Are simshops an endangered specie ? 2/2

François "Navman" Dumas made a smart comment about the precedent post on simshops. Brian Sommers also gave a good comment yesterday. So i am publishing the whole text from  Francois, hoping that will interest every simmer and not only designers and developers.

"I fully agree with Brian [Sommers]. The 'distributors', the shops that add little or nothing of value to the actual products', are getting way too expensive in comparison to their services. With simMarket taking 35%, Aerosoft even 40%, and others not far away, it makes an already bad income on add-on development just about worthless.

It is one of the reasons that designers start running their own shops (I know it was for me). You are correct that not all designers will have enough TIME for this, and hence the support may fail. Or the presentation of the wares, for that matter ;-) But lets face it, other than the 'commercial support' the regular distributors don't offer much else. It is STILL up to the developers to provide technical support on their products and BE INSIDE of the communities. Running your own shop as a developer DOES have a lot of drawbacks however. - People need to KNOW and GO there (extra 'effort') - There isn't much to browse, so no 'collateral sales' will be done - It takes valuable time away from actually developing new products - It takes time away from SUPPORTING existing products - It adds to the learning curve and adds a financial risk I know, I have pondered over these things for many years, while still working for simMarket. I took the step more or less forced by the economic situation of losing contracts and money, and losing access to certain sites. I am not a developer (well, a re-starting one, but that doesn't count), so I can spend some more of my time at it. But I also decided that JUST for my own products it doesn't make sense. So MY business model is to have a shop for our own products and products of befriended and/or related developers. I do NOT want to sell shit in my shop (pardonnez le mot), I don't want to sell farm simulators and I don't even want to become rich of it. So I invite CERTAIN brands, companies and individuals to sell with us, at a VERY reasonable price...... and we'll see where were headed that way. So back to your original question, YES, the shops are in danger, but not more than individual developers are of losing too much money to continue their work/hobby. Oh, our shop? It's here: http://silvercloud-store.com/index.php

Francois "Navman" Dumas.

A simmer asked me by email what means B2B ? Its a professional gibberish word to talk about business to business and here, relations between developers, designers, resellers etc.