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[hanako]

It's worth noting it only really works for games that are "fun" before they're complete.  Story-based games and content-driven games (like *most* RPGs) don't work as well as things that offer innovative gameplay or "deep" mechanics.

If you're updating on a regular basis and you're creating your content in a fashion such that the game is very fun up to a point and then hits the to-be-continued point, it'll still work. Think of it like a webcomic that you're checking into every week to see how the story has updated.

It may not work as *well* (I have nothing to compare to after all) but it's not like people don't follow serialised stories.

[bateleur]

I'm considering using this model myself, but the one aspect I haven't quite worked out is how to get it to play nicely with payment processing systems.

BMTMicro, for example, seems well set up to allow the customer to download a fixed software package. If I just want to register customers and then let them upgrade to my latest dev build whenever I like, it's all a bit awkward.

[hanako]

I've got an updater built into mine so that they can keep upgrading from the original installer they downloaded after purchase.

If you set the download links to never expire, BMTMicro customers can re-access their download link to get the latest version you've uploaded. You'll still have to nudge it manually now and then if they access from sufficiently different places to make auto-expire kick in though.

It's also possible with BMT Micro to set it up so that you handle the downloads yourself - I know at least one dev who had it set up so that purchases would send information to a database on his site and customers could download as much as they wanted from there.