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December Days 08: Shareware
Dec. 8th, 2019 09:22 pm[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]
You know how there are multiple studies that say people who read books in libraries tend to buy more books? (This is also true in Canada.) Software worked in similar ways, and games especially, once the CD-ROM format provided a whole 800 MB of space to fill, instead of just the 1.44 MB available on your standard-issue 3.5" floppy (although they were rather rigid) disk. There was a big heyday of discs that were things like "1,001 Games", showcasing just how much stuff you could fit on a CD, and all of it supposedly for the cost of the disc itself. Many of the games on those discs were freeware, so you might find an implementation of a brick-breaker game, a table tennis clone, a couple of text games, a whole lot of implementations of word games, checkers and chess programs, and the like. They were usually complete in and of themselves, and they were often pretty simple, without much for options, bells, or whistles associated with them.
A fairly significant part of those game discs, and, as the Internet started opening up to the population in general and companies realized they could provide their software directly, hosted download sites had material that was marked as "shareware." While today's software demos are often time-limited ("try our product free for 30 days, after that it's only $AN_ARM USD!") or feature-limited ("you can walk with our software, but you'll have to pay for a license to chew gum while you're walking!"), and are often both, shareware was meant to be distributed and shared among everyone, and so it could be a full-featured piece of software. (Sometimes it wasn't.) Much of the time, after a certain point, shareware would turn into nagware, with an unavoidable part that essentially said "you seem to be enjoying this software, why not buy a registration key for it? It will get rid of this message and it will give you extra benefits, like being able to upgrade the software when new versions come out!" The messages were usually brief, and then they could be dismissed and the software would still function. So, if someone was willing to put up with whatever the nag message was, they could continue to use the software. Unsurprisingly, one of the things that's still sought after on the World Wide Web are registration keys for various pieces of software that still use them. Nowadays, some pieces of software have essentially said they need to phone home continuously to work, making it impossible to use them without an Internet connection, and that's not a positive sign in terms of software development, because when those servers get shut off, it's like what happens when a Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game dies, except people understand that MMOs will eventually shut down due to a lack of resources keeping them alive. (The good ones figure out a way to release it to the community so that community members can take over the duties of running it on their own server time, if they want to keep it alive.)
How did shareware work with games? Well, you could ask John Carmack about that, since a lot of the games that I remember being shareware and being very enjoyable came from his brain, or id Software, Epic (then Epic Megagames), or Apogee (which later became 3D Realms). For those publishers, the shareware model consisted of the first "episode" of a longer series, which could be played in its entirety. At the end of the first episode, having seen what the game could do, the person who had played it could pay for the rest of the series and get a registered copy of all the episodes in the series.
Apogee distributed Episode I of a lot of side-scrolling action-adventure games like Commander Keen (which would eventually also have Episode IV, the first of a duology, distributed in the same way), Duke Nukem, Raptor: Call of the Shadows, Hovus Pocus, and other such games. (I think we might have bought a significant amount of the Apogee catalog at that time, precisely because it was side-scrolling action that was just the right kind of difficulty for all of the family at the time.) Epic handled the Jazz Jackrabbit series (among others), and id was responsible for Doom and Quake both, with both of their first episodes released to be played. (Most, if not all, of these games are still available for purchase, whether through Steam or GOG or your distribution platform of choice.)
Doom was actually how I was introduced to the shareware concept, as a friend had the first episode and showed some part of it to me. I'm not really that great at twitch shooters and I have a low startle point, so things teleporting in or popping around a corner and trying to nom me were not things I was looking forward to in a game. And I was a lot younger then. I could handle some pretty impressive feats at Commander Keen, but Doom seemed to be an entirely different level of issue. Possibly because dying reset progress in a lot of these types of games, and it seemed like it would be a bad thing if you were several levels in and got defeated, so you ended up only having your pea shooter again, which wouldn't help you defeat the bigger baddies, likely leading to you getting toasted again and again once you'd died the first time. (This same negative loop happened in a lot of other games, too, although some of them, I would discover, had anti-frustration features, such as there always being a pickup of the Neural Stunner at the Bean-With-Bacon Megarocket if you had less than 7 shots, I think, on it.) At a certain point, though, my Sierra Adventure Game training kicked in, and since you could save anywhere, the rule of "save early, save often, save to different slots" greatly helped with making sure that progress wasn't lost as the games were played. (And still is basically used in this manner for a lot of games, with the exception of roguelikes and others where the point is that you die a lot and have to restart from the beginning until you actually succeed on a single run.)
Shareware was an interesting time. It's still being practiced today, in a lot of ways, with demos and various feature-limited things available for free distribution, with the paid product still safely locked behind a paywall, but it's a lot more centralized now, and what's really being shared among people is information about the game, rather than an episode of the game itself for someone to try and figure out on their own. And there are still games available for free (some of them fiendishly hard, like NetHack), and the concept of sharing things among your friends has stuck around into swarm protocols and file-sharing networks, but they graduated from sharing demos to sharing the full things, and piracy of things has gotten a lot more intense as companies are trying to protect their IP and charge for it.
It would be nice to go back to the shareware idea, where we could play a significant portion of a game for free and decide on whether we want to keep playing the game and buy the full thing. It works for the public library, when it comes to books and other media, so why wouldn't it work again for games? (And some games have had their source code released under a GPL, like a significant amount of id Software's material.) With a lot of AAA games these days asking for 50-60 dollars for something unseen, it becomes a matter of faith, trust, or watching someone else play the game before someone is making a decision about whether or not to buy it. Indie distributions and figuring out the right price point to get someone to take a chance on a game is a significant part of game stuff now-a-days. Maybe we're due for a return to a shareware-style model. Maybe not, but I think it's a worthwhile idea for places that are trying to attract more people to use their software or play their games.
You know how there are multiple studies that say people who read books in libraries tend to buy more books? (This is also true in Canada.) Software worked in similar ways, and games especially, once the CD-ROM format provided a whole 800 MB of space to fill, instead of just the 1.44 MB available on your standard-issue 3.5" floppy (although they were rather rigid) disk. There was a big heyday of discs that were things like "1,001 Games", showcasing just how much stuff you could fit on a CD, and all of it supposedly for the cost of the disc itself. Many of the games on those discs were freeware, so you might find an implementation of a brick-breaker game, a table tennis clone, a couple of text games, a whole lot of implementations of word games, checkers and chess programs, and the like. They were usually complete in and of themselves, and they were often pretty simple, without much for options, bells, or whistles associated with them.
A fairly significant part of those game discs, and, as the Internet started opening up to the population in general and companies realized they could provide their software directly, hosted download sites had material that was marked as "shareware." While today's software demos are often time-limited ("try our product free for 30 days, after that it's only $AN_ARM USD!") or feature-limited ("you can walk with our software, but you'll have to pay for a license to chew gum while you're walking!"), and are often both, shareware was meant to be distributed and shared among everyone, and so it could be a full-featured piece of software. (Sometimes it wasn't.) Much of the time, after a certain point, shareware would turn into nagware, with an unavoidable part that essentially said "you seem to be enjoying this software, why not buy a registration key for it? It will get rid of this message and it will give you extra benefits, like being able to upgrade the software when new versions come out!" The messages were usually brief, and then they could be dismissed and the software would still function. So, if someone was willing to put up with whatever the nag message was, they could continue to use the software. Unsurprisingly, one of the things that's still sought after on the World Wide Web are registration keys for various pieces of software that still use them. Nowadays, some pieces of software have essentially said they need to phone home continuously to work, making it impossible to use them without an Internet connection, and that's not a positive sign in terms of software development, because when those servers get shut off, it's like what happens when a Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game dies, except people understand that MMOs will eventually shut down due to a lack of resources keeping them alive. (The good ones figure out a way to release it to the community so that community members can take over the duties of running it on their own server time, if they want to keep it alive.)
How did shareware work with games? Well, you could ask John Carmack about that, since a lot of the games that I remember being shareware and being very enjoyable came from his brain, or id Software, Epic (then Epic Megagames), or Apogee (which later became 3D Realms). For those publishers, the shareware model consisted of the first "episode" of a longer series, which could be played in its entirety. At the end of the first episode, having seen what the game could do, the person who had played it could pay for the rest of the series and get a registered copy of all the episodes in the series.
Apogee distributed Episode I of a lot of side-scrolling action-adventure games like Commander Keen (which would eventually also have Episode IV, the first of a duology, distributed in the same way), Duke Nukem, Raptor: Call of the Shadows, Hovus Pocus, and other such games. (I think we might have bought a significant amount of the Apogee catalog at that time, precisely because it was side-scrolling action that was just the right kind of difficulty for all of the family at the time.) Epic handled the Jazz Jackrabbit series (among others), and id was responsible for Doom and Quake both, with both of their first episodes released to be played. (Most, if not all, of these games are still available for purchase, whether through Steam or GOG or your distribution platform of choice.)
Doom was actually how I was introduced to the shareware concept, as a friend had the first episode and showed some part of it to me. I'm not really that great at twitch shooters and I have a low startle point, so things teleporting in or popping around a corner and trying to nom me were not things I was looking forward to in a game. And I was a lot younger then. I could handle some pretty impressive feats at Commander Keen, but Doom seemed to be an entirely different level of issue. Possibly because dying reset progress in a lot of these types of games, and it seemed like it would be a bad thing if you were several levels in and got defeated, so you ended up only having your pea shooter again, which wouldn't help you defeat the bigger baddies, likely leading to you getting toasted again and again once you'd died the first time. (This same negative loop happened in a lot of other games, too, although some of them, I would discover, had anti-frustration features, such as there always being a pickup of the Neural Stunner at the Bean-With-Bacon Megarocket if you had less than 7 shots, I think, on it.) At a certain point, though, my Sierra Adventure Game training kicked in, and since you could save anywhere, the rule of "save early, save often, save to different slots" greatly helped with making sure that progress wasn't lost as the games were played. (And still is basically used in this manner for a lot of games, with the exception of roguelikes and others where the point is that you die a lot and have to restart from the beginning until you actually succeed on a single run.)
Shareware was an interesting time. It's still being practiced today, in a lot of ways, with demos and various feature-limited things available for free distribution, with the paid product still safely locked behind a paywall, but it's a lot more centralized now, and what's really being shared among people is information about the game, rather than an episode of the game itself for someone to try and figure out on their own. And there are still games available for free (some of them fiendishly hard, like NetHack), and the concept of sharing things among your friends has stuck around into swarm protocols and file-sharing networks, but they graduated from sharing demos to sharing the full things, and piracy of things has gotten a lot more intense as companies are trying to protect their IP and charge for it.
It would be nice to go back to the shareware idea, where we could play a significant portion of a game for free and decide on whether we want to keep playing the game and buy the full thing. It works for the public library, when it comes to books and other media, so why wouldn't it work again for games? (And some games have had their source code released under a GPL, like a significant amount of id Software's material.) With a lot of AAA games these days asking for 50-60 dollars for something unseen, it becomes a matter of faith, trust, or watching someone else play the game before someone is making a decision about whether or not to buy it. Indie distributions and figuring out the right price point to get someone to take a chance on a game is a significant part of game stuff now-a-days. Maybe we're due for a return to a shareware-style model. Maybe not, but I think it's a worthwhile idea for places that are trying to attract more people to use their software or play their games.
