Evolution of a Go program

About the development of Moyo Go Studio, software to (help) play the Oriental game of Go. Go is a two-player zero-sum game of perfect information. It is considered much harder than Chess. Currently, in spite of enormous effort expended, no computer program plays it above the level of a beginner.

Friday, October 21, 2005

Longhauling

Interesting. I had a big spike in sales for a week, and now I have no sales whatsoever for almost a week. I am pretty sure why: Every new customer found one bug and two new features they would like to see implemented, and kindly informed me so on the forum.

New customers of course look at the forum to see how existing customers like Moyo Go, and see a lot of: "BUG found!" and "We really desperately need feature XYZ". So they think: "Why not wait a little until the bugs are ironed out and feature XYZ is implemented".

Hm, in case of Moyo Go, this is a bad idea. Because customers get lifetime free updates, which means you're loosing nothing when you buy now. But as soon as I have straightened out major bugs and implemented major features, I'll raise the price. Master Go, for example, can't do what Moyo Go does, but it costs 100 USD. This means that Moyo Go will most likely be doubled in price, over the coming years.

So it's expensive to wait.

Of course it's not that bad with bugs and lacking features, it's just the fact that because I offer free updates and I quickly fix bugs and implement new features, that people "avalanche" me with them :) Blake Haber asked for a much more powerful SQL database search and he got it 24 hours later. Of course this encourages to request more :) It doesn't mean that Moyo Go is a stinking pile of crap, on the contrary.

I do not care that I am not selling anything, for the moment. Because things go in waves. All the stuff people talked about will be fixed/implemented, they will rave about it, there will be a sales wave again, they'll find bugs in the new functionality and sales will slump again, etc. etc. until Moyo Go Studio has achieved Full World Domination. While all the time being under-priced, when you look at MoyoGo's commercial counterparts.