I was wondering how much money people make from shareware and freeware(in the form of donations)games. Do any of you make enough money to live off of? [edited by - geniusjoe on September 14, 2002 12:27:50 PM]

Yes. Good example is www.dexterity.com


[edited by - FenixDown on September 14, 2002 12:53:24 PM]

Another example Spiderweb Software



[edited by - Ironside on September 14, 2002 1:17:11 PM]

Ironside, is it worth to port shareware games to mac?
What about the sales percentage?

Firstly, I am not the proginator of Spiderweb software. My little "Spare time" company is Rainfall Studios. However from what i've heard Jeff Vougel say (he's the head guy at Spiderweb) it makes alot of sense to port to the MAC for the following reasons.

1. You already have the game, if you've deisgned your code right you just have to re-implement some of the rendering and window classes and you've opened up a whole new market. Porting an exsisting game to another platform is much easier then writing a new game for that platform. It's a good investment of 3-4 months that could pay off in $1000's of dollars.

2. The mac game market is somewhat stagnent. There's a lot of mac users out there who haven't been innundated with games of every genera like us PC users have. So you have a better chance of selling them the full version of your game then you would a PC user.

I may not have repeated jeff's wrods verbatum but you can head on over to his site, he's got a lot of interviews posted where you can hear it from the horses mouth.

Edit:
ahh now I can quote him..

quote: Jeff Vogel said: If you really want to make some money at the shareware biz, porting your software to another platform is a great way to increase (even double!) your income.

[edited by - ironside on September 15, 2002 2:54:36 AM]

Thanks a lot for the info.