Did piracy kill the amiga?

[mrbob2]

My answer, of course not. It was the same as the other computers, spectrum, c64, amstrad etc. The machines had a finite lifespan as the hardware couldnt be upgraded or as in the amiga, didnt have the financial clout to compete with the pc/microsoft.

I know piracy harms developers and its illegal but when i was at school EVERYONE who owned an amiga owned copied games and the amiga was i reckon the 1st machine for people to create "games lists for"

In my 24 years of gaming ive never heard of a developer go bust due to piracy.

Thanks to the net i have ammased a collection of around 3gb of amiga games. In my eyes my collection is complete, every game ive always wanted i now own. As some of these games a are probably still owned by some company or other, am i being naughty?

If i borrow a friends dvd film and copy it to dvd its copyright theft and naughty..... If the film is on tv and i record it to watch another time, is it still theft?

If its just the film from start to finish, whats the difference?

Just a few things going round my head tonight lol

[killergorilla]

Pirates killed the Amiga. Actual swashbuckling Pirates.

[mr_a500]

Originally Posted by killergorilla

Pirates killed the Amiga. Actual swashbuckling Pirates.

Damn! I knew it!

[mrbob2]

You mean that sid mier game that was coming to the amiga? Flippin beard wearing, 1 legged parot fiddlers!

[DamienD]

There are soooo many threads on EAB about this, here's just a small few:

... Did the pirates killed the Amiga before it's time?
... Piracy/Cracked Games
... Piracy - the cure?
... piracy
... Pirate or Law Abider?
... PIRACY! Good or Bad?

[killergorilla]

You know what really grinds my gears?

YOU DAMIEND, F*CK YOU!

[Zetr0]

@mrbob2

if you consider the existing fucktards running amiga.inc at the moment as pirates... then yes.... Pirates Killed the Amiga.!!!

[EmuChicken]

if you couldnt copy games, no-one would have known how great the computer was cos they couldnt see the games in action.... and only a handful would have bought the amiga in the first place X)

yes, I bought my share of games, you know how BIG them game boxes were!!?

[Photon]

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!)

[paranoid]

Originally Posted by mrbob2

My answer, of course not. It was the same as the other computers, spectrum, c64, amstrad etc. The machines had a finite lifespan as the hardware couldnt be upgraded or as in the amiga, didnt have the financial clout to compete with the pc/microsoft.

I'd say this is pretty spot on.. Except, I'd add a little more to it and that Commodore gave up without much fight. I think the ones running Commodore at the time might have been able to do more financially, but figured it was better (for them) to just let things slide until they could just go out of business, without much financial harm to themselves.

However, that a computer is going to die of old age isn't so much the question as whether or not piracy murdered it in its sleep.

I know piracy harms developers and its illegal but when i was at school EVERYONE who owned an amiga owned copied games and the amiga was i reckon the 1st machine for people to create "games lists for"

In my 24 years of gaming ive never heard of a developer go bust due to piracy.

I imagine there's a few, actually. In a world with no piracy (philosophically speaking) there might be more people that would buy some title that otherwise didn't do well enough for the company to try again. But then, talking about the Amiga itself -- Commodore wasn't a (software) developer in the same sense. You can't pirate hardware (easily) and no way could someone cobble together an Amiga from parts from Radio Shack as a way to skirt the cost of an Amiga.

["in the same sense" to mean only software or a focus on it.. Of course AmigaOS is technically software and could be pirated and they did AmigaVision (among other things?) but the piracy of those things didn't put a dent in Amiga computer sales, surely. And I added "easily" for hardware, because I do remember plans for a couple things floating around, like some hardware copier, but I know of no one that actually made them.. Also, thinking of early stories of the Amiga, I imagine one could homebrew an Amiga from plans downloaded off a BBS, but you might as well get a part time job for a couple weeks instead considering the work it would take.]

Thanks to the net i have ammased a collection of around 3gb of amiga games. In my eyes my collection is complete, every game ive always wanted i now own. As some of these games a are probably still owned by some company or other, am i being naughty?

I'd argue that it is naughty, just not very naughty. Unless Team 17 has a warehouse of Superfrogs it's trying to unload (or something similar), the developer isn't missing any money from your copied Superfrog. However, the value of an original Superfrog trying to be sold on ebay has decreased, though, probably just slightly. Having said that, beyond the actual boxes of Superfrog, Team 17 holds the copyright to Superfrog, and if they wanted to sell it to be emulated on Xbox, your copy would devalue their profits similarly.

[You'd have to find someone that finds Superfrog on ebay, would otherwise pirate if they could, but for some reason can't, and would buy off ebay. Someone that wants an original for the manual, etc doesn't care that someone has just emailed them Superfrog as an attachment.]

If i borrow a friends dvd film and copy it to dvd its copyright theft and naughty..... If the film is on tv and i record it to watch another time, is it still theft?

If its just the film from start to finish, whats the difference?

Technically speaking, "another time" is fine -- if you mean just once and not to watch more than once, or give to a friend, etc. If I remember correctly, in the US anyway, there was a big lawsuit over VCRs back in the day, and it was dismissed for "time delay recording" saying someone can record a show they'd miss in order to watch it (once) later. But it didn't allow for someone to do more than that.

(And as noted, this has been hashed out before it seems.. But I do like the discussion.. )

[Ironclaw]

PC killed the Amiga imo.

[cronos]

Commodore killed the Amiga.

[Ironclaw]

Gameboy killed the Amiga.

[cronos]

Ah, the Gameboy... I should have known... Evil Nintendo!

[humble worm]

I killed the amiga. I trod on it with my wooden leg and then my parrot took a shit on it.

[Jope]

My Amiga never actually died, it's still running!

[Ironclaw]

Originally Posted by Jope

My Amiga never actually died, it's still running!

With WinUAE in the existance today, who cares if an Amiga computer still works or not ? .

Not me, and ya all know it ! .

[Zetr0]

I rekon it was KG's self made internet pr0n that killed the miggy scene....

[killergorilla]

You post whore.

Just because I make better shortbread than you.

[mailman]

Who was to blame: piracy or bad management? Read the fifth part of Jeremy's story on Ars Technica. Find out yourself.