Getting Rich, Slowly, From Shareware
“Selling shareware games has been very, very good to me. And I’m certainly not the only one,” Thomas Warfield wrote in a March post on his blog. “There are lots of other people who have been quite successful selling shareware games. Steve Pavlina at Dexterity is well known in the indie game world. DreamQuest Software and Silver Creek do quite well (both of them) in the niche of multiplayer card games. Kyodai Mahjongg clearly sells very well.”How well? It’s hard to tell. Successful shareware game designers are a cagy lot. The Kyodai site claims “9,590,367 visitors here since April 2, 1997.” Warfield’s own game Pretty Good Solitaire has been the top-selling solitaire game for ten years (the current version offers 611 variants) and sells more strongly each year. Warfield is certainly well into his second million bucks – not that he’ll say so: “[S]hareware is a funny business. That is, since people can try your product before they buy it, it’s generally not a wise policy to act like some kind of Donald Trump. Shareware authors, as a rule, don’t generally toot their own horns. (There is one guy I know who put up a picture of his Mercedes on his web site – not really a great way to get sales, in my opinion. But his company does make millions every year).”
Darius Young on January 30th, 2006 8:46 pm
That is the great thing about casual game downloads. The customer can actually play the game before making the decision to purchase it. It’s a wonderful thing!
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