Does anyone have any shareware success stories, where they''ve actually gotten paid for a game released shareware? If so, I would be interested to read the particulars.

At the moment I am selling three games a day. But I think this is an exception in the shareware market. You can make money, but you need the right product at the right time to the right people.

What kind of limitations you used in the shareware versions to make people buy the full versions? I used allowing to play only for 10 minutes. And I sold only 1 copy that was bought by someone with the credit card number of someone else.

jester, what sort of game is it? do you have a link? where are most of your sales coming from? is it age specific? how did you limit the shareware version?
your case is a good one - 3 games a day is mighty fine! good work!

Jester, that is exactly the kind of story I am looking for. Can you post some of the details, such as the location of the program, how long it took you to write, and where I can find it?

Congrats on selling three a day. That''s amazing.

Our first online game, Paintball NET, went online in 1996, and was taken offline in 2000.

Our original goals for the game, since it was our first game, were just to have it survive about 6 months and to make us about $1000 total, enough to cover some of the hard development costs.

By the time it went offline on Labor Day 2000, Paintball NET had been online over 4 years, and had generated just over $45,000 US in revenue.

We took PBN offline for a couple of reasons. Primarily, customer support had become too expensive. The money the game was making, versus the cost of time and resources to keep it running, had tipped out of balance. In a sense, the game was a victim of its own success.

Despite what the players seemed to think, Paintball NET didn''t make us rich, but it do incredibly well for its simple beginnings, and it taught us *huge* amounts of what is necessary for designing, running, and maintaining an online game.


DavidRM
Samu Games

quote: Original post by zenic

jester, what sort of game is it? do you have a link? where are most of your sales coming from? is it age specific? how did you limit the shareware version?
your case is a good one - 3 games a day is mighty fine! good work!

It looks like it''s here:
http://www.nbsd.de/Smugglers/indexE.html




A CRPG in development...

Need help? Well, go FAQ yourself.

Ahh! At last Nazrix! And I thought nobody remembered me here...

No honestly I had too much work yesterday to answer.

border="0" src="http://www.nbsd.de/Smugglers/images/banner.gif" width="468" height="60">

It has a 32 turns limitation and it took me about a month to two months to write. Most of my sales are coming from good ol'' USA. For the rest of the questions check it out and...buy it.

Jester, you should put your site into your tag...free advertising every time you post

That's a great amount of sales for a few months of work...very inspiring...


A CRPG in development...

Need help? Well, go FAQ yourself.


Edited by - Nazrix on May 11, 2001 5:03:54 PM

You planning to start acting as a publisher sometime, Jester?