marketing a modders engine?

[scratch]

hi, i've been working on an engine (3d, scripted) for a while now, and its soon time to start marketing it. I want to market it as a modders engine, ie: you buy the engine + license to create mods and sell them as your own games.

how would I market it? its EXTREMELY easy to mod, I'd supply exporters for most popular 3d modeling apps, textures are dds, scripting is lua, and I would supply some basic tutorials and models to get you started.

should I go about creating a simple game for it as an example? or market a game with an option to purchase a modders licence?

opinions?? ideas?? comments??

thanks

[Sune]

I couldn't imagine paying for an unproved engine. I would want to see at least one good game made in it. But then again, we never like paying for anything and always use open source software or write everything from scratch (like our own engine).

[Mattias Gustavsson]

I think that to be prepared to buy an engine, a lot of people want to see one or more games made with the engine, and not only demo games, but commercial games being sold and preferably being at least moderately successful.

Also, getting the source code to the engine is a given, but paying for it, one would also expect a decent level of support as well.

There's a lot of engines around that can be used for no fee (I won't call them "free", because many of them comes with quite restrictive licenses), and given the fact that many programmers prefer to build their own tech to some extent, it can be hard to compete if you offer a pay-for engine...