Amiga Piracy Discussion!

[Lord Riton]

I have the feeling this is like trying to prouve that God exists or doesn't exist.. there will always be believers on both side.

My opinion is still that piracy harms the games industry.

Originally Posted by TheCyberDruid

Have a look here : http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2...ss-by-2012.ars
That is with all that oh-so-bad piracy around on every platform.

Without piracy it would be even more.

[gilgamesh]

Originally Posted by Lord Riton

I have the feeling this is like trying to prouve that God exists or doesn't exist.. there will always be believers on both side.

No, it is not. You theory is: Piracy ALWAYS harms. I came up with at least on counter example, so 'always' is out of question. I agree that piracy OFTEN harms.

EDIT: Ok, I think everything has been said. I think maybe we just didn't understand one another's position entirely. Really, we're only apart by the difference between 'always' and 'most often'.

[TCD]

Fair enough, but I hope you've gotten the point that the 'facts' don't really prove the point that the game industry suffers that much from piracy as they claim they do. Like Galahad said in an earlier post, 'someone' will always break the copy protections simply because 'it can be done', so you won't get rid of that. I hardly play any games nowadays and games like Morrowind I have in three versions... The consensus should be that games worth playing are games worth buying and people will do so despite of the possibilty to pirate them.

Originally Posted by Lord Riton

Without piracy it would be even more.

Okay, another point to prove, so let's have another thing to consider : http://www.dailyfinance.com/quotes/e...s-inc/erts/nas
Again sales != game quality or innovative concepts.

[prowler]

Originally Posted by Lord Riton

My opinion is still that piracy harms the games industry.

Originally Posted by gilgamesh

No, it is not. You theory is: Piracy ALWAYS harms. I came up with at least on counter example, so 'always' is out of question. I agree that piracy OFTEN harms.

If by that Lord Riton is saying that piracy is of more harm than help to the games industry, then you are both actually in agreement.

[Lord Riton]

Originally Posted by gilgamesh

No, it is not. You theory is: Piracy ALWAYS harms. I came up with at least on counter example, so 'always' is out of question. I agree that piracy OFTEN harms.

what counter exemple ? there is no counter exemple, even Leisure suit Larry got harmed of piracy a lot, maybe even more than most other games arround then, just you don't notice it because he also got sold a lot more. If you really think that piracy helped to make it sell more, you're just a lost case for me, sorry..

[KevG]

My pennies worth....

When the A500 came out there was no internet or anything similar. If you wanted a game for the Amiga then all you had to go on were screen shots in the magazines. You couldn't see anything move to see if it was either silky smooth or jerk-o-vision (and many games suffered from jerk-o-vision ST ports). So I occasionally took a risk and bought the game based on the images and reviews in the mags. Very often I was dissapointed with the game and felt that I had wasted my money.

Enter the crackers....
These geezers came along and provided a service that allowed people to copy and try out the games first before buying the original. Great idea! But, now that I have got a cracked version of the game why should I fork out my hard-earned cash for the original?

Piracy still happens today but for different reasons. If the internet was available when the A500 was around then I don't think that piracy would have been such a problem because you would be able to see a video of the game on YouTube etc. and you wouldn't have to rely so much on (often biased) reviews in the magazines. This would result in much better games being produced as nobody would want a video of their crap game to be viewed YouTube would they?

So back then there was a lot of misleading marketting going on that allowed a software house to release a crap game and it would sell just because the screen shots looked good. This could not happen today with YouTube and similar services available.

So to sum up, I think that the often misleading and biased views of the magazines was a contributing factor towards piracy on the Amiga.

Erm, thats it. Bye!

Kev G.

[gilgamesh]

I don't mind being a lost case, as long as what I say is logically justifiable. My point with the Larry example is this: Noboy would have taken notice. It had lousy sales. But the pirating crowd made it a phenomenon.
Bruce Everiss mentions something similar with GTA4.

Whereas your point is: Piracy hurts because piracy hurts. No exceptions.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by KevG

So to sum up, I think that the often misleading and biased views of the magazines was a contributing factor towards piracy on the Amiga.

Or the advertisements... I bought Carcharodon: White Sharks just because the ad in one magazine looked awesome. It is/was an average shooter at best, so getting a pirated version first would have been a good idea I guess

[Lord Riton]

Originally Posted by gilgamesh

Whereas your point is: Piracy hurts because piracy hurts. No exceptions.

This is indeed my point of view. sometimes it doesn't hurt to much, even maybe the injury can be close to none, but in my honnest opinion it will never help to sell games.

Here another proof: and this time watch it entierly please !

[ Show youtube player ]

and then let us smoke a round

lol

[rats]

I liked all the demos and music that came with amiga piracy. When the amiga started dying the pirates pretty much owned the platform in the uk.

[gilgamesh]

@Lord Riton:

yep

[Lord Riton]

Originally Posted by rats

I liked all the demos and music that came with amiga piracy. When the amiga started dying the pirates pretty much owned the platform in the uk.

I liked the Demos and the demo makers a lot too. I offten just watched a fiew demos instead of playing a game or doing other stuff. But demo makers are not the same as pirates. eventough sometimes a pirate is also a demo maker or a demo maker a pirate, because both were generaly great at coding.

[gilgamesh]

So I'll just let that stand uncommented, just for the sake of completeness.

Originally Posted by Markus Persson

If someone pirates Minecraft instead of buying it, it means I’ve lost some “potential” revenue… but what if that person likes that game, talks about it to his or her friends, and then I manage to convince three of them to buy the game? I’d make three actual sales instead of blocking out the potentially missed sale of the original person.

http://gigaom.com/2010/09/15/dont-th...-as-marketing/

Sorry guys, no hard feelings.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by gilgamesh

http://gigaom.com/2010/09/15/dont-th...-as-marketing/

Sorry guys, no hard feelings.

Dude and it so has the same layout as the Bruce Everiss blog
Yeah, no hard feelings and enjoy life as you did before

[Lord Riton]

Originally Posted by gilgamesh

http://gigaom.com/2010/09/15/dont-th...-as-marketing/

What i got of this is that the guy says piracy is harmefull but we cannot stop it so let's get the best out of it.

None the less, he would much preffer to not get pirated at all.

For me he is doing wrong when he says that he is for piracy. Or maybe it was just the journalist that wrote the article that made it sound like that..

Edit: look how it starts: "Most video-game developers — along with most musicians, writers, movie producers and virtually every other kind of content creator — see digital piracy as an enemy to be fought with every weapon at their disposal" So even that journalist agrees that that guy is not thinking like the waste majority. I agree , that alone doesn't mean he is wrong, but for me he is.


Edit2: cool makes now over an hour that this post is on top ! guess i definitively got the last word now !

..well, in fact i'm just happy, because i just solved a very hard to track bug on my QON game, i can go happy to bed now and make sweet dreams, gn

[Siggy999]

10 years ago I might have just agreed with the piracy causation. On the surface of it, it makes some sense.

That a game pirated is one less sold, thus one less payment to the publisher and developers (of course assuming that one pirated would equal one sold, and not one pirated would equal one '30 bucks? sod off!' - a very valid counter argument) - as a general statement, yeah, it seems logical, and I couldn't fault anyone for still following that line of thought (though I'm no longer among them).

Where (for me) the line blurs on this subject is that a dollar in the publisher/developer pocket, doesn't really mean a dollar in Commodores pocket.

And Commodore were the ones that dropped the ball.

Sure - games sell computers/consoles. By the time I was scraped my last few sheckles together from my megre pay, the first game I 'received' was Shadow of the Beast. Probably the prettiest game made for the ocs/esc Amiga, in a time where the PC had a handfull of colors and made beep-beeps from it's internal speaker... The second game I 'received' was F18-a inteceptor, which at the time gave a pretty smooth 3d game experience (compared to it's rival platforms in that year)...

My brother, a pilot, loved it so much he sold his PC to buy an Ami 500, when he set it up in his place, his 4 housemates bought them the next week.

2 developers didn't get 5 sales that day, but C= sold 5 more units.

Mind you - I didn't see much prettier games than SoB - it was 'up there' as far as how pretty (not how playable - just how nice looking) you possibly could make something... And for the most part the people who were getting games on the sly, were getting them for a machine they already bought, and that watching one of those games has, in fact, sold them more units.

The blurry line - Developers making/losing money doesn't automatically mean Commodore making/losing more money.

Had C= kept up on the arms race (if it were possible), developers would have stayed anyways. When Doom outsold Windows 95, the writing was pretty much on the wall where gamers were going platform wise, and for what, and the 'fleecing' of C= began in earnest.

For the 10+ years I had my Ami, I only ever witnessed 2 commercials for it, one TV, and one on a local radio show using it's speech synth to tell about the local computer store.

Over years of looking back, I think C= is more responsible for screwing themselves than anything else.

[desiv]

Originally Posted by KevG

When the A500 came out there was no internet or anything similar.

Yes there was..
And I even remember that there was a site in Finland that had a good Amiga archive...

I had to use a shell account on the Sequent to get to the internet and FTP the files, and then I used Z-modem (sz) to send the files to the Amiga.

But it was there..

No Graphical Internet to speak of then tho...
And even DNS was new and frowned on.
If you couldn't remember the dotted quad, you didn't deserve to go there.. ;-)

Man, I'm getting old.. ;-)

desiv

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Siggy999

2 developers didn't get 5 sales that day, but C= sold 5 more units.

Did you just say that, for the guys who make the hardware, piracy can mean increased sales (I mean purely, not with a 'snowball' effect ) ? OMG! You think it's even possible that the Amiga survived longer because there was a vivid pirating bunch on the Amiga? Wow
(that wasn't mean ironic, just nice to read someone could put it into words Siggy999 )

[Christian]

Originally Posted by TheCyberDruid

Or the advertisements... I bought Carcharodon: White Sharks just because the the ad in one magazine looks awesome. It is/was an average shooter at best, so getting a pirated version first would have been a good idea I guess

You think that's bad. I pestered for Outrun on the Amstrad CPC cause it looked awesome in the ads :P

I think I still have it somewhere. Learned a lesson there lol

[Siggy999]

Originally Posted by TheCyberDruid

Did you just say that, for the guys who make the hardware, piracy can mean increased sales (I mean purely, not with a 'snowball' effect ) ? OMG! You think it's even possible that the Amiga survived longer because there was a vivid pirating bunch on the Amiga? Wow
(that wasn't mean ironic, just nice to read someone could put it into words Siggy999 )

hahaha I guess in a way I am :P Overall in the grand scope of things? Who knows, I can only really cite what I had personal experience with.

I used to subscribe to the 'piracy killed the Amiga' idea - but over the years certain things didn't add up for me.
First was that people don't get pirate games for a computer or platform they don't own.
Second was I'd seen personally where a game (pirated or not) displayed on the machine was enough to sell it (the machine).
Third was thinking about the timelines. Many developers carried on after the declaration of bankruptcy by Commodore (the beginning of the end) - so they essentially outlived the machine.
Others like Psygnosis were jumping ship anyways around that time either because of the bankruptcy, or seeing better prospects on other platforms (or both - like Psygnosis).

As far as the whole piracy she-bang went - I think the guy who made Deluxe Galaga was further ahead of the game than most publishers... Make a game that was complete even as a demo version, add more value for the registered version and keep your distribution costs low. I spent the 20 odd bucks on it, and was happy to do so.

If I end up finishing a game for the Ami (or any other machine for that matter) - that would be the road I'd take.