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Photon · 12 December 2007, 02:07

Software piracy didn't kill the Amiga. I'd say tons more Amigas were sold because of copy parties and quick-ish swapping.

But without copy parties, cracktros, and competition to release cool stuff first, no scene. It's what made the scene blossom from 3K cracktros with color cycle+scroller to groups making multi-disk megademos.

So for the scene it was good, but you can bet your ass small developers (the 1-4 people kind) got tired in the end selling 500-2000 copies of a game that took half a year to make. £30000 hardly covers 2 people's salary + rent a place to work in, not even mentioning packaging the games and marketing them.

So I think when it went from kiddies buying some £8 tape cos they didn't have a dual deck recorder

to kiddies having an X-copy night with a stash of 150 disks, devs ran out of money and they couldn't see enough money coming in, so they gave up and started another career.

Today, most kiddies don't have a "game capable" PC, and if they have a father who does, it's still a matter of setting up torrent tracker, possibly getting an invite, use a DVD burn/mount utility... if they don't know how, it's back to "knowing someone that will burn me a DVD" or maybe go to a LAN for 8yo etc etc.

Also, most games for kiddies are for consoles, PCs have "serious" games now. Roco Loco, platformers, sports games... for PC? nah.

Back then a regular family could have a 10yo who knew perfectly well how to copy a game in 3 minutes flat. Same family, copy a console game? Fageddabawdit! No surprise devs prefer consoles, and make more money.

Some generalisms here, but I hope you catch my drift

ps. My drift is that piracy killed Amiga software development - which eventually led to no new releases. Which led to BBStros over cracktros and stagnation of the scene in the end. (I'm sure the HOL guys can make a chart of #releases/year and see when it happened. Interesting stuff!)

12 December 2007, 02:07	#9
Photon Moderator Join Date: Nov 2004 Location: Eksjö / Sweden Posts: 5,639	Software piracy didn't kill the Amiga. I'd say tons more Amigas were sold because of copy parties and quick-ish swapping. But without copy parties, cracktros, and competition to release cool stuff first, no scene. It's what made the scene blossom from 3K cracktros with color cycle+scroller to groups making multi-disk megademos. So for the scene it was good, but you can bet your ass small developers (the 1-4 people kind) got tired in the end selling 500-2000 copies of a game that took half a year to make. £30000 hardly covers 2 people's salary + rent a place to work in, not even mentioning packaging the games and marketing them. So I think when it went from kiddies buying some £8 tape cos they didn't have a dual deck recorder to kiddies having an X-copy night with a stash of 150 disks, devs ran out of money and they couldn't see enough money coming in, so they gave up and started another career. Today, most kiddies don't have a "game capable" PC, and if they have a father who does, it's still a matter of setting up torrent tracker, possibly getting an invite, use a DVD burn/mount utility... if they don't know how, it's back to "knowing someone that will burn me a DVD" or maybe go to a LAN for 8yo etc etc. Also, most games for kiddies are for consoles, PCs have "serious" games now. Roco Loco, platformers, sports games... for PC? nah. Back then a regular family could have a 10yo who knew perfectly well how to copy a game in 3 minutes flat. Same family, copy a console game? Fageddabawdit! No surprise devs prefer consoles, and make more money. Some generalisms here, but I hope you catch my drift ps. My drift is that piracy killed Amiga software development - which eventually led to no new releases. Which led to BBStros over cracktros and stagnation of the scene in the end. (I'm sure the HOL guys can make a chart of #releases/year and see when it happened. Interesting stuff!)