This is a marketing and technical issue and financial issue for both dialup and DSL customers. I own a small ISP so I can see the problems from both sides.
Many potential customers ask for umlimited service. If the service doesn't say that it is unlimited the customer goes elsewhere.
Since many companies advertise unlimited service (even when it isn't) this forces other companies to advertise unlimited service or be destroyed by competition.
Some companies say they are unlimited, others say "virtually unlimited" but the truth is that the customer doesn't want a limit even though most customers never hit any acceptable limits.
The other side is technical and financial. Each dialup customer uses a dialup line when connected. Do ISPs have a dialup line for each customer? No, the currnt ratio is about 5 to 6 customers per line. Do the math. If everyone has unlimited access and used it, then 80% of the customers dialing would get busy signals and the ISP would die.
For DSL it isn't quite the same. All the DSL customers have 1.5/256, but how much bandwidth to the internet does the ISP have? DSL costs between $40 and $60 for most people. All that bandwidth travels across an ATM circuit. A 1.5 ATM circuit costs an ISP like mine about $800 per month. A 1.5 to the internet costs an ISP like mine $1200 to $2000 per month.
Once again, do the math. In order to make money selling DSL an ISP needs to put at least 40 DSL customers with 1.5/256 on the same T1 (the same 1.5 of bandwidth). And 80 is a more common number.
If every one of those customers expects to get 1.5/256 24 hours a day, 7 days a week they are dreaming. They have to share.
But since ISPs have to make customers want their service, they have to advertise unlimited service. The truth is that even if the ISP advertises unlimited service, it simply can't be unless the ISP has only 1 DSL customer per ATM and per T1 to the internet and loses money every month.
True, but there is still overhead. If you have 2 developers and a content person and you want to pay them for a year you are looking at 150k minimum.
While small in the grand scheme of things, that means that when you release your first title at the end of that year you need to make twice that in the first year just to break even.
300k. If you sell something cool on your website and make $20 on each copy you simply need to sell 15,000 copies. That is 40 or more orders a day for a year. Exactly. It isn't simple. It is hard.
It'd be far easier if the game were on the store shelves. And being on the shelves is harder and/or costs a very large amount of money. We had a game which got great reviews in 1997 and 1998 (Gridz) and it sold well. Even with 4 and 5 star reviews we could not get shelf space.
We are happy with how well Gridz (www.gridz.com) has done over the years (and it is still selling), but if it had gotten shelf space we think we'd have sold 10 times as many copies.
I suppose it would have sold more if there was a windows version, but then I'd have to write windows code...and that doesn't sound fun. And fun is why I do this.
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This is a marketing and technical issue and financial issue for both dialup and DSL customers. I own a small ISP so I can see the problems from both sides.
Many potential customers ask for umlimited service. If the service doesn't say that it is unlimited the customer goes elsewhere.
Since many companies advertise unlimited service (even when it isn't) this forces other companies to advertise unlimited service or be destroyed by competition.
Some companies say they are unlimited, others say "virtually unlimited" but the truth is that the customer doesn't want a limit even though most customers never hit any acceptable limits.
The other side is technical and financial. Each dialup customer uses a dialup line when connected. Do ISPs have a dialup line for each customer? No, the currnt ratio is about 5 to 6 customers per line. Do the math. If everyone has unlimited access and used it, then 80% of the customers dialing would get busy signals and the ISP would die.
For DSL it isn't quite the same. All the DSL customers have 1.5/256, but how much bandwidth to the internet does the ISP have? DSL costs between $40 and $60 for most people. All that bandwidth travels across an ATM circuit. A 1.5 ATM circuit costs an ISP like mine about $800 per month. A 1.5 to the internet costs an ISP like mine $1200 to $2000 per month.
Once again, do the math. In order to make money selling DSL an ISP needs to put at least 40 DSL customers with 1.5/256 on the same T1 (the same 1.5 of bandwidth). And 80 is a more common number.
If every one of those customers expects to get 1.5/256 24 hours a day, 7 days a week they are dreaming. They have to share.
But since ISPs have to make customers want their service, they have to advertise unlimited service. The truth is that even if the ISP advertises unlimited service, it simply can't be unless the ISP has only 1 DSL customer per ATM and per T1 to the internet and loses money every month.
And that ISP won't be around for very long.
True, but there is still overhead. If you have 2 developers and a content person and you want to pay them for a year you are looking at 150k minimum.
While small in the grand scheme of things, that means that when you release your first title at the end of that year you need to make twice that in the first year just to break even.
300k. If you sell something cool on your website and make $20 on each copy you simply need to sell 15,000 copies. That is 40 or more orders a day for a year. Exactly. It isn't simple. It is hard.
It'd be far easier if the game were on the store shelves. And being on the shelves is harder and/or costs a very large amount of money. We had a game which got great reviews in 1997 and 1998 (Gridz) and it sold well. Even with 4 and 5 star reviews we could not get shelf space.
We are happy with how well Gridz (www.gridz.com) has done over the years (and it is still selling), but if it had gotten shelf space we think we'd have sold 10 times as many copies.
I suppose it would have sold more if there was a windows version, but then I'd have to write windows code...and that doesn't sound fun. And fun is why I do this.