n. Software so bad or useless that it never gets installed.
2003
In the gaming world, few things exemplify corporate greed as well as poorly made expansion packs. Europa Universalis: Crown of the North falls squarely into this category. From start to finish, it is a poorly conceived, ill-executed, and time-wasting piece of coasterware designed to suck money away from both fans of the much-lauded series and unsuspecting newcomers.
1998
Traveling further down the spiral, the visuals in Spawn set a new low for 32-bit graphics, with excessive clipping, poor textures and incomplete animations that advertise the rush job committed here. Throw in a sorry excuse for a soundtrack and you have a game that's table-coaster-ware. Bottom line: Send this back to hell.
1995 (earliest)
Its marketing plan has changed several times, and one analyst who is a SoftKey fan calls its products ''coasterware,'' because if you don't like the actual software you can use the CD-ROMs as drink coasters since they're so cheap.
"Of course, the emergence of Windows as a widely accepted and widely used operating environment on the PC is certainly not obvious right now. Although sales of Windows have been good, most of it is undoubtedly shelfware."