KevinHarder.com

Eric Sink - a legendary software craftsman in the developer community - recently published an article on msdn that describes his experiences so far with Winnable Solitaire.

Winnable Solitaire is a game Eric wrote as an experiment in running what he call's a Micro-ISV. That is a software company made up of one person (usually the developer). If you are at all interested in the software development industry, I recommend reading both his original article and the new one.

I've been following Eric's Micro-ISV experiment and as I eagerly read his update on it I was shocked when I came to this sentence:

As of 29 September 2004, I have sold six copies of Winnable Solitaire, for a not so grand total of $42 (US) in revenue.

Wow - only six copies?!? That was not at all what I had expected! I had thought Eric’s experiment was going to be a success much sooner. I can (proudly?) admit that I was one of these few individuals who purchased a copy of Winnable Solitaire, and so I wanted to explain my reasoning behind purchasing it to possibly help Eric in his research.

Eric states that some of his readers claimed his experiment was unfair since he is relatively famous because of his web log and articles, and that gives him an advantage not normally available to a regular developer starting their own micro-ISV. He humbly refutes this idea by saying he is a nobody and that being famous in the developer world isn't very useful for selling a game to the consumer market. While I think he is more famous than he thinks, I do agree with him that it's not useful for selling to the average consumer. But he's missing what I believe is a major market for his game - technical folk. Granted he may be missing it on purpose since this is after all an experiment. Although I have no experience with it, I can certainly imagine that breaking into the general gaming consumer market can be very difficult, especially with so many variations of software games out there, and he hasn't done much marketing or brand building other than using Google Adwords. But he already has a very established and regarded "brand", so to speak, in the computer software industry. And he has proven talent and success with selling software to technical folk (i.e. SourceGear). The technical/developer gaming market may not be as large as the general gaming market, but I'm sure it's more than six people!

I am not a big gamer, to put it simply. Don't get me wrong - I enjoy playing games (well, good ones at least) and I have played computer games many times in the past, but I generally stay away from them. I think the biggest reason is that after playing computer games for awhile I often feel like I've wasted my time and haven't really gained anything. I would much rather write code or read. Of course reading blogs can often be just as big a time sink but for some reason it seems more "justifiable" to me. =) When I do play games I like them to be short and sweet, and the traditional solitaire game included in the Windows OS has always been one of my favorites. But I have gotten frustrated when I spend a good deal of time trying to solve a game that turns out to be unwinnable. Surely there has to be other developers out there who feel the same way?

So I was reading Eric's blog one day and saw he wrote a version of solitaire that was always winnable. I immediately downloaded the trial version. I liked it - it wasn't any different than regular solitaire - just winnable. I generally believe there is always a solution and explanation to everything, so the fact that this game could be won (but still takes skill) really appealed to me. This is one of the reasons the developer market would be a great fit for the game, because I think Eric's one big differentiating feature (being winnable) is something that technical folk generally value more than non-technical folk. But hey, I could be wrong! =)

After playing the trial version of the game a few times over the next week or two, I was considering whether to buy the full version. I have yet to make a fortune in the software world, and since I've been saving for a wedding I am pretty careful about what I spend my money on. But after the price was reduced from $12 to $7 that really put it in the "impulse buy" range for me so I ordered it. And I'm happy I did.