Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!agate!shelby!unix!hplabs!motsj1!mcdchg!ddsw1!corpane!sparks From: sparks@corpane.UUCP (John Sparks) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: No more Cinemaware stuff for Amiga !!!???? Message-ID: <951@corpane.UUCP> Date: 12 Aug 89 13:50:01 GMT References: <9180.AA9180@heimat> <1989Jul30.210112.10525@ddsw1.MCS.COM> Organization: Corpane Industries, Inc., Louisville Ky Lines: 74 <925@corpane.UUCP> <4639@tekig5.PEN.TEK.COM> Sender: Reply-To: sparks@corpane.UUCP (John Sparks) Followup-To: Distribution: Organization: Corpane Industries, Inc. Keywords: In article <4639@tekig5.PEN.TEK.COM> wayneck@tekig5.PEN.TEK.COM (Wayne Knapp) writes: >> [my inflated figures for software sales on Amy] >You must be the man that fell to earth! If you really believe what you >are saying you should be selling your own program. There are several >flaws in your above posting. > > 1) 1,000,000 Amigas sold doesn't mean 1,000,000 being used. Well, maybe not. but a pretty big margin. Why else would you buy it? > 2) Selling to 10% of the market is almost unheard of, except > for a very few programs like Deluxe Paint. Most software > companies are singing in the streets if they can sell to > 1% of the market. Hmm. I guess I really over-inflated my estimates. > 3) A list price of $50 dollars means that the producer of > the software gets only $20 from software distributors, that > is if you can still find one that is still in business. > 4) A nice box, manual, disk, and shipping runs an easy $8. Yep I also forgot to include production costs. Ooops. > 5) Pirates kill a large amount of impulse buying, which can > easily amount to 80% of your sells. I know this because > less than 20% of the sells every bother to send in registration > cards. In other words "impulse buying" == "suckers who buy anything in a pretty package", if only 20% ever bother registering, then that is a good sign that the program is not worth the cost, and the maker better get on the ball and come out with a good program or face the facts of lowered sales as word of mouth travels about the crappy program. > >So the cash equation is more like: > > 900,000 * (.01) / 2 * $12 = $54,000 > >Even that may require heavy advertising at about $5,000 a mouth for >say 6 months, costing $30,000 total. Leaving about $24,000 to split >between everyone involved in producing the software. > >Now the numbers can move some, but the essence is that your $3,500,000 >is off by an order of magitude. Sorry about the cold water, but is >very hard to make a living writing Amiga software. > > Wayne Knapp Well sorry for the wrong figures above, But Karl's seemed way to low. He was going on an installed based of 50,000 which I know there are more Amiga's out there than that. I didn't realize how unprofitable writing software could be. It's a wonder we have any programs for the Amy at all. -- John Sparks | {rutgers|uunet}!ukma!corpane!sparks | D.I.S.K. 24hrs 1200bps ||||||||||||||| sparks@corpane.UUCP | 502/968-5401 thru -5406 Cheerio-Magnetics: The tendency of the last few cheerios in a bowl of milk to cling together for survival.