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Comment by PostOnce | Hacker News Reader

This business model is cool, free game digitally, but boxed it costs money. (let's ignore the "you need the original doom" stuff for the purposes of considering this business model)

Also, the company providing the actual boxes, Limited Run Games, does cool stuff. I thought a game was going to be digital only, and then found them doing a version in a real box, DRM free, no steam activation required; I thought that was cool of everyone involved.

I miss big boxes. Apparently they disappeared because Walmart wanted to make room for DVDs by removing software SKUs, so the software publishers downsized the boxes so they wouldn't have to put fewer SKUs on the shelf at Walmart. https://rome.ro/news/2018/4/18/big-box-extinction (intro) and https://rome.ro/bigbox (actual blog post w/ story)

Lastly, John Romero, if you're reading: fix your blog ^ why is the intro not included on the blog post page?

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    This business model is cool, free game digitally, 
    but boxed it costs money.

If you're not Romero (and probably even if you are) this is a plan to make basically beer money - or any way, not enough to support a development studio making these games.

I suspect this is mostly a hobby for him.

I agree with both you and with GP.

It's more of a "feel good" symbolic support model, and that's great! There should be a place for that in our lives too.

Being paid for working on something that ultimately isn't about the money is actually a really tricky problem to solve, and this feels like a decent approach.

It works in music though

A friend of mine runs a small music label in Italy ( https://www.heavypsychsounds.com/ ) in the stoner segment and had some success printing vinyls in limited edition of the bands he publish

You have to create your fan base first, but usually when you build it from the ground up it's loyal and buys everything you print

He makes enough to sustain a small business and had the satisfaction of getting in touch with the bands he once listened to when he was younger and to republish them (Nebula, Nick Oliveri from QOTSA, Brant Bjork from Kyuss)

It works for the label, but does it enable the artists to live off of their music? I doubt it.

Most musicians live off the money they make touring and performing. It's rare that a musician makes enough money off of record sales alone.

if the artists can't live making their music, the label can't publish them

BTW in this specific case the bands get the full cachet for the live gigs and the merch they sell at the venues, the label pays for the pressing and gets its own share from selling the records and from the merch sold on the label's website

It's a small business, not a shady multi billion company

it's made out of passion, not for greed

You can make a pretty professional album with a band of five people and a few thousand dollars in equipment. Game budgets regularly breach 10s of millions.

The game development business it's very similar to music industry right now

many small indie actors, few giant ones

minecraft was created by a single developer, angry birds costed officially around 100K, both made hundreds of millions

putting up a band that sells records in the tens of millions doesn't cost less than making angry birds

and it's harder to get to that point, band that sells so many records are just a few

For example Lady gaga sold globally less than 9 millions records, Angry Birds has exceeded 12 millions

As time goes on, I think game development will come to be more and more dominated by hobbyists. With the amount of games out there, it becomes harder and harder to make a case for trying to start your own studio.

It's like with music or movies or novels; you're taking a huge risk by quitting your job to do it full time. The sad thing is that it was only a few years ago when it actually did make some sense to try it.

One counter example; time will tell whether this will be sustainable: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/morphcat-games/micro-ma...

(Keep in mind that 150000 EUR might be "beer money" in the US, but the typical German salary for a non managerial SW engineer is around 60000 EUR, so 150000 EUR are 2 "good" man years' worth of money).

Needing the original Doom is par for the course for this sort of megawad project, even if it’s Romero making it. There’s a bunch of tricky licensing issues around shipping the original Doom wad that you’d need for core game resources.

Yeah, understandable; that's what I meant by the "let's ignore you need DOOM" part, because everything Romero made he's giving away free. So his business model is still "it's free digitally, but costs for the box set".

What I wanted to avoid was people saying "oh but it's not free you have to buy DOOM", which is irrelevant to the idea at hand.

Now that I think of it, locomalito did this before, http://www.locomalito.com -- he makes retro freeware games, and occasionally sells box sets of those for a fee.

I've looked into it & you're basically making cents on the dollar on these limited edition boxed sets due to manufacturing cost at such a small scale + shipping. It's nice for a hobby but not a good way to make a living.

Sure. It could always be used as a promo tool / halo product though; e.g. the press you can generate with the limited edition could move units of the non-limited one.

But you're right, generally it's a hobby or just a gesture for the fans, not a business decision -- and that's cool.

Does "Original Doom" also include the version on Steam?

I hope so, I've preordered already in the hope that SIGIL runs on the original release - then I'll be playing it on my actual 486 when it arrives!

Obviously I'll have to transfer the WAD over but it's set up so that Win 3.1 can see my NAS so the fact that it ships on USB media hopefully shouldn't present a problem.

Install Zandronum or ZDoomGL, and copy the doom.wad to it. You will get a much better experience.

Good tip, thanks.

Yes.

Today it's very easy picking DooM from GOG or Steam, or any warez site.

Chris Anderson wrote a book on these sort of "pricing" systems: _Free: The Future of a Radical Price_ [1].

Worth a read if you're into this idea. It includes some interesting historical examples of creative selling.

Can't say I _agree_ with the book, but glad I read it.

1. https://www.amazon.com/Free-Future-Radical-Chris-Anderson/dp....

While I suspected the disappearance of big software boxes had something to do with available shelf space, it didn't know it was competition from DVDs that were the main factor.

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