On Thu, 30 Apr 2015 19:02:15 +0100, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

> 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

Which is what I said. :)

> 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.

Yep.

> 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...

And yep.  In fact, there is a free cross-platform version of Visual 
Studio now, just saw the announcement yesterday. :)

Jim



-- 
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and 
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw

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