And more to the point, can I afford not to?
This is the mental fight I find myself having during the initial development of a product I am working on currently.
I have worked in the software industry for many years, mostly employed or working under contract but have sold and supported my own software direct in the past. Last time I sold direct was a few years back though and much has changed in the world since then.
The record industry is on its knees and so frantic it is willing to attack its own customer base. The rest of the content industry is watching in panic as they see the same problems starting to bite them.
I believe the movie industry bet on HD content as a way to hold back the P2P monster. DivX was their version of the MP3 hell. Once home users replaced their dial-up connections with DSL it was their problem too. Their solution was to try and bloat film size with HD films. Trouble was that it took so long to get to market that home bandwidth is no longer a problem. Even a game demo can be 4-5Gb in size. Their expensive and complex DRM was smashed to pieces before they even knew which disk format would be the winner. All the security does now is add cost to the films and hardware that plays them.
Then we have the likes of Microsoft being forced into killing off OneCare, it’s unloved AV and security solution. The new free replacement will be available next year. There were just too many good free alternatives in that market. I get the feeling that paying Microsoft AV protection money was never going to feel right though. OpenOffice V3 must be causing a few worried looks in the board room just now.
Even back when I sold software it was for tiny amounts yet cracks were available for everything I published. The content industry has spent multiple millions to prove there are no good copy protection systems so I have no hope. DRM only affects legal users, with or without it you have a pay what you want model.
Free carries benefits as well. A site like The Pirate Bay cease to be a threat. It becomes a high volume site that gives free “advertising” and access to a scalable content distribution system. It’s only cost is the bandwidth for the original seeding of the file.
Knowing this it becomes hard to resist free so I will give “pay what you want” a try. As to the product, that stays under wraps until early next year when it is released.
