The Score	Selling stuff on the Net: Take 2 - Auction Time
By Ben Calica Gamasutra March 13, 1998 Vol. 2: Issue 11 Past Scores Nintendo Stands Alone [03.13.98] Everything Old is New Again [02.13.98] The Year of the Bottom Feeders [01.30.98] Settle the Score? [View Thread] Haven't joined yet? [Join Now]	It seemed like such a good idea at the time. Sell directly on the net. No more pain of trying to get the endcap at Egghead, much less get in to the store at all. No more getting nuked because the second tier distributor you finally found that sold a bunch of your stuff went out of business owing you a couple of hundred grand. (I personally know of at least 4 companies that almost went under when this happened. Distributors sinking are like ocean liners, you don't want to be close enough to them to get sucked down in their wake when they go under.) And no more making $5 while EA made $20 per box on the product that you hocked your mother's house to get out the door. Net money is pure, net money is 100% and net money is all yours. Not only that, the Government is pretending to be magnanimous and extending the tax free zone on the Internet for another 3 years. That means that anything that doesn't actually have a physical manifestation doesn't really count as a real thing in the government's eyes, hence no tax. (Actually, I think the reason they're doing it is they know full well that all a company needs to do is set up their website in Dominica, and they're living tax free anyway. This way they can make sure that the companies get established here before they try and nab em with tax. But, hey, a 3 year tax free ride is pretty damn cool.) On the web you save serious cash.  You've got no packaging costs, no inventory to maintain, and everybody's equal (Ok, some are more equal then others.)  With huge numbers of people (mostly computer types) spending as much time with their eyeballs on the web as on TV, the web banner advertising is ending up being worth some serious money too, particularly with the search engines, and news services who can throw up relevant ads to what the users actually asked to see. If they're looking for game stuff, who knows, they also might want to buy a game. When you add in the shelf space nightmare, and the web did really look like the place to set up the street-corner briefcase. The street corner analogy turned out to be a little too accurate. The problem was that people just didn't trust web.  It was full of evil hackers waiting behind every Icon to poach their precious credit cards. Not that people wouldn't leave credit slips lying around like confetti, or give credit cards to the phone representative of the Policemen's Other Secret Ball, but obviously there were maniacally clever technoids waiting out on the web for them to make that fatal mistake. I have to admit, the first purchase I made over the web made me very nervous. Not because I thought my credit card was going to be hijacked, but because there wasn't anyone there to say, "Thank you, sir, would you like that gift wrapped." It was unsatisfying. Besides, the web stuff was always there. I could get it tomorrow, or the next day. No sense of urgency, of a blue light bargain that I just had to get right then. Well, the web world has changed big time in the last few months. Amazon was the on-line commerce first for a whole mess of people. It was buying something familiar over this foreign medium, so it was a more gradual snag. They could offer something that you couldn't get with a physical bookstore… every friggin book on the planet, pretty much, so people had a reason to go. And you'd get the book in the mail the next day, so it was satisfying in the same way that it was being able to order software from PC/Mac Connection at 3 a.m. and having it make that nights Airborne. Then came Egghead! The suckers just plain turned virtual. One day their one of the biggest chains of software stores… the next week their overhead has For Rent signs all over it. They have outrageous prices, but you know that because it's Egghead, you'll actually get the stuff you order. You still have to get the endcaps… but they're digital this time. And then there's my new favorite. The on-line auction. Go to www.egghead.com and you'll find a related site called Surplus Auction. These guys are dumping all sorts of cool bargain bin stuff out, and they have a bidding structure that rewards you for getting your paddle first. It's amazing how quickly you'll slam a credit card down just to set up an account when you see something you'd love to have go sailing by. And they do direct emails to anybody who signs up, or stops by, for that matter, letting people know what's going up for bid. So I started thinking. What if I got an email this morning about a new Diablo character, or set of Quake II weapons… only 500 of which were going to be bid on at high noon. Would that same fever grip? Would my credit card be out, especially as I came just so close today and started waiting for tomorrow… hoping something cool would come up. The fever of rarity combined with knowing that it's going, going, gone. Hmm. This stuff is effective. So far I've bought two Logitech mice and a Pentium II 266 computer… and I think I meant to do that too. ;-) To use the online auction model to sell bits and pieces of entertainment, games need to be designed to be modular and securely upgradeable. But hell, things are heading in that direction anyway. Might as well make some money from it. Almost 11pm… got to go check the auction… see ya later. -B Unemployed with a Theater Degree from Brandeis back in 1984, Ben Calica has been making a living in the computer and gaming business in various incarnations since then, Including: Founding Editor of New Media Magazine, First Toys Editor for Wired, one of the few single boys to write for Parents Magazine. Product Manager for the multimedia authoring system, SuperCard Director of Production for CyberFlix; (design credits on Lunicus, Creepy Castle, and conceptual design for Skull Cracker) Product Manger for the ill-fated modem for the Sega Genesis, the Edge, for AT&T [which, by the way, we decided stood for All Tiny Testi---maybe I'd better tell that another time]; Worked for NeXT long enough to get into real good argument with Steve Jobs; And recently was the guy behind Apple Game Sprockets... He did a bunch of work on interactive drama (wrote script for MacWorld CD-ROM game of the year in 1993), before he decided it just didn't work. Spends a lot of free time now lecturing on multi-player/virtual world stuff. For a day job he works as Director of Product Development for ThinkFish, an artistic rendering company that recently merged with Viewpoint Datalabs. He could show you the secret desktop software he's working on, but then he'd have to kill you.