> PS. Did Randy raise his royalty payout? It used to be $5 per cart sold.
> I thought. Or does he renegotiate royalties for each separate author or
> game?
I think the deal with Randy works just the other way round. He makes
and sells the carts for you and then he charges you a fee for doing
so. He lets you set the cartridge price, and whatever the difference
between this price and his fee is, he will send to you. I think for a
normal 4K game he currently charges $5 for the parts, $1 for shipping
inside the USA ($4 for outside the USA) and $5 for his work. Therefore
he suggest a 'royalty' of $5 for you too. But if you want to include
an expensive extra, like a fancy label, manual or box, you can make
him charge more from the customers. And if you think that you don't
deserve that much money for the little game that you hacked together
in just one afternoon, you can of course reduce the cartridge price
too. ;-)
The big benefit of this method is that you as the programmer keep
all the rights to your program. I think most of us hobby programmers
here are very reluctant to give up control over our programs, at
least for the small compensation that the market would allow some
cartridge maker to offer.
The other benefit of Randy's method is that by modifying existing
cartridges and putting simple inkjet labels on them, he can keep
the costs per cart relatively low. Having the cartridges made
professionally with nice labels and boxes etc. is going to cost
quite a bit. Sure, there will be some people who would gladly
pay the extra cost for a nice and shiny package, but the people,
who just want to play the game on a real system, might drop out
of the potential customer base, especially if there really would
be a steady stream of new releases each year. And as a programmer
I would want my games to be played by as many people as possible.
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
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