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by Andrew Welch

On CDs and Shareware

We release a fully functional demo of the game (the aforementioned companies refer to this demo as the "shareware" version of the game, which isn't entirely accurate), and if people decide that they'd like to buy the full game based on the demo, we'd love to have them do so. We think Ferazel's Wand is a great game that will sell itself in short order.

Why are we not releasing Ferazel's Wand as a strictly shareware title? For one thing, we haven't released a strictly shareware product in years; technically, all of our software can be classified as "crippleware". That is, part of the product doesn't function until it has been paid for.

We made that move several years ago based on our own research, and based on the research others had done. One study is actually quite interesting: a few years ago, a PC shareware company decided to do a little experiment. They issued a product that when first run, would randomly roll the dice to decide if it would be a shareware product or a crippleware product for that user.

Other than the fact that for 50% of the people who downloaded it, features would be disabled until they registered (paid for) the product, the product was *identical* for everyone. When people did pay for the product (either to eliminate the shareware notices in the case of the shareware variant, or to unlock features in the game in the case of the crippleware variant), a special code was included with their payment that indicated whether they'd paid for the shareware version of the crippleware version.

Thus, the company had a way to track exactly how effective a shareware product was versus the same exact crippleware product. They had a way to determine whether the good will generated by the shareware approach was more effective than "forcing" people to pay for crippleware.

What they found was interesting: more than TEN TIMES the number of people who paid for the shareware version paid for the crippleware version. That is, more than 90% of the sales of the product came from crippled features. You make more money if you market your products as crippleware.

So we decided to give this route a shot. Are we just money grubbing bastards? Absolutely not; if Ambrosia generates more revenue, we have more revenue to roll back into the development of our products. We want to move onwards and upwards. If you look at what we've produced over the years, I think it's quite clear that the quality and production value is absolutely on the rise.

So that brings us to the present. For Ferazel, we've decided to put it on a CD for two primary reasons:

1) The game is huge. It's way over 100mb in size (uncompressed), and so it really isn't practical for us to offer it for download. Consider that we've sold over 4,000 Ambrosia CDs in 1999 (which contain *exactly* what we have available online, just in convenient CD form), and I think it's clear that CDs still have their use, even in the Internet age.

2) Ferazel is an extremely high quality game, and we want to sell a ton of copies of it. We think making it available on CD will actually improve sales, and open up some co-marketing opportunities that otherwise wouldn't be possible. All of us (Ben above and beyond everyone else) have poured quite a bit of blood, sweat, and tears into the project -- we want to see it succeed.

Some people don't like change, and react to it negatively, regardless of whether the change is actually for the better or not. There isn't much I can say to people who just want everything to always stay the same, except that we're still trying to do what we've always done: produce quality products and sell them for fair prices.

We're just trying to grow, and bring our company to the next level, and if we succeed, everyone will benefit. Judge for yourself when Ferazel is released; I don't think you will be disappointed.

Andrew Welch
Thaumaturgist
Ambrosia Software, Inc.

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