[JonSick]

I like many others here had about 20-30 original games and then over 120 cracked games.

Did I ever play all of em? Nope! I remember playing alien breed and monkey island so much I bought them both original... alien breed wouldn't let me put on infinate lives and I got pissed off using the code wheel every time on monkey island, so I went back to using the crax - kept the originals nice and clean though!

I'm a creative person myself - I play in metal bands. With metal, particularly black and death metal, the days of charging £10 for an underground band CD are long since gone. Hell, even asking £2 for a metal band's cd-r will always lead to nothing. People these days would rather use that £2 on another pint than your crummy CD. In any case, why should they listen to you?

With metal the only way you get yourself known is to put many hours of slaving into creating your 8-track CD that has to sound good, decent artwork, hours and hours in front of your PC with four cd-writers attached and just burning off copy after copy. But what do you do? You gotta give it away free! If you don't you'll be going home with them cd-rs forever! We're a fairly popular band now - nowhere near sepultura stakes - but doing very well and we're in the unique position of actually being able to charge for our cd now, but we know full well that someone will buy our cd (for £3) and will copy it for friends, make it available on their P2P shares... even in the likes of Germany and Hungary, there are people offering rip-offs of our disk. We don't mind though... why? Because its the only way more and more people will hear us and be interested in us!

Its the same with the amiga! There was LOADS of great games readily available. For most people the biggest sway from things like the PC, Mac and Atari was because they could get tonnes of quality games that were much better than their counterparts on an amiga computer!

Piracy didn't kill the amiga. It was the millions of blunders by CBM that killed the amiga then the tarts that got hold of it afterwards (escom, gateway, etc).

This is another reason why a used a1200 can still command up to £90 for an absolutely pristine in-box unit, stock! Because there is great software still available! The most I've seen things like megadrive or SNES consoles go for is about £10... Those asking £25 for a snes are still left with it!

Game manufacturers have it ALL wrong. I would like an xbox-360! Really would. But paying £50 for a game? Sod the hell off!!!

These companies would make far more by making the consoles a lot more expensive, but then the games dirt cheap! If I could buy a 360 for, say, £359, but then alll the games were £10 each, would that not be better?

I pirated games because I was young and didn't have the money to blow £30 a twist on amiga games! I did where I could, or wanted to, but otherwise the lure of £1 per disk at the car booty, or free off my mates, did wonders!

I used to go with a few friends of mine. We used to go and buy some blank floppies for about £5 per ten, prolly bought about 20 each, then we used to go to the car booty, buy about 3 or 4 games each, come back to mine and copy each others! The pirate got wind of this, worked out what we were doing, and even HE got pissy! Even though he was making about £30 a week off us combined! But anyway, he could also get any game we wanted! We could ask him for it one week and he'd have it the next week! Still the same price of £1 per disk - somehing that wasn't possible with shops.

So lets narrow it down.

Pirates could in general get you any game you wanted within a week- shops couldn't
Pirates only charged maximum £1 a disk - shops didn't
Pirates understood the market: young kids whose parents weren't gonna lay £30 a week pocket money on them every week - shops were clueless to this
Pirates were able to provide games in most cases with decent trainers on them for lame players like me - shops didn't and neither did software houses.
Pirates were also the reason I would guess that most people bought amigas - Shop's only sold them to whoever came in.
Pirate and PD groups also promoted the amiga - I haven't yet seen an advert for amiga, apart from shop ones. Did CBM ever even do this?
Pirates supported their software: If your disk was faulty, they would happily replace it and give you another game on top as an apology - shops never wanted to know.
If my pirated disk ever did develop a fault, I could just go get another copy of one of my mates. My bloodnet disk 8 is still faulty, neither the shop or software house wanted to know! I ended up buying a pirate copy.
I could back up my pirate games - no chance with original games! Meaning I'd always have a copy somewhere or another!


So in actual fact, pirates were more educated in the market and knew their target audience better than these software houses or CBM! Same as now! I know the metal markets! I know its a full on waste of time to try promoting my music in the local bhangra arts center! I know I'd be much better off promoting it down the camden underworld!!!

If CBM had more of a clue about their target audiences and promoted their machine as such, they probably would be still around today!!! Possibly not amiga, but CBM definately!

Jon




Just as a quickie edit: I actually do some side-work in console repairs these days, my biggest draw being installing chips to playstation 2s and xbox 360s. I know why people are installing these chips, I know full well! Fact is they bring me the chip and instructions I'll do the soldering and as far as I'm concerned, they want to play the imported games. The fact that I know all too well that they're going off to blockbuster to rent some games a dvd-r em is neither here nor there. But I tell you 99% of the guys who ask me to do this are young kids! Kids cannot afford £50 a game! Parents can't afford £50 a game! The only people who can are either rich rap starts or parents/25-30 yr olds with a combined income of over £100kpa!

I understand this and I know nothing about consoles! Why doesn't nintendo or any of the other software houses know this?