Selling Software Products
In a digital economy there are three ways to sell your software products:
- Produce packaged software in a factory and sell it in retail stores.
- Produce packaged software in a factory and sell it through your e-commerce firm.
- Sell your software as a digital download through your e-commerce firm.
E-commerce takes years to gain traction and become mainstream. Until it does, software is sold mainly through retail channels — so it is worth mastering the production and sale of packaged software first.
Producing packaged software in a factory
Once your software has been developed in a software firm, a factory can turn it into packaged software products to sell at retail.
Packaged software is produced from DVDs and paper, as the Manufacturer’s Guide shows.
Find the new factory icon
Once a software project is complete in your software company, a new icon appears on the factory interface. Use it to set up a production layout for packaged software automatically.
Choose the software to make
Clicking the icon prompts you to pick which of your software products the factory should produce.
Production begins
The factory then produces the software, provided the required raw materials are available.
Selling software through e-commerce
Selling your software through e-commerce — either as a digital download or as a packaged product — is covered on its own page.
E-CommerceReleasing new versions
In the software business you have to keep releasing better versions to keep customers happy and sales up. Commercially successful software products all have new releases on a regular basis; those left without a new release for years inevitably suffer poor sales.
To see how often new versions appear, open the Software report and look at the sales graphs. New version releases are marked with yellow lines.
New versions are developed from two buttons on the software company interface.
[New Version]
Starts a project to develop a new version of a software product completed here previously.
As a rule of thumb, a new version should be noticeably better than the one before it. Invest the time and resources to improve the underlying tech before contemplating a release.
[Auto] — develop new versions automatically
When enabled, the next version is developed automatically as soon as more advanced tech has been researched. Useful for cutting down micromanagement when you have a lot of software companies to run.