> I would like to spin this thread directly back to David--what would
> it take financially to justify your making a successor to KoDP?
A great question, and one I'm very interested in hearing David's answer to. One developer I know personally who's made the shareware, Internet-distribution-only model work is Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software (www.spidweb.com) -- his Exile/Avernum series has been very successful. He noted in a column somewhere (or possibly on the site) that the biggest expense indeps face is art -- professional art costs a lot, and I bet it was a big chunk of KoDP's budget.
One possible way around this would be (and I'm just throwing ideas around here as they bubble up) to pay artists a royalty based on each copy sold, rather than a big whacking fee up front for each piece. QA, another big expense, can be ameliorated by, well, us -- many of us would jump at the chance to run QA on early buiilds of another A-Sharp game for no more compensation than a copy of the finished game and a mention in the credits.
But boxed-game, on-shelf distribution next to products from Maxis, Blizzard, and iD is not a likely prospect -- I would go as far as to say it is flatly impossible in the current climate.
And that makes volume projections extremely iffy. Where is the marketing coming from? There's word-of-mouth, and shareware associations have nice professional networking, but some better distribution solution has to come into place, and that's something I don't have a lot of info about. I imagine David and the rest of the A-Sharp crew know a lot more about that end of things.
Paul E.
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