My teen years right there; brings back the feels. I became a programmer just a little too late to ride this wave, or perhaps I just didn't have the ambition. I found a spreadsheet of my shareware sales on a 3.5" floppy disk just a couple days ago. My most famous shareware program, ButtonWiz, was making $130 per month in 1998 or so. I think shareware only had a few years of life left in it. I'm happy that I was able to participate, in some small way, in an amazing era.
The shareware scene is still doing strong. Yep, trivial niches are mostly filled, but there are plenty of unoccupied ones.
I think "shareware" as a term was gradually transformed to a more contemporary "startup". The shareware in its original meaning was mainly about bootstrapping, while a startup can rely on a wider range of instruments: from bootstrapping through investing up to crowdfunding. Financing opportunities are much more diversified nowadays.
Shareware was a distribution model first and foremost, which was a big issue in the pre-Internet era. Technically speaking, shareware is no more, because no one shares the wares anymore.
It is still widely used as a term for one-dev shops, independent small vendors, etc., but definitely not for startups.
I remember the owner of RegNow telling me the average revenue per developer on their books was $400 per year. This was around the turn of the millennium.
It's probably like most sectors, a few are making a killing, some more a living and the rest just pick up crumbs.
One of the defining traits of shareware is that you could give someone a copy of such software. The modern App Store is not really like shareware in that sense. A curated walled garden is a bit too restrictive for the true shareware concept, IMO
In the pure sense I agree. I'd much rather be able to get apps from anywhere or anyone. Trying to give friends iOS games I'm working on is a major pain. At least with Android I can upload an APK somewhere.
The original purpose behind giving anyone a copy was advertising and distribution, which is done differently nowadays. Rarely does anyone I know give someone a thumbdrive or equivalent of a piece of software, instead a website or app store link is shared.
Shareware strikes me as too precarious of a compromise to last long as an industry. It makes sense that in the longer term it would split into F2P games and Open software, which are both better at maximizing the distinct virtues of shareware
Only about 25 years too late, but I just bought a copy of Excelsior that I played to death in highschool. I might still have my graph-paper maps of that darn tower where you could only see the 8 squares around you...
