On 28/04/2015 10:26 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> I imagine for the CryTek, the subscription model is more lucrative than
> licensing to a few people - you get hobbyists who want to play with it
> who could never afford to pay the $1.2 million (yes, I looked it up -
> that was the cost reported in 2012 - so I owe you an apology, because
> while it's not "millions" it is>  1 million.  So my apologies for coming
> down quite as hard as I did.) licensing fee now have a professional level
> tool they can access for a reasonable price.  Lower price, larger market,
> increases revenue.  Instead of 10 people paying $1.2 million (netting $12
> million in perpetual licensing fees), they can get, say, 100,000 people
> paying $10/month - or $120/year - which is a net of $12 million.

Sounds to me like it *was* a couple of million to licence it, and then 
they decided maybe getting everybody to use it for a smaller fee would 
be way more profitable. AND THEY'RE PROBABLY RIGHT! :-D

IIRC, Oracle did a similar thing. To *buy* the cheapest edition of the 
Oracle database engine is £8,000 - far more than an individual can 
afford. The "full" edition (with hot-failover support, clustering, and 
so on) is £80,000. You could almost buy a *house* for that price. BUT... 
then they suddenly decided that you can actually download not just the 
full edition, but the premium one, free of charge, "for personal use". 
You're just not licensed to use it commercially. (I'm sure they must 
have some way of actually *enforcing* that, though...) Which means 
everybody gets to know and love your product, and there are therefore 
lots of hireable people who know it, which makes it more likely that 
companies will choose it. Which makes more money for Oracle.

In a similar way, there used to be a free edition of VisualStudio. 
Presumably if all your developers are used to using it, they will nag 
their employers to buy it for them...

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