Why do some companies even think about making software that doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell at selling. For example, I just saw a TRL trivia game advertised on MTV. How many ppl are really gonna buy that? And those old Mcdonald’s and Barbie games. WTF? What about that new Mary Kate and Ashley game called crush. WTF? No one is going to purchase these. It is a waste of money. Are these companies really idealistic or is there some other motive?
Thanks
One of the top selling games some months back was a Barbie based game.
Remember, not everyone has the same taste in games as you.
Hate to break it to you, but the Barbie games routinely hit the top 10 every Christmas. (Barbie’s one of the best-selling toys of all time. Why wouldn’t Barbie computer games sell?)
Complaints about the stupidity of software marketers probably belong in the Pit. Questions about who will buy what software probably belong in IMHO. Questions about how software developers decide which games to market may be appropriate for General Questions. I’ll assume this is a poorly-worded GQ, but please be more careful about your wording in the future.
bibliophage
moderator, GQ
I agree. I thought you were putting out a call for really bad software.
But, just in case that’s OK for your OP:[ul][]Windows ME[]Windows 98[]Windows 95[]Windows 3.x[*]Internet Explorer[/ul]all suck (IMHO). 
Speaking of bad software, an interesting bit of information: a few years ago when there were more computer and operating system choices (Commodore, Atari, Apple, and others still very much alive and kicking), one of the big magazines (Byte?) had people learn all of them and compare their satisfaction. The only OS that repeatably ranked much different from the others was Microsoft’s - it got slammed in every comparison.
Hold on there a second…
They have a Mary Kate and Ashley game out?
Sweet.
It’s called “Crush”, huh.
What, ahh, am I allowed to do in this “Game”?
I do a different type of software development, but I would observe that game software of the sort you are talking about can typically be developed by a small team as a standalone program in a relatively short time. It doesn’t require the ongoing support, standards compliance, and complex interaction with other products that, say, a commercial server product does. You probably don’t have to sell a huge volume to recover costs on a game, and you can EOL it fairly quickly when it is no longer popular.
Games are also good candidates for “shovelware”, and those deals can sometimes provide a nice chunk of cash for a small company if they get shoveled into a popular item.
glossary:
EOL - end of life. In other words, “we don’t support that anymore because all the engineers that knew anything about it have all quit or been moved to other projects”. You’re on your own, buddy.
shovelware - all the freebie stuff you get in the box when you buy new hardware (and some software). So called because they just “shoveled” a bunch of stuff onto the distribution disk.
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- IIRC, by PC Game’s rankings, the year “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” came out, it ranked third in sales of all PC games… -and it was released in November. From a technical standpoint it was a simple game to write: it didn’t use 3-D, and didn’t have any special hardware requirements outside of average video and sound. And what I find most interesting, people bought it because they already thought they could beat it! All it had going for it was a low price, and a massive television tie-in with a popular show…
-By January it was in the bargain bins, in February it was free inside cereal boxes, but the people who made it don’t care. By then it had hauled in quite a bit of change and they were just disposing of the leftovers. The CD’s cost fifty cents and they sold a whole bunch for twenty-five dollars. You can say you don’t like it, but it’s difficult to argue with success.
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Myst was another technically simple game that sold very well. -For a while on Gamedev.net’s forums, I got my kicks posting about how Myst was the future of RPG’s, - MC
- IIRC, by PC Game’s rankings, the year “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” came out, it ranked third in sales of all PC games… -and it was released in November. From a technical standpoint it was a simple game to write: it didn’t use 3-D, and didn’t have any special hardware requirements outside of average video and sound. And what I find most interesting, people bought it because they already thought they could beat it! All it had going for it was a low price, and a massive television tie-in with a popular show…
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Okay, I know that this ISN’T about software that actually sucks, but I feel it my duty to warn you guys… DON’T EVER GET WINDOWS ME! Here is my sad tale: I had a nice, stable Windows 98, then for some weird reason I wanna get Windows 2000. But since my dad had the 2000 disk with him and the ME disk was sitting right there, I installed that instead. And guess what? I didn’t decide to keep my old OS files (I didn’t have enough space on C drive - all the space is in D and I didn’t feel like switching anything around…). So now I have Win ME, and it keeps freezing, and I can’t install ANY other Windows (not even 2000 -_-) over it 'cause ME is the newest system! Arg! This is so awful! I’m stuck with it 'till Windows XP… And don’t get XP either 'cause you have to register it or it won’t work, so no more copying disks. Therefore I’m stuck with Windows ME indefinitely! (Well, I COULD erase it and re-install everything, but that’s way too much of a pain!) Oh yeah, and Windows ME won’t let my computer “sleep,” or it freezes. Plus certain software won’t work. This sucks! Cry with me! Waaaa-haaaaa…
Oh yeah, but I really like Windows… People should stop complaining 'bout Windows. Beats the heck outta “Mac OS” and such… Unless it’s Windows ME they’re complaining about. THAT one sucks…
(OMG I just wrote like an entire page!)
Wow, your ME install must be really hosed, or you have a bad copy of windows 2000 – I run both ME and 2000 on the same system. First I installed ME, and then when I put in the 2000 CD, it offered to upgrade my existing OS (replace ME) or to install itself and allow my system to dual boot…
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yabob, I don’t have a programming job at all, because about the same time I got most of the IT courses for an associate’s done, the stock market had begun to tank -
- but by just reading I have noticed that support for unconventional games is usually minimal, and that’s where a lot of the profit is realized. They stick to general software graphics and sound, turn out a product relatively quick and avoid a massive amount of production and support costs. The system requirements that some of these games have are so minor that they can run on most any computer out there (even 386’s), and many of the problems that modern “hardware-accellerated” games have is with being able to run properly on dozens of different pieces of accelleration hardware.
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Particularly for video cards, now the only real standard for hardware support is “none”. - MC
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yabob, I don’t have a programming job at all, because about the same time I got most of the IT courses for an associate’s done, the stock market had begun to tank -
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