Shareware

My experience with shareware development is limited but...

I noticed when toying around with Install Shield that it looked particularly easy to create installers that give your program a time limit on its use. You may want to look into that for creating trial demos.

Also, Steve Pavlina wrote many articles about how to succeed as a shareware developer. Check them out and best of luck with your shareware endeavours..

I've been toying with the idea of going commercial via shareware in the murky depths of the future, too. However I also lack a decent understanding of business strategies, so I'm trying to learn about the best way to market things as well.

I'm not sure whether the time limited approach is best for games, as personally that tends to annoy me. Even after 30 days, if someone is playing your game that will still work as advertising for your group. From what I remember from when I used to play heaps of shareware games back in the early-to-mid nineties, most games released a limited version as shareware, with additional content for the commercial version. Usually they would release Episode 1 as the shareware game with no limitations in gameplay (which provided a quite decent amount of game), and then have two to five more episodes in the commercial version with more enemies, weapons or what-have-you in the commercial version. This was succesful for companies like id and Epic Megagames, which are now massive.

The balance is to release enough game with your shareware version to get the audience hooked on how wonderful your game is, but have enough extra goodies in the full version for them to pay for it.

However, I can't really offer any advice on the distrubition side of things, as that's beyond my knowledge as of yet. Best of luck!

Well, if your going into business, good luck! I think that there is a utility that you just select your file, and input the number of days for its use. After that amount of days, your program just locks down. My dad used it for programs he wrote, and he said that he used it a couple years back for some software he wrote. It was almost impossible to break the lock on it too. I'd say that if you are going into business, you might as well buy a utility like that.

Spiderweb Software has some good Shareware advice.

Steve Pavlina at Dexterity Software also has some good advice here.

Personally I think the term shareware has some somewhat negative connotations, you might want to describe yourself differently - something like independent software developer with an online distribution model. The choice is up to you though,