Try-before-you-buy may have been around for 20+ years, but it’s on its way out. In an effort to maximize returns, it has gotten a lot more restrictive over time. What were once given away as full-featured programs with nag screens are now often time and content limited, and even those limitations have become more strict over time, dropping from 30-day trials to hour demos, or less. The reason? It’s inefficient.

A “good seller” in the industry profits from only 1% of their downloaders, and the majority of games don’t make even half that. Here’s a more appropriate way to look at it: For even the best selling titles, 99% of the people aren’t buying. This is 99% that may not want to shill out $20, but may be willing to watch a short ad or even pay $0.25 per play. By honing in on these non-payers, a significant amount of income can be gleaned from even a poorly selling game. Combine strategies to maximize both types of players and you’ve opened a door of opportunity.

To limit your strategy to such a poorly performing facet of what could be a much larger pie is just silly. On the other hand, we don’t have much choice at this point. The infrastructure for micro-payments is non-existant for the indie, and advertising solutions nearly so. Once the ball gets rolling, we’ll see a lot of opportunities open up - opportunities far beyond the familiar try & buy model. It’ll just take a big player to open the door for us.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.