When did PC gaming start to make an impact in Europe?

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Aladin

Were protections as common on PC as on Amiga? (To find out if the number of game sales is representative of the number of players).

Manual protection was pretty much the same, but I would say that physical protection on floppy disks was less common on the PC. I mean you could just install the game to a hard drive anyway.

[Aladin]

I asked because I remember that in games in 1989, we often photocopied protection codes and that there was no cracktro. But that didn't stop the games from being copied. And I didn't have a hard drive, just two 5 1/4 drives

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Aladin

I asked because I remember that in games in 1989, we often photocopied protection codes and that there was no cracktro. But that didn't stop the games from being copied. And I didn't have a hard drive, just two 5 1/4 drives

That's a fair point. In the 80s I guess there were more physically protected games (but like you said some form of protection codes was far more common). Once a hard drive install is possible it makes far less sense to protect the actual media the game is delivered on.

[donnie]

Pc where insanely expensive. When we bought our first family pc it cost something like 16000 sek, that is probably 4000 euros today.

before 94,95 id say most if not all pc were work pcs. People around me started buying pc around 94-95 for family or gaming purposes. This is also when svga, cdroms, sound cards were standard.

[TCD]

This is an ad from the German magazine Power Play from June 1992:

Two points:
1) It is bundled with Monkey Island II.
2) That sure doesn't look like a work PC to me.

[donnie]

thats one nice looking pc.

[TCD]

I just entered the price into one of those 'inflation calculators' and the 2,999 DM from 1992 would be 2.945,35 € today.

[donnie]

I think those inflation numbers are off. I check one of the swedish inflation calculators and it said the same thing. 16k sek was more than a months salary.

even so. 2945 euros is not a mass market price.

We have to take in to account that in 92 the average gamer was a kid without an disposable income. The first generation mainstream gamers where just hitting 20.

Today the average gamer is probably around 35-40.

[Megalomaniac]

So £1, $1 and €1 in today's prices all roughly equal 1DM in 1992 prices, within maybe 10%. I'll try to remember that. But yet, PCs weren't truly affordable for the average gamer even in the mid-1990s. For a lot of us it was probably more a case of persuading dad that we'd used it for serious stuff as well? Even an A500 was over £1000 in today's money for most of its lifespan.

Having On-disk copy protection meant improved performance if you accessed the hardware directly perhaps using non-standard trickery, but it also meant a game not being hard drive installable. On the PC where machines came with hard drives by the late 1980s, and disk-access-heavy genres like sims, strategy and especially adventures dominated at that time, point 2 mattered a lot more than point 1. On the Amiga, where even small hard drives cost more than the entire A500 (the A600 and A1200 changed this slightly) and action games were at least as big as sims / strategy / adventure, point 1 mattered more. Maybe the proportion of pirated copies to bought games was higher on the Amiga than the PC too?

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

For a lot of us it was probably more a case of persuading dad that we'd used it for serious stuff as well?

That was surely the case. It is just important to note that gaming PCs were a thing as early as 1992 and not only after Doom was released.