Who is shareware developer and do this for living? Can I see your website please ? What kind of shareware games do you develop? What kind of shareware games make a good chance to live from? How big is your company? Do you work alone or with other people? Are the other people volunteers or co-workers? Do you earn enough to live every month from the profits, while paying all the costs of your staff, hard/software, office space etc.? How long are you in this shareware business and from when became the serious with profits you can live from? How did you market your shareware? By retail publishers/distributors on there big cdrom compilations, with your demo(s) on it. With a link to your website, about how to order the full version. Or in the demo a print orderform? Through your website with online orderform? You promote your website and shareware through all the importants search engines, like AltaVista, Google, etc. Software Portals (games section)where you place a link of your company and a desription of your shareware. And through review sites like Tucows, etc. Also you contact all the sales internet distributors like Digibuy etc. They sell your game on there site and do also the order processing etc. In case you can''t handle the order proccesing, do you link your order page to one of these internet distributors like Digibuy for instance? When you don''t got a automated credit card system on your own company site? And perhaps also not a fax for fax orders and PO Box for mail orders? Only you handle the email orders, based on the email order form on your site? What kind of general costs do you have? Like webhosting, etc? Do you use clipart graphics and sounds? Or do you hire a freelancer or perhaps if you got luck a volunteer? How did you find your freelancer or volunteer? Or do you design the graphigs /audio your self? How long in months did it take to complete your succesfull shareware project? Can you give a brief advice to all of us who want to the same you did? Thank you very much for your time and help, I appreciate it!

...far out there must be like a hundred questions there... calm down mate...

This are interesting questions however

I don''t count hundred, but about 23 questions. And the most questions are detailed based and the answers can be worth it.

I hope there are people who do this for living and give a reply.

You may want to look at www.dexterity.com

The guy who started that whole lot has a wide variety of articles on similar topics to the questions you raise. You may also want to search these forums on gamedev for ''Steve Pavlina'' or ''Dexterity'' as he may have posted useful articles/posts here.



regards,

GeniX

www.cryo-genix.net

Look at Niels Bauer's games here. The Smugglers series is real fun. And as far as I know, he's making a living of it

Steve Pavlina's Dexterity and DavidRM's SamuGames are good examples too.

I'll be making a try by myself soon, too


--DK
--H. Hernán Moraldo
http://www.hhm.com.ar/
Sign up to the HHM's developers' newsletter.

[edited by - doctork on March 19, 2002 7:36:12 AM]