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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mychal" data-source="post: 2481877" data-attributes="member: 35253">In the early 90's I wrote a software game and distributed it as shareware. I had 100's of thousands of downloads that i kenw of... I had 200 people pay for the software. The game was good enough to be published twice, once in Japan and once stateside. So I have some experence about shareware as a business model.  Pirates took my shareware game and they would bundle it with other shareware software and sell the cd's. People who paid for the cd would think...'I own the software, cuz I already paid for it.' I as the shareware artist got squat..... Shareware is NOT a new idea, it has been around for decades and we still have software pirates of shareware products. Shareware doesn't stop pirates, not in the least bit. If you sell a product for $15 , but also offer it as shareware.. pay what you want. you will almost never get the $15 retail price. Who would pay full price when you told them they don't have to. You will lose income but have more customers. More income is usually better a better choice for a business. You will have people who will also think... 'Shareware = freeware' Shareware by it's nature IS free, and the owner is asking you to pay for it, but not requiring you to. Rats won't pay a dime for it. So your honest customers will pay you less, and rats won't pay you anything for it.... loss of income. Take the $15 example... if I had 100 customers who paid me $15 i'd make $1500 simple. If it was shareware and pay what you wanted.. how much would you make... I'll pull a number out of my butt and say the avg. shareware fee I get is $7.50. I'd need to double my sales just to break even. Denny at WorldWorkGames estimates that he loses 60% of his possiable revenue to rats. So he would need to get almost 100% of the rats to pay for his product and maybe he'll increase revenue. Not going to happen. Shareware won't solve the pirate problem or generate increased income. PERIOD.</blockquote>

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