Piracy/Cracked Games

[BlaCkAdDa]

I was a young teenager when I had my amiga... all my money went into buying games and so forth. I pirated stuff too, but reality is I wouldnt have bought too many more games anyway, and I still bought all those games I really liked etc so no real harm done.

Now I buy all my games because I can, I earn good money and I cant be bothered playing that many games anyway so I just buy the ones I plan to play for a long time.

When we had our amiga computers, games were too expensive to buy. Allthough my dad had a few originals (Cannon Fodder 2, Syndicate) most of our games came from swapping copies with friends.

I don't feel guilty about using pirate software. Now that I'm earning, I can afford to buy some software, I don't mind paying a reasonable price for a game that I will enjoy playing. What I object to is overpriced software. I recently needed a copy of Microsoft (boo!!!) project. and over £400 its out of my price range, this made me think that; If software developers were to significantly lower their prices, and increase copyright protection, then there may be more of an equilibrium, where people have to buy originals, but are not being ripped off.

When I first got my Amiga 500 there was very little on the shelves anyway and I certainly had no access to pirate games. Over the next couple of years I spent an absolute fortune on games and software, and I've always liked to own the software I use.
One of the turning points for me though was when the shops started to refuse to allow you to return games just because you thought they were crap. Upto that point (probably 88/89) you could return a game with the reason that you didn't like it. Anyone else remember that ?
By the time I had an A4000, I had some mates that could get cracked copies of virtually anything and one of them got sent parcels of cracked software to distribute every week. I pretty much stopped buying software for the Amiga.

[petza]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Think the main problem was the jump in price from 8bit machines. Software companies were under the illusion that because 16bit machines were more expensive, then people must be able to afford to pay more for the games.

Most prestige 8 bit titles were £14.99 or less, Amiga traditionally was £25.99.

Once software companies had written their game engines, not a lot was needed to tweak them into becoming different games.

Piracy was always going to happen no matter what the price, but £25 for a game was a lot of money for me. And I bought what I liked to play, but how fucked off would you feel to buy a game, and then complete it the day after you got it?

i think the reason game prices shot up is becuase the 8 bit games were coded by 1 man he used to do everything the gfx sound coding,the 16 bit games were made by a team 1 person did the coding another did the gfx another did the sound,all these guys need paying


i used to pirate so did nearly everyone i bought around 10 games on the amiga and ST


i never felt guilty about pirating i bought every single spectrum becuase they were cheap

i buy every pc game now because i can afford them and im too lazy to search for pirate pc sites that let u download games u always have to vote or some crap

[girv]

Here's my 2E-2.

Back in the day, I was never into the Amiga "scene". I didn't know any crackers or have contacts in any groups. There were just a bunch of us at school / university that had Amigas through to about 1994.

I used to kind of obsessive-compulsively collect Amiga games no matter if I wanted to play them or not. I / we got the games from local rental shops, postal games rental clubs and, when we got to university and had fast access to this new "inter-net" thing, from ftp and fsp sitez. My mate was the mad downloader who would spend all day poking around the sites for new warez and download them to the uni servers. Then I would copy the archives to 1.44Mb floppies for transfer to bootable Amiga floppies via the swanky high-tech HD floppy drive hanging off my A1200. When we got hold of an actual original, I would sometimes crack it and spread it to our little group.

Did I play these games? Rarely. I wasn't that interested in the games, it was just about having them and they were easy to get. Very few of them ever got more than a quick "does it boot?" check before going into storage. The main entertainment for me came from cracking the originals, but occasionally a game would hold my attention and in these cases I felt duty bound to buy it. Games like Lemmings, Frontier and Alien Breed 3D for example. I also bought any "serious" software I used.

I ended up with about 1,500 disks of games. I dumped them about six years ago when I moved house, it was crazy to keep them, crazy to have them in the first place. The vast majority of them probably hadn't seen a floppy drive since 1994.

Do I feel bad about the cracking or the copying? A little, I guess. I don't think I did much harm as there was no way I was going to buy these games in the first place. If I couldn't have got them so easily I wouldn't have had them. The only harm to the Amiga software industry I would have done would have been from cracking the originals for our little group of 5 or 6 - there would be a slight possibility that that stopped one or two of us from buying one or two of those particular games. Total lost sales: approximatley 4; bill me.

Did piracy kill the Amiga? No. The death of Commodore and the subsequent prolonged and ill-fated takeover farces starved the platform of updated hardware for far too long and the users drifted away to shinier things. But for me it wasn't about the shiny but rather the ability to poke under it, so I stayed.

And I'm still here

[wakeupbomb]

I think we had about 3 copied Amiga games, Doodlebug, Mortal Kombat and Walker. We just bought almost all of our games, which means I still have quite a large collection They just seemed worth it...
And I still buy them now off Ebay

[petza]

Originally Posted by wakeupbomb

I think we had about 3 copied Amiga games, Doodlebug, Mortal Kombat and Walker. We just bought almost all of our games, which means I still have quite a large collection They just seemed worth it...
And I still buy them now off Ebay

good little boy

[wakeupbomb]

Originally Posted by petza

good little boy

someone's gotta do it

[jaycee]

In my opinion, what killed the Amiga was Commodore's management screwups.. not keeping the Amiga hardware current enough which allowed the PC to take over.

Yes, I did pirate games, as many others did, but most of the time the disks were corrupt or had problems on my A1200 anyway. I seem to remember hacking into quite a few cracked games to fix A1200-related problems

The whole try-before-you-buy thing really works, and good demo's on coverdisks really helped with that. For example, I bought Hired Guns and Worms, solely because the coverdisk demo's impressed me so much. Hired Guns still does impress me, I've just managed to get a 100% cracked version onto my PC to play under WinUAE (I figure I'm allowed - I did buy the original after all!)

I actually remember a friend of mine taking the piss out of me because I bought hired guns. "You paid all that money when you couldve just got a pirate copy" he said. Two weeks later, he was asking me if he could copy my Disk 3 because his pirate version was corrupt... a week after that, he found the "THIS IS AN ILLEGAL COPY" trap in his saved games

[dirkies]

I know Amiga got popular in the local computerclub where I was since most parents saw that not only it was a great machine for their kids, but that software was abundantly available at no extra price, unlike the Sega & other Jap console stuff that was around, which had the hidden price of paying a lot more than the console itself to keep your kids happy. So it was good for the Amiga there was piracy, it allowed to be accessible for most normal folks, so many 500s were sold that way.
And the more hardware is out there, the more chances a software company can sell more copies, despite being pirated a lot. Of course it can kill a company and it is theft, but I would feel more comfortable writing a game for a machine of which 100,000 are sold and is easy pirate-able then writing it for a console of which 5,000 are sold and is very hard to pirate.
Amiga for me was the logical next step after C64, and the copying of games was part of the "necessary tradition". Most games I would not even have bothered having/buying, unless I had them easily for free, moreover since I did not have the money to buy them (my parents bought the hardware for me). And in my local village, nowhere were Amiga software shops, you had to drive (=find a driver) to a city 20 miles away to see any $$$ Amiga-software shop. Magazines were the primary source of info of new games, not the shops... gee, imagine internet those days! (I never was in the BBS or cracker scene, so I had to find all out by friends and mags what was happening.

It was a nice period, and I only bought some productivity software and wrote some myself, but games were more like some 'freebie bonus' experience, the Amiga was much more interesting than just games for me. I did play a lot of different games to see what was new, but only a few attracted me enough to spend more than 30 minutes with it, and since I already had them at the moment of discovery, why bother go buy them afterwards? (and 99% of all my fave games were from 1987-1989 only!)
Oh well, I do not try to say piracy is ok, it is not and never will, but for most souls it was the only way to have cheap entertainment, are we now criminals who killed Amiga? No, I would have never bought one if I had to pay 25 quid for each floppy I wanted to boot.
Somewhat similar and related, the same is the case with Sattelite TV. Today I read an article on SAT TV providers who make first their encryption VERY hard to crack, but then unofficially leak their decryption codes months before switching to an uncrackable system, just to: a) sell their stock of old vulnerable decoders and, b) to create a public who will buy the subscription once they realize their pirate decoders are worthless when the new encryption system is in place, but saw enough during the previous months with the leaked decryption methods/keys to decide it is worth buying... Not a bad strategy I think...
Amiga died because the manufacturer stopped innovating, made a lot of costly mistakes (so all this nothing to do with piracy) and left their user base with nothing to re-motivate themselves, so they left bit by bit, seller & buyer, towards other platforms.

Amen!

[IFW]

"of which 100,000 are sold and is easy pirate-able then writing it for a console of which 5,000 are sold and is very hard to pirate."

The problem is the description and the numbers...
"of which 10,000 are sold and is easy pirate-able than writing it for a console of which 200,000 are sold and requires hardware to pirate."

Multiply these numbers to get a picture of today's pc vs console market as well.

[ungi]

Well, one thing that most posters here show is that we all were kids when the Amiga was a popular machine. So, noone had the money to buy a lot of games at this time.

I was 15 when I bought my first Amiga 500, and naturally I got lots of copied stuff and could not afford to buy more than a few originals every year. Still, I did buy my most favorite games of the time, like Dungeon Master, some Magnetic Scrolls and Infocom games, Drakkhen, Populous, Genghis Kahn, F-16 Fighting Falcon and a few more.

And guess what? The most fun I had at that time was with the originals. I loved manuals and the gimmicks in the boxes.

I also did a very strange thing: I sometimes played through a game and AFTER that, often years later, I purchased the original. Strange, isn´t it?

I do think that the Amiga was hurt by piracy in the later years. First, pirated copies helped to sell the hardware and make the Amiga big. Later, pirated copies led to some very bad sales of software that would have been worth buying, like Lionheart, BC Kid or Fire & Ice. The software companies switched to more profitable machines, which in turn hit sales of the Amiga hardware.

Still, the reason why the Amiga died was ONLY due to Commodore getting bancrupt. I am just reading "On the Edge", a very interesting book revealing some nice information about Commodore. With Commodore intact and bringing newer Amigas to the shops, there would have been a good chance that the Amiga would be still a living machine today. And it was not the Amiga that killed Commodore, it were serious management errors. The Amiga had the potential to carry Commodore, like Apple could survive in the shadow of those shitty PC machines.

Anyway, today the Amiga is dead, and most ppl that still use it seem to be guys in their 30s that grew up with it. Ppl that understand that the Amiga certainly is something "special" :-).

And, btw, games of the kind that were written in the glory days of the Amiga are just not made anymore. I hate those crapppy 3D shooters, they just make me sick. I don´t play Alien Breed 3D on the Amiga as well. I do play newer PC games sometimes, but I also still enjoy playing those old Amiga classics these days. And I still buy old Amiga games that I solved 10 or more years ago :-).

I have completely abandoned pirated copies today, if I play a PC game I downwload the demo and if I like what I see I buy the original, but it makes a difference if you have 20 euros or 2,000 euros of disposable income every month...

[Galahad/FLT]

Another thing that didn't help, is the fact that the Amiga used disks.

Today, I have bought quite a few PS2 originals, but I don't buy them at full price, I wait until they drop in price as an exchange game.

Cartridges and DVD's are relatively easy to check, a disk isn't.

Lots of things buggered up the Amiga, Commodore being the major factor.

[mr.spiv]

Originally Posted by Jope

Here's a couple shots of mine. ;-)

http://jope.fi/OQO_Emu/

I really should get around to installing 3.9 with a P96 screen of 800x640 16bit.. :-D

Geez now that looks nice!

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by mr.spiv

Geez now that looks nice!

Mr.Spiv = Stonecracker?

[StingRay]

Yes, it's Mr. StoneCracker. Hello Spivz0r, nice to see you here too.

[Charlie]

Originally Posted by Jope

Here's a couple shots of mine. ;-)

http://jope.fi/OQO_Emu/

I really should get around to installing 3.9 with a P96 screen of 800x640 16bit.. :-D

A bit slow under WinUAE?

Hmmm.
More than enough to run Amithlon...
If it will intall.
I wonder if GC would do an updated kernel?

[mr.spiv]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Mr.Spiv = Stonecracker?

D'oh.. my cloaking device failed

[StingRay]

Originally Posted by mr.spiv

D'oh.. my cloaking device failed

You can run but you can't hide :P

[andy2004]

Hi Mr Spiv great fan of your StoneCracker cruncher for the amiga , just 1 question. What was the last version you wrote? I have the 4.10.3 Professional.