Re: Business models

["Mark Collins" <me@thisisnurgle.org.uk>]

> Then there is:
>
>   * Sell in-game advertising (an unexploited concept to date).

I used to work at Silicon Dreams developing soccer games. You think thoise
billboards are put there for effect?

>   * Shareware (give the stuff away - plead with people to send you $$$)

I'm not a big fan of shareware (I don't trust people).

>   * Crippleware (give away a crippled version - demand money for the
>     useful version).

I'm not a bastard. (usually)

>   * For networked games, give away the game and charge per-hour for time
>     on the server.

At Silicon dreams, we were developing a micropayment based multiplayer
game...

>   * Sell it to the distributors like RedHat and SuSE as a way to up the
>     sales of their distro's.

Asking a friend at Netcraft to put me into contact with RedHat for that very
reason...

>   * Give away the game, sell the cuddly toys and T-shirts.

Cute things suck.

>   * Give away the game - get it on all the major Linux distro's, then
>     sell the expansion packs once everyone is hooked.

I tend to think the other way round. If you give the expansion packs away
for free, it adds infinite longetivity to a title, which means people may be
willing to part with their hard earned cash for the core program.

>   * Get a real job to pay the mortgage - do the game for fun and give it
>     away.

No fun.

>   * Give the game away for free - then after 3 hours play have it encrypt
>     every file on the hard drive - demand $1000 to provide the decryption
>     key!  (OK - this may not be such a good idea)

Illegal in the UK.

>   * Find a hardware vendor who needs a kick-ass demo to show off his new
>     Linux product...charge him for your services.

Could do....

>   * Write a cross-platform game - sell it to OS-X, BeOS, Windoze, BSD
>     and Solaris users - give it away to us *nice* Linux people!

When I said I wasn't a bastard, I lied.

> Personally, I think the only solution to the 'commercial games under
> Linux' thing is to write in a cross-platform way and do a simultaneous
> release for (at least) Windoze and Linux versions.  There are really
> no technological obstacles to doing that - providing you choose portable
> graphics and sound libraries at the outset.  (OpenGL/OpenAL/SDL, etc)

Or have a good technical design for the progrom (I break the core componants
(audio, visual, input, AI, logic, frontend etc etc) into seperate,
well-defined classes so they can be recoded without breaking stuff. Porting
is a piece of piss, and it means I have fewer levels of abstraction).

Regarding the simultanieous release, that's not really a distrobution model,
is it?

Nurgle


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: linuxgames-unsubscribe@sunsite.dk
For additional commands, e-mail: linuxgames-help@sunsite.dk