Screen Savers?

[Davaris]

I was wondering if anyone knows anything about screen savers? Is it a profitable market?

[dburger]

I'm somewhat familiar with the screen saver market, having built some in the past for the After Dark folks back in the hayday of the screen saver. I've also created a few as add ons for other products.

I do think there is some market for them, but most of the banner ads and so forth that you see now for screen savers are actually from the adware folks and are given away free. In exchange for getting the free screen saver you get spyware/adware installed on your PC. (It is used as a download vehicle.)

I'm sure with the right plan, there is money to be made selling them, but it will be extremely hard to compete for downlaods with the folks giving them away.

By the way, I think what Reflexive did, integrating a screen saver like mode as a reward into Big Kahuna Reef, was a briliant way of using the screen saver concept as an in game reward, without just throwing in a seperate screen saver.

[Travis Dorschel]

Yes, screensavers are profitable for people who can produce quality. While I personally haven't made a fortune I have made money with my two simple screensavers. My screensaver was on the bottom of screensaver.com for a week and I sold 7 that week, so yes they are popular. I have e-mail corresponded with a few people who make 50k or more making/selling screensavers independently. Freeze LLC (adware!) is a company of over 30 people and was named one of the fastest growing in 2004 so they must be making quite a bit of cash. Additionally, the market is huge, pretty much everyone.

Its all about quality though and it takes time to build up your reputation and user base. These two independents seem to be very successful:

http://www.3planesoft.com
http://www.risoftsystems.com/index.asp

[Davaris]

Interesting. I was thinking you would have to have something unique and a market that already buys what's on the screen saver in another form. I was wondering do you need any special tools to make them? I'm still using Visual C++ 5.0. I haven't a clue about them.

[dburger]

Freeze LLC (adware!) is a company of over 30 people and was named one of the fastest growing in 2004 so they must be making quite a bit of cash.
This is exactly the issue. If you want to run an adware company then I think screen savers are a great biz plan, but if you are trying to sell shareware that’s another story. You will be competing with some very large, well financed corporations that are in the business of giving away free screen savers, smileys, games and anything else they can get their hands on, in order to install their adware. You can't compete with that on any real scale.

This bundled-in adware is seriously damaging the whole shareware business, even games. People are getting afraid to download anything for fear their computer will be taken over by this stuff. We've all had to deal with trying to remove this crap, whether it was installed on our computers or a bunch of our friends'.

Sorry, rant over.

[Devman]

My first commercial venture is a screen saver, which you can get from the link on my signature. Also, I have some information on how to make your own screensaver, including a zipped Visual C++ project (6.0, may have to be edited to work with 5.0) that is a working screensaver skeleton that uses OpenGL to draw spheres on the screen.

I was really excited about using screensaver.com to sell my screensaver, and I submitted my screensaver to them, which they accepted. Then I found out that they bundle adware into the screensaver, and I was disturbed because I dislike that stuff intensely. I dialogued with them about it, and ultimately told them NOT to list my screensaver. It was not worth it to me to sell more screensavers if it meant adware was going into it.

As a test, I downloaded one of their screensavers (from freeze I think), and going through the install wizard was a minefield of trying to avoid installing all the adware. Ugh! I cancelled before I finished installing it as I didn't want to spend the next 30 minutes getting rid of it off my machine.

Since I released it, I have been selling about 1 copy per month, which for me covers the cost of the website hosting plus a bit extra. It has been really cool to start off with this project, even though I know I can't quit my day job with it!

People generally expect screensavers to be free, I think. I think the same way, yet most screensavers are pretty cruddy or have adware. I bet if you could create several cool screensavers and bundle them together and sell them, kind of like After Dark did, you could do decently. For me, I want to work on developing a game for my second commercial project. It was good to do the screensaver because I wanted to get the experience of taking a project from scratch to code completion to testing to selling it on a website and promoting it. Also, I LONGED for my favorite After Dark screensaver: Marbles. So I made it myself!

Good luck to you!

[Davaris]

Thanks Devman. :) I'll take a look at your code.

A screen saver could also be good for value adding when you are selling your game. You could offer it free if they buy the full version within 10 days of playing the demo.

[Travis Dorschel]

Competing with Freeze for the screensaver market will be tough but I think it can be done. I am currently preparing a unique line of products similar to animated desktops (see www.elefun-desktops.com) that I think will be better than the competition. Just like in games or any other software product quality is what matters. Jim Sachs spent years making one screensaver (www.serenescreen.com) the original fish tank screensaver and made such a high quality product that he was able to sell it and I am sure he made millions off of it. I am betting my development time that something new, unique and high quality could still sell well.

For my screensavers I used the DirectX 8.1 Screensaver framework that is included in the DirectX SDK:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dndrive/html/directx08202001.asp

For my current development I decided to reduce my requirements and developed my own engine in DirectX 7. I will post a beta of my work in the next few weeks.

[VladR]

It`s EXTREMELY tough to compete with the Screensavers like 3planesoft has. We are currently under contract work to produce 6 scrensavers and we have made on 95% first screensaver which is similar to Nautilus that 3planesoft has. But it took 3 people 4 months with prepared engine. Even I underestimated the work involved. Every little detail counts in creation of realism and feeling of the underwater scene.
At first sight you say: Hey, here`s just fog, some terrain and a vessel flying through some scenes. Easy, right ?
I was wrong. Getting it to feel real and good is much more tough than producing a game. It`s easier to spend 2 weeks fixing AI, than spending 2 weeks some small effect that you have to get right so that the realsim isn`t spoiled by one wrong effect.

It`s a perfect experience for our team, and we`re advancing our engine this way. But I`d like to see someone who does a screensaver of similar quality that 3planesoft has (i.e. so many different scenes, night&day cycles, special effects) just by himself and one artist, or by evenings when he comes home.

Just try to watch 3planeSoft`s screensavers (nautilus,nature) carefully. And each time you`ll spot new effects, new things to watch. Even after 20 views of whole screensaver, you`ll spot new things.
They packed unbelievable amount of stufff into one screensaver. And most of it, you`ll never spot directly. It just all adds to realism.

Regarding the original topic, if someone pays us to create screensavers, they must sell. So I`d go for it. Just be prepared to invest much more time into it than expected.

[Devman]

It`s EXTREMELY tough to compete with the Screensavers like 3planesoft has.
I looked at 3planesoft's offerings, and I agree 100% with this. As a matter of fact, I would even go so far as to say you can't compete with them in the screensavers they make. They make screensavers that clearly have talented artists behind them, as well as programmers. However, there are other ways to make your screensaver attractive. For example, my Abound screensaver has balls bouncing around the screen, filling it up, and I have watched peoples' reactions to it: They are mesmerized by it and will stare at it for long periods of time. Why? People know how balls bounce and react in the physical world we live in, and so they like to watch and see the balls on the computer do the same thing. There is something fascinating with simple physics and motion.

The reason I bring this point up is to suggest that you make a screensaver that is attractive in a different way than dazzlingly beautiful artwork, which takes money and talent to create. Instead, make something that takes advantage of what you are skilled at (for me as an engineering major, it was physics). I am not an artist, so the only artwork I had to do was call OpenGL's gluSphere() function!
Regarding the original topic, if someone pays us to create screensavers, they must sell. So I`d go for it.
I do not know who it is who is selling the screensavers you are creating, but I would warn about someone bundling adware or spyware into them to sell them, which seems like what many companies do these days. For some people this is not a problem. For me, it is because I would not want my mother or friends who are less computer savvy getting that junk on their system. Hopefully the company contracting you is one that does not do this.

[VladR]

I looked at 3planesoft's offerings, and I agree 100% with this. As a matter of fact, I would even go so far as to say you can't compete with them in the screensavers they make. Well, technically it is possible, but the question is whether is it worth it ? I mean, I`d have to spend another 2 months playing with special effects to create nicer screensaver than 3planesoft has. But then we`re getting to the point where it takes about half a year to create one scrensaver. True, if I wasn`t the only programmer on the team, it`d be faster. But there`s no way to justify the costs of additional programmer. Besides, if I`d have to manage third person of the team, i`d spend about 66% of my time just managing other people, and therefore not programming, so the gap of effectiveness of hiring additional programmer would be even lower (for me at least).

Still, if someone has the engine in better state of complexity than we have and has one talented artist willing to work on something for half a year, it is possible (provided both of them won`t mind not getting paid during this timeframe).
Therefore the Entry Gap for this Market is quite high.

[Savant]

One option would be to take an existing engine (like Ogre) and basing the screensavers off of that. At that point it becomes an art problem...

[VladR]

One option would be to take an existing engine (like Ogre) and basing the screensavers off of that. At that point it becomes an art problem...
Not quite. Although I haven`t read a feature-list of Ogre, and I`m sure it has the most basic features as you need for underwater scene (just an example of Nautilus), the real problem is to tweak the DirectX features so that they all blend together. It`s of no use that you have some Ogre`s functions for fog&multitexturing, when you realize you have to tweak the hell out of it to get the right effect in accordance with Front&Back Clipping plane and ZBuffer and MipMap Detail and sane amout of terrain triangles in the scene & few other things, so in the end you HAVE to go deep down at the level of DirectX commands. If you don`t understand the DirectX docs for specific features, Ogre won` be of any help to you, since you have to adjust it to what your artists give you. And, on the contrary, you have to adjust artists`s output so that it fits what DirectX allows you. Because with scenes where the terrain is BIG (in comparison with player) the user will spot instantly that far clipping plane is very near and that objects disappear in fog very fast which would be unrealistic for underwater scene.
If, for example, underwater effect was just about multitexturing with Caustics and turning the fog ON and finding the good fog color, it would be easy. But it`s about 10% of all work involved.

The same about underwater bubbles. I`m sure Ogre has some Particle classes. But does it have specifically underwater particles ? They have to change speed,direction,size,opacity with distance and several other parameters. All of this needs to be tweaked manually to get it right. Sure, you can do similar effect in one day. But it will look far from great and to look great, you`ll need to play with it quite a lot.
Besides, if you have thousands of such particles, it`s critical, you control their creation&lifetime, or the framerate shall go down very fast if you`ll use just some general Particle Class.
Besides, if you watched Nautilus just once - would you say that it has 6 different particle systems just for bubbles ? Most people (including me after first few views) spot 3 of them.

Actually, I got the right effects only by writing specific shaders in ASM. This however means that EVERYTHING has to be rendered with shaders, so if you need another light, well, you`ve got to write a different shader for this. Do you need Animated lightmaps ? Again, specific shader. Do you need some combination of all of above ? Again, another shader.

Of course, you need quality ART, or no shaders shall save you. But it`s just 40% of the work.

Of course, I didn`t mean to bash Ogre. Not at all. I don`t know it. My point is that in the end you need to program a lot of it yourself so that it runs acceptably and you understand what`s going on underneath. So any generic engine is usable only little IMO.