I've been getting a lot of email and posts from game developers who are wondering what our overall strategy is with getting new games on TotalGaming.net. Let me take a quick stab at that in plainer terms than any spindoctored marketing document could:

TotalGaming.net is a gaming network for obtaining games electronically and downloading them right away. What makes it different is that it also includes retail games as well as indie titles and that there is no sort of DRM type scheme or "renting" involved. You're buying games.

From there, you can purchase games either individually OR purchase a TotalGaming.net subscription which contains most of the games available in the whole network.

Regarding royalties: The developer's game is made available as a seperate purchase. What % of the sale the developer gets is based on a number of factors but one of which is whether the game is also part of TotalGaming.net's subscription as well.  Their royalty of the TotalGaming.net subscription also depends from game to game.

A developer can opt out of having their game available as part of the subscription but their stand-alone royalty would be smaller since they are, to a degree, riding on the popularity of the subscription to get users to notice their games on the site.

The challenge for us is both repeat and avoid what happened with Object Desktop.

Object Desktop sells a LOT of copies each year. Object Desktop has sold more copies in the time GalCiv has been out than GalCiv has. And its sales INCREASE over time. So in that sense, we want to repeat that experience in being able to have a suite of software so compelling that it reaches critical mass and people just buy the whole thing even though there's only X programs they'll end up using.

But originally, Stardock intended for Object Desktop components to be developed mostly by third parties (like we did on OS/2 with "OS/2 Essentials"). But developers would focus too much on the per unit royalty rather than on the big picture. Is it better to make $20 per copy but only sell 500 per year? Or is it better to make $1 per copy but sell 100,000 copies per year? Year after year after year? So ultimately we ended up making most of the Object Desktop components with our own development team. Which worked out for us but it took longer for us to reach critical mass.

With TotalGaming.net, IF we can just get enough games on there that it reaches critical mass, then you get to that "no brainer" level of value that people just plunk down $89.

I've talked to a lot of indie developers over the years and the typical indie develoepr game sells far fewer than 5,000 per year. In fact, the majority sell less than 1,000 units per year. So if their $40 game sells 1,000 units, that's $40,000. On the other hand, if we can combine our strengths (and stardock is willing to eat it quite a bit on this to make it happen) we can have a gaming network that sells 20,000 copies per year, then 40,000 then 60,000 until we reach whatever the maximum sales level that can be attained. So then the developer making $1 or $2 per unit is making quite a decent amount of money just on the subscription.

Throw in another 500 to 2000 units sold stand alone where they get a good chunk of it and they have a pretty sustainable base.