ericmcg@pnet91.cts.com (Eric Mcgillicuddy) (12/12/90)
Either A+ or nibble reported a while back that 1 million GSs had been produced This was last summer I believe, maybe earlier. However I suspect that over half were sold to schools. This means that there are only 500,000 home computers. And this means that developers are either writing educational or home programs or do not consider 'critical mass' to have been attained (particularly since Apple will not be improving the hardware anymore). It takes a fair number of sales to repay development costs, even of a port, and the average program is only bought by approximately 1% of the computer owners. Certain classic programs can attain up to 5%, such as Appleworks. Suppose a company projects 5,000 unit sales (and good estimate on average), it must pay 1 or more programmers 1 year's salary on these sales. That means that at a cheap $20,000/year each unit must sell wholesale at $50. Retail stores would thus sell it for around $90, if they carried it at all. The actually price point for most games is closer to $20 wholesale so 12,000+ units must be sold. This requires 1.2 million machines in the target market (the home). This has not been reached and will in fact never be reached. Simple economics indicate that it is not profitable to write programs for the GS specifically. You must find a programmer that knows the system and it willing to take what he gets in terms of royalties, you can not afford to keep him on staff just for the GS. I do not believe that a person like this exists. Two possibilities exist to change this, lower price and/or improve the performance of the system (unlikely) or have a larger percentage of the installed base buy software. Interestingly, a larger percentage of Mac owners tend to buy any given piece of software than on any other system. I suppose that if they have the bucks for the hardware, then they have the bucks for the software. UUCP: bkj386!pnet91!ericmcg INET: ericmcg@pnet91.cts.com
rhyde@ucrmath.ucr.edu (randy hyde) (12/13/90)
>> Simple economics incicate tat it is not profitable to write programs for the
GS specifically [with only 500,000 home systems]...
Gee, I remember making a profit selling Apple II software when there were only
50,000 Apple IIs total.
*** Randy Hyde O-)