Soft-sell no longer works in these competitive times

The old shareware model used to be the apex of the small-time software market: Give away an episode, sell three. And that’s no good anymore, and hasn’t been for some time. But today, I’m not trying to convince you that the old pull-market model isn’t efficient. I’m going to convince you that today’s method of 1-hour time-limit sales tactics are outdated and can’t be sustained forever.

First, a history lesson:

Soft-sell only works in a domain in which there is little-available or hard-to-get content, but still a strong demand. The domain can be defined as any number of factors, some of which compound: price point, platform, genre, and lifestyle (mobile vs. sit-down-and-play, for example). And as the domain is populated, hard-sell techniques are necessary to stay abreast of emerging competition.

In the days shareware reigned, access to shareware was limited, usually only available by mail-order. You had to pay $3 for a disk and wait a week or two for it to arrive. (You might have been one of the bleeding-edge users and got your shareware from a BBS, but it’s just as likely you got the full version from that same BBS, and so why buy at all?)

In this regard, even though there may have been millions of shareware games around the world, it was tightly filtered through an access point: Only a handful made it into the shareware catalogs. (And they were often the same games, month-to-month.) The intra-domain competition was, at least in the eyes of the user, very low.

Then comes the Internet.

All of a sudden, this entire world of shareware products explodes, and everything you could ever want is at your fingertips. Catalogs grow exponentially. Niches bloom into genres. The audience expands, the potential blossoms, and it becomes a very attractive proposition for developers, new and old.

Then the space floods.

Competition is fierce. It takes more and more to stand out. The model used previously is changing. Developers don’t have to encourage their visitors to share their wares, anymore–anyone can get them in the blink of a baud over the net. And one thing is abundantly clear:

Soft-selling isn’t working anymore.

With all the competition, no player goes without a game. There’s an alternative to everything out there. You can play an episode a day and not run out of games to play.

And developers eventually wised up, realized the landscape had changed. What was necessary before (encouraging people to share the software) was not only not necessary anymore, but actually hurt. Soft-sell gave way to hard-sell: 3 guns, 2 levels, 1 hour…

And it worked!

But now we are in another, different world with portals aggregating game releases. They still adhere to the old “proven” practices, ignoring the reality of the changing landscape. No longer is even an hour of gameplay enough. Because, even with only an hour of play, a user can move on to any number of the clones and get their fix, without spending a cent. (And this is, of course, ignoring the gaping hole introduced by the portals’ failure to work together and disallow cross-site extension of trial limits.)

So what we need more of, is less. Less trial time. Less content per trial. Less time spent thinking about what used to work in a different domain.

Otherwise, you’re wasting your time.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 22nd, 2007 at 3:24 pm and is filed under Business. 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.