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Shareware: Difference between revisions
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* '''Trialware:''' You can only play the game for a certain span of time (typically about a month,) a certain number of times, or something similar. After that, it can't be played any more until it's purchased. In the early days, this could often be circumvented by [[Good Bad Bugs|setting your system clock forward several years before installing it; on reverting to the normal time, you would be told that you are on day -3467 of your 30-day trial]].
Shareware is intended to get distribution by way of [[Exactly What It Says On the Tin|players sharing it with each other]] via whatever means they feel like. That almost always means the internet now, but [[Older Than the NES|in ancient times]], this took the form of telephone BBS networks, a prototype of today's [[Fora]], or more often that of people actually copying the games onto floppies or cassettes and physically handing them to their friends (a process jokingly referred to as 'Sneaker-net' by many computer users). Since shareware games are often quite compact compared to other games, another way they would sometimes see distribution (especially once CD-ROMs caught on) was in the form of physical media sold at stores or in computer magazines for a nominal fee, which included large numbers of shareware games in much the same manner as a digest or compilation.
Buying shareware is often referred to as “registration,” because all that's usually included with one's purchase is a code (consisting of one or more special strings of letters and numbers.) This allows sales to take place via postal mail, telephone conversation, or (even over a decade before the web) online communication. When typed into the program, this code “registers” the copy installed on your machine as belonging to you and removes whatever restrictions existed in its unregistered state. This is all the [[Copy Protection]]/[[DRM]] typical shareware games have, and—most shareware authors and customers feel—[[The Power of Trust|all that they need]].
Some games, most notably early Apogee and [[Id Software]] titles (''[[Duke Nukem (Video Game)|Duke Nukem]]'', ''[[Commander Keen (Video Game)|Commander Keen]]'', ''[[Wolfenstein 3D (Video Game)|Wolfenstein 3D]]'', ''[[Doom (Video Game)|Doom]]''…) were distributed in “shareware” versions (typically only the first of three episodes), even though the full games were separate software that was physically sent to the customer by mail-order. By common terminology, such distributions are more accurately called demos (demonstrations), just usually more generously sized, such as an entire multi-stage episode rather than one or two stages. Even so, it might be argued that a certain resemblance exists between shareware and demos in some cases, such as flat subscription-based games that can segue directly from some sort of free trial to the full game, like ''[[World of Warcraft]]''.
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* ''[[Quake (Video Game)|Quake]]''—The original game in this series was released as shareware. It gave gamers eight levels for free, with 24 more available if you bought the full version.
** Nine if you count the Hub Level "start". Which is also a cool deathmatch level.
* ''[[Real Space]] 3: Apocolypse Returns''—Though, the three other games in the series are entirely free.
* ''[[Rise of the Triad]]''—One of first shareware releases that had an entirely different set of levels for the shareware version. All the levels included in the full release are completely new.
* ''[[Secret Agent (Video Game)|Secret Agent]]''
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Video Game Tropes]]
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