For the most part I can’t stand baseball. I can have fun going with my kids or friends to an occasional baseball game, but I can’t imagine a bigger waste of time than watching a non-playoff baseball game on television. On the other hand, like a lot of folks I’m fascinated with baseball statistics and baseball sims.
For the past couple years I’ve been mentioning and recommending Out of the Park Baseball, but this year OOTP was bought by the company that makes the highly successful Football (as in soccer) Manager and the next version of that program isn’t likely to come out until late 2005 or early 2006.
So I went in search of a different baseball sim and wound up at the website for PureSim Baseball 2005. I downloaded a shareware copy and played around with it. I’m a stats freak and was a bit disappointed at how the export options stacked up against OOTP, but was impressed by how frequently the game is being updated. For only $20, PureSim Baseball 2005 is a non-brainer if baseball sims are your thing.
Except, apparently the game isn’t selling as well as past releases have. For the lateset version of the game, the developer decided to turn the game into nagware. The author calls it shareware, but nagware is a better term since its fully functional and never expires. Instead you get asked occasionally if you want to register the game for $20 — there’s also an “I’ll buy it later” button that you push and go on with your playing the game. The nag screens are very infrequent, so it’s not really that annoying.
PureSim Baseball 2005 developer Shaun Sullivan announced in late November that he was releasing the game as nagware by writing in his blog,
Well, I took a leap of faith this week and went ahead and released the game as shareware. What does this mean? Well, first of all it means folks don’t have to pay for the game and they can play it for as long as they like with no feature restrictions. There are a few “nag messages” littered in there (they are employed more if a user has played the game for a significant amount of time without paying) but generally folks are getting a free game.
Why go shareware?
Good question. My motivation for going shareware is based solely on wanting to increase the game’s audience. By increasing the game’s audience I get more feedback, and that leads to a better game. PureSim is player-driven and I hope this will add to that aspect of the game’s development even more. I can already see based on the traffic on my message board and the number of downloads that this aspect of things is most certainly working! That said, I not seen any increase in sales. It may be too early to tell, but I’ll let you guys know.
It is a pretty widely held notion that people don’t pay for something they can get for free, but I am hoping that the combination of a high quality game, low price and older player demographic will work in concert to get some folks to register.
That strategy, not surprisingly, didn’t work. As Sullivan notes in in this discussion forum thread,
UPDATE: Sales are way down, so I guess the “people won’t pay if its free” rule of thumb applies.
At some point I’ll probably have to consider “premium” features that are only available to registered owners.
Any other ideas are welcomed.
That surprised a lot of people in the discussion forum. After all sports sims appeal to a fairly narrow audience, and $20 is a bargain for a game like PureSim Baseball 2005. So why are registrations down?
It could just be that people don’t like the game or that the people buying previous versions of the software were cheap bastards all along, and the nagware experiment outed them. Personally, I think the game itself provides users a psychological incentive not to register the game. As I note in this thread,
And it’s not necessarily that someone who downloads and never pays is thinking “hey, I’m getting this for free, why bother paying?” Look at what your nagware message says “I’ll pay later.” Notice what some of the comments in this thread are — I’d love to pay now, but I can’t. I’ll pay later. Riiight. Even the most honest of us are tempted to think, “I’ll pay next week” week after week.
Which is why I’m a big fan of fully functional, time-limited demos. The software just stops working after 30 days (if its not at least 30 days, I get really annoyed), and then I have to make a decision — is this software that I really can’t live without out? If the answer is yes, I pay and register. If not, I remove the program from the hard drive.
Pure Sim Baseball 2005’s problem is it never forces that sort of decision on its users. Hopefully it will soon, as I’d like to see Sullivan make enough money to continue developing a very good sim.
You can always tell an expert! Thanks for cotnruibting.