While this hasn't paid for nearly all the time I'd put into it, it did help to make Wildcard Design better known in the BeOS community. Since I already had the demo version of Abuse working on the BeOS, I thought it would be a great idea to actually sell the full version. I talked Dave Taylor at crack dot com into allowing us to port and sell the full version. Rather than a royalty arrangement, they wanted a very reasonable up-front flat fee. This contract was signed at the beginning of July 1998.
Abuse is, in fact, the only game that required an up-front payment which resulted in a profit.
They wanted to do the beta testing, sales, marketing, etc, themselves, and we would receive a small royalty from them for our porting work. Unfortunately, although its been selling for BeOS for almost a year, we have yet to see any of these royalties. At the beginning of December 1998, I quit my job at Beatware, Inc. to work full time for Wildcard Design. I'm happy to have made many friends at Be during this time. Unfortunately, big companies usually don't move very fast, and by the time Activision had the contract for us to sign, it was the middle of March, 1999.