begin quoting Druppy as of Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 11:55:45AM -0700: > > On Jun 12, 2008, at 10:34 AM, Bob La Quey wrote: > >Selling software = bad business. > >Selling services enabled by software = good business. > > > > I'm curious how this would break down in the B2C world as opposed to > the B2B world. Business love service contracts but consumers do not.
Some comsumers/users do, some don't, some are ambivalent. > So let's say I make an awesome game and I want to see it, how does > that work with your model? Do I sell a service contract to my end > user, in case the game breaks? For online games you can obviously > charge for server usage, but what about single player games? You can charge for server usage, or you can sell the product and provide free server usage. The problem comes when you try to to both: sell the game *and* charge for server access (pisses people off) or give away the game *and* server access (no revenue stream). Blizzard has done both -- Diablo I and II provided pay-for-game and free servers; WoW is a free-as-in-beer game and a for-pay server. Some of my favorite games are open source. For example, xpilot is open, run on open servers, with open clients... but there's not really a way to make money at it, except perhaps for advertising. > How does > a company recoop R&D investments? Let say we spend $3million and 5 > years making a game and release it as open source. What is stopping a > bunch of server farms from running our stuff for free without ever > having spent a dime on R&D and thus being able to sell the service for > much less. Software should be free! You should just spend that money out of the goodness of your heart! > Maybe I am missing something though. Sony or Nintendo could give away games for free and use 'em to sell consoles; the problem is that eventually everone will have a console, and then the market is dead. A new console is required to jump-start the whole process over again. Of course, charging for games *and* consoles *and* services... that's a business's wet dream, and a customer's nightmare. -- Happy middle grounds are hard to find, and often despised by all sides. Stewart Stremler -- KPLUG-List@kernel-panic.org http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
