have an intelligent conversation with a core-level advocate. Now the quality of discussion is just 2 or 3 shades of gray different from ESR rambling about guns. The bottom line: Business is business. The MacHeist bundle is good business. The bundled price is going to encourage people who've never dropped a dollar on shareware ever at any point to drop dollars. One dollar, or even two, recovered for a shareware author is significant versus the zero that often gets spent on their software, often by scofflaw-like long-time piratical users. The bundle also achieves exposure for some of these products that would've been unattainable otherwise. Would I, or anyone I know, ever have spent money on a Pangea game? Nope. Never. iClip? Maybe.. I know others that like it.. but I shy away from user interface altering things like that. For FotoMagico? At $79 normally priced? I would've thought them crazy. Now that I have these things from the bundle? Hooray! Quite cool software. I'm sold on the benefits. I'll be an upgrade customer for at least some of them. The same goes for at least a few other bundle tools. Getting a license for TextMate and Delicious Library on the cheap is an amazing deal.. and now that I'm invested, however tinily at the outset, each of those developers has potentially made a long-term sale that will result in many times the revenue lost on the individual copies in upgrade revenue. Newsfire's author was particularly cognizant of this issue.. the MacHeist license doesn't come with lifetime upgrades.. but for a tiny figure of 10 dollars more, it's an option right out of the gate. Instant revenue turnover. It's a good, good thing. I honestly wish that I -had- subscribed to Gruber's blog in the past, so I could have the pleasure of saying to him: "No, John. No holy wars. No whining. Sit down, shut up, and give me my money back."
Problem is, what if your application is made well enough, that you hardly ever get any support requests? Yes, it happens - especially when the application comes with well made and thurough documentation.
Then it still costs a fortune to make, but we're not supposed to charge for that.
Still costs next to nothing to make copies of (disregarding the cost and time of burning to a media or traffic for downloads)
Still costs next to nothing to support.
Where are we supposed to make money?
If our application costs $100,000 to develop, implement and document, and we expect 10,000 users, and expect maybe one percent of our users requirering our support, are we supposed to charge them $1,000 for support, just to break even? Or should we be allowed to charge $20 per copy/licence to make some money?
Charging for support can be profitable I suppose, but I believe it also breeds an artificial need for bad documentation and buggy software. After all, if the documentation is perfect and the software hardly in need of support, where are you supposed to make your money?
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
That doesn't make it newsworthy.
For a developer who doesn't pull in $5000 on average over the time period their software will be offered in the bundle... this is a good deal. They get exposure, they get money. If you're pulling in 5k on your own, then there's no benefit for you, and obviously, no reason to participate. So don't.
"We don't entirely know yet." is not the answer to the "Who loses?" question. Any rational intelligent developer would have compared their average earnings for whatever period their software would be bundled, to the flat fee offered by macheist.
-If your average earnings are lower, this is a good deal.
-If your average earnings are equal, but you think you stand to benefit from the exposure, this is a good deal.
-If your average earnings are higher, but the exposure you stand to gain outweighs the projected loss in profits, this is a good deal
The only developer who 'loses' is the one everyone has heard of, who takes a drastic cut in profits by bundling their software. And even then, you can't cry about it because you don't know what their motives were.
Whats funny is that the fact that these two morons Gus/FlamingFireballMan have increased the value of macheists offer by getting this shit posted all over the place. I would never have even seen this if it wasn't for them. The two of them should cry each other to sleep at night. I read their posts and all I see is a couple of bitter noobs who got left out and/or thought their work was worth more than they were offered for it.
They probably got paid for their blog posts.
How many of you who say there isn't a problem here, but speak out against the RIAA when it comes to music? I don't see any difference.
This is WHY we have record companies that pay for big marketing and why artist perfectly capable of putting their own stuff on iTunes still want to be part of a "label". I don't have a new mac yet, but I'm almost curious to buy this while it lasts! I've thought the small companies should band together like this for a while. After all, the one turn-off of the Mac shareware scene for me is that there are so many little companies that want $39.95 for little utility apps... not that I'd mind paying, but tracking all those little charges from year-to-year and version-to-version would be a real PITA over time! In the online world it would make sense for a website to act as "publisher" and collect a bundle up for a better price, and give a cut to the developers. After all, a $39.95 app probably costs most developers $10 to $15 just to invoice and bill you.. even online.. after credit card fees and labor charges to have somebody monitor it. If they drop the cost in the bundle, and let somebody else pick up the cost of invoicing they probably end up ahead. Perhaps the MacHeist people accidentally stumbled upon a better way to get developers PAID for their work!!!
What does "equitable" mean?
Perhaps an arrangement where MacHeist didn't make 10 times as much as any of the developers.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that this situation is about a group of developers that sold resale rights for a fixed sum and then some had seller's remorse after they saw how much product the reseller moved. No piracy there. That isn't much different than a former employer of mine selling their vertical application I helped develop for tens of millions of dollars per license and while paying us grunts in the trenches tens of thousands.