Why would we have app stores when we have Internet, why would we go for that? (Google is doing a web store, even Asus is doing one for netbooks).
How Apogee Software, Epic Megagames and ID could make at the peak of the shareware business, 100,000$ a month by selling and sending floppy discs to much less gamers that we have today?
Why would we go to support one, probably not compatible with nothing in 6 years platform when we have around 200 million computers sold each year around the world?
It wasn’t the finest way to market it but anyway, shareware made ID Software a huge independent success.
According to GameSetWatch, Jason Rohrer made 43 000$ in less than a month with his last game with crazy ideas stuffed in it, Sleep Is Death sold 14$ the two copies. No DRM No middle-person Cross-platform Open Source. Jason gets 100% of this money.
I want the Shareware back. I want medium sized games, not 40 hours or 5 minutes ones, nor 1 minute Flash loading game or 2.5 Gb to download/uncompress before hitting Start. I want my money to go entirely into the pockets of the developers (AAA games? At best 10% cut for the developer, almost as shitty as music deals) because I love their game. Because I know they’re hard to do and that they deserve it.
I want developers to trust me and that even if their games are pirated, they’re so good that it’s not that much a problem (ID during the 90s PopCap during the 00s). I want them to go for it like PopCap did:
K: One thing that certainly stands out now is that pretty much all of our early games that went on to be big hits — I can clearly remember every one of them having somebody who had stood up before and said, "There’s no way this thing is gonna sell."
I remember someone saying that about Bookworm because they said, "You know, word games just don’t sell. They never sell." I remember someone saying that about Zuma because they said, "This thing’s like an action arcade game. That’s not gonna sell."
And I remember someone saying that about Bejeweled; they said, "There’s no skill here! That’s not even a game. It’s not gonna sell." And yeah, I think Plants vs. Zombies, someone said something to that effect: "This is too weird; it’s too hardcore."
BF: "It’s like a strategy game."
JK: Yeah. So if someone says it’s not gonna sell, that’s probably a good sign.
I want game developers all over the intertubes, I don’t need a GateKeeper, even when they do a good job. I have friends and social medias, they share and I’ll go to any .com or whatever dot something is providing a good experience, some good games to download or stream. And I’ll be way to proud to share it too. We even have QR Code (licence free) to make apps installation a breeze on mobile platform. Why the hell would we want to share our hard-earned revenue and being treated like lemmings?
This console generation has been a disaster (it was absolutely planned) in a lot of ways. I urge developers to start their business and aim to computers which are making them free, while making money. Yeah, not that much consoles or phones if you want to be more than a one-hit-wonder-with-five-iteration-of-it before being sold to a big publisher and die in its hands (IW anyone?).
It happened, it has existed. I don’t see why it couldn’t be possible for the next decade. Or if it can’t be done this way, I’d like to know why…