Charging before the game is finished

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Bellum

Master Knight
Way back in the Stone Age I found stumbled onto a game, then almost unknown, called Mount&Blade. The game was very incomplete at the time. 714, I believe. The graphics were terrible, the water was green, I was lucky if it didn't crash, but it was one of the best damned games I'd ever played. So I bought it, at a discount, and I never regretted it.

At the time, I thought it was a novel idea to charge for a game before it was completed in order to fund it. Now, though, with games like Minecraft and one or two others, it seems to be slowly becoming an accepted method for an indie developer to acquire some venture capital, and I love it! Minecraft is also turning out to be one of my all time favorite games. It's great that these games that would have died long before completion before now have a chance to thrive.

Was Mount&Blade the first game to use this model? If it wasn't, does anybody know what was? Is there a snazzy PR term for it? It needs a snazzy PR term...
 
Definitely not the first. It's a theme with things other than games as well.

It's pretty much a video game stock, you make a risk on something that might not get finished, and if it flourishes, you get a better game out of it.
 
I don't think it's been around in video games that long, has it?

I mean, indie games have really taken off in a way they couldn't before broadband internet became so popular. This just isn't something that would have been feasible for most if not all of the nineties.
 
shareware was free but usually included a hint to send a donation to the developers, but you didn't have to.

some good stuff came out of it though.
 
Urlik said:
shareware was free but usually included a hint to send a donation to the developers, but you didn't have to.
some good stuff came out of it though.
Some of them had a "Buy now and we'll give you even more stuff later" sales pitch. I don't remember exactly, but I'm pretty sure Ken's Labyrinth had a pitch like that. I played the last versions of it a while back, and it looks nothing like the old shareware I played when I was a kid.

Bellum said:
That's fascinating.
Was it local? How did they get the word out?
There used to be a lot of "Shareware discs" available for sale in various stores. You could buy a disc (or a pack of discs) with a ton of shareware games on them, usually with a GUI menu and installation instructions included. They also used to distribute mods that way, especially for Warcraft 2. You could find some really obscure games by buying those, especially in the sci-fi adventure horror and text based genres.
 
I have shareware games left over from the 1990s that included some or much of the game, but not all of it. You had to pay to unlock the rest.
 
I don't think that's quite the same thing. Charging for the rest of a game compared to charging for a game that isn't actually done yet.
 
Calodine said:
I don't think that's quite the same thing. Charging for the rest of a game compared to charging for a game that isn't actually done yet.

rejenorst said:
Yeah the first episode of Doom was released as shareware. Or the first 3 missions I don't remember now.

Yeah, I'm specifically talking about charging for an alpha or beta product to fund its completion.
 
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