Quote:
people now expect to get stuff for free

Yeah, I know. As I was saying earlier (either here or another post), this is a pretty big problem. It's very easy to get anything you want and never even think to pay for it.

"The good ol' days" are long gone, this is true. If you compare a typical home grown game to a commercial production, it's just devastating. Commercial ventures absolutely obliterate small time and indie developers efforts. And that is the level of game people would be willing to pay for, which is a problem for joe-schmoe working out of his "garage."

Back in the day, the playing field was a little closer. Now it's worlds apart, I guess.

So the problem is finding a market niche, I guess. You're right, no one will pay for pacman, but they might give a little to something they can play with, something they've never quite got to play with before, and something that stays fun for more than a few days...

Something that doesn't reek of "payme money plz plz pay me" The most recent shareware games I've played are such scams and money grubbing "demoware." Repulsive ;)

That's a pretty good idea. Like several people have said, if it was simple enough I'd definitely pay.

I wonder if this wouldn't work just as well as making it shareware since, as pointed out in the thread I started that you refer to, shareware probably doesn't work very well anymore. It's just too easy to get the program for free anyway nowadays, so this is probably a better solution.

Wanna hear something scary? Some people have had donation request for some of my games, which I denied because I'm using copywritted materials.

The truth, is that it doesn't really matter how you get paid, it's how well you advertise.

In all honesty, most likely not, at least unless I was totally blown away by its quality. I like to think that I'd be more generous than your average pirate sort, but I still haven't gotten around to paying for GDNet+ yet either (hopefully soon!) However, I'd also like to point out that this is probably a biased place to ask. It seems to me that the results you see in a development community won't reliably coincide with the results across the gamer community.

In one year, we made a little over 2K USD from donations (plus another maybe 2K from various services). If it's a good product, some will donate.
And, in turn, I did donate 25 USD for SDL (eventually I will donate more).

I've donated to a few projects myself, so yes it can work.

I think most people are a billion times more likely to donate toward a game than anything else, but even then they still aren't likely to donate.

Quote:Original post by catch
Folks, someone was asking about the profitability of shareware (or rather things he could make shareware in hope of making money).. And it brought up a question I'd like your answers/insights/opinions on.

What about donation-ware? Now listen for a second..

If someone had made something, let's say a game (being gamedev.net and all), and you downloaded and played it. All the author was asking was this.

Pay whatever you think it's worth. If it's worth nothing, don't pay for it. If it's worth a dollar, pay a dollar, if it's worth 10 bucks, pay 10 bucks, etc.

Do you think people would pay anything, ever? Would you? Now be really honest with me. If the game was really good and you really enjoyed it, would you take the time and money to support the author, or just be happy you're not obligated to pay a cent?

Honesty, please!

Thanks,
Catch

I can't imagine ever paying for it. Honestly. I wish it would work that way, but you just don't find the incentive to even bother if you already have the full version. It's not necessarily that I can't afford a few bucks, it's more that i'm just lazy, and don't have to.

slap. *bump*