...and the #1 reason why Stardock is so successful: Because everyone thinks
desktop enhancements are a tiny niche market.
When I try to convince the press to cover our software, I am often met with
"Do people really use this stuff?" By "stuff" they mean desktop
enhancements. Do people really want to change the way Windows looks and feels?
Surely, it's just a tiny group of geeks who do this right? Right??
In actuality, desktop enhancements are pretty huge. They just don't get
respect. Let me give you a startling statistic:
WindowBlinds has 2 MILLION more
downloads than the popular voice over IP game utility "Roger Wilco". In
fact, I couldn't find ANY games on Download.com that even come close to the
popularity of WindowBlinds. And WindowBlinds is just one of the many desktop
enhancements on there. DesktopX is another that is incredibly popular with
millions of downloads just on Download.com.
It creates a bit of a crisis of faith here. Because Stardock makes games too.
But it makes it a hard sell internally at times when $50 programs like Object
Desktop can sell thousands of dollars per day right off our website while our
expansion pack for our hit game (by PC standards) Galactic Civilizations got
only 6 pre-orders yesterday. Thousands of dollars for Object Desktop, $120
for the expansion pack. And the development expenses between the games and
non-games is remarkably close.
I'm confident that more people will eventually buy PC games electronically.
That's not the issue. It's not that the PC game market is small as much as the
desktop enhancement market is relatively large. There are lots of other
companies in the desktop enhancement market too as well as a lot of freeware. So
while we may be the "Blizzard" of the desktop enhancement market, we're not the
Microsoft. 