Author: Richard A. Fowell
Date: 10:30:27 01/07/05
Go up one level in this thread
What I think Vincent is saying is that he (and other programmers) will be happy to sell their engine to a Macintosh software publisher for a flat upfront fee if the publisher wants to provide the up-front money and take care of the GUI, marketing, etc. I'm not quite sure what "pay me 125 copies" comes to, but let's say $46 a copy, since that is what Tiger and Gandalf are selling for. That is $ 5750. Then the distributor is free to charge whatever price point they think they can make a return. If they sell 1000 copies, they will have paid less than $6 a copy for the chess engine. I believe that this is how "The King" got into Chessmaster, "Ruffian" into Kasparov, and GNUchess into "Big Bang Chess". These retail for $40, $20 and $25 currently. Note that, after deducting the other costs for GUI development, advertising, distributor markup, etc., that doesn't leave much per copy for the engine developer. Also, the economics of scale means that the per copy price must be higher to cover the fixed costs, since fewer units will be sold. As a case in point: Kasparov Chessmate sells at Amazon for $18.88 for the Mac, and $9.99 for the PC. Chessbase did, in the past, sell products on the Mac platform, such as Chessbase itself. They stopped, presumably because they were not getting a return on their money that they wanted. If you can find 230 like-minded mac chess enthusiasts to form a co-op to each kick in $25, you could fund the creation of a freeware Mac DIEP engine, and distribute it through the internet archive services like Info-Mac. -Richard On January 07, 2005 at 09:02:39, ERIQ wrote: >On January 07, 2005 at 08:52:05, Vincent Diepeveen wrote: > >>On January 07, 2005 at 01:42:15, ERIQ wrote: >> >>>I think some programmers are just getting lazy. >> >>For engine you need a 1000+ copies sold a year to make a living. >> >>Selling engine without GUI is not realistic i learned the hard way. People only >>get mad then. I can assure you that. >> >>However if someone is prepared to pay me 125 copies of diep, i can deliver a >>single diep binary for each platform: g4 and g5 and os/x (xboard/winboard >>compatible) and the person in question then can try to sell that as much as he >>wants to for the mac and can keep all the profit he makes (it is impossible to >>check sales anyway). In fact diep will be one of the few working parallel at the >>g5. OS/x might have not such best multithreading support (no kernel threads), >>though i didn't check it out 100%. Yet DIEP is multiprocessor so no problems at >>the dual G5 there. >> >>The G5 processor is relative slow for integer software in general, but for DIEP >>it's a fine processor. >> >>Vincent > >Do you really believe that someone would buy you product at that sum of money >over hiarcs 9.6 (mac),for less than $50 bucks. I understand that you need money >but please be realistic.
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