RE: Amiga users didn't upgrade

[TEG]

Originally Posted by TCD

Edit: The images can be found in my user folder on the file server as 'Amiga users didn't upgrade_Images.zip'. I've numbered them and all images from Amiga Format have the issue number in the file name.

but where is it exactly? In the Zone? I can't find it. Anyway you did a good job!

[Aulapatchuc]

Originally Posted by TEG

but where is it exactly? In the Zone? I can't find it. Anyway you did a good job!

https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=43633

[TCD]

Originally Posted by TEG

but where is it exactly? In the Zone? I can't find it. Anyway you did a good job!

Here is a direct link to my uploads folder on the file server: http://ftp2.grandis.nu/turran/FTP/~Uploads/TCD/

[Turrican_3]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

I would be cautious before saying that piracy did kill the Amiga.
Piracy was also the reason why people bought Amiga. It was the exact same story for the PlayStation and the brand seems still strong to me nowadays.

It was a double edged sword as usual.

Piracy definitely helps spreading the hardware, but if (almost) everybody gets your stuff for free you're going to get out of business sooner rather than later.

There's a reason 16bit consoles, despite having a way higher barrier of entry (devkits were still quite expensive back then) kept being supported while the Amiga was quickly abandoned even before Commodore died: they had a massive userbase and piracy was almost non-existant.

Regarding Playstation though: yes, piracy was huge there, too. But their userbase was even higher and they managed to get enough people purchase original games. None of this, unfortunately, applies to the Amiga.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Turrican_3

Regarding Playstation though: yes, piracy was huge there, too. But their userbase was even higher and they managed to get enough people purchase original games. None of this, unfortunately, applies to the Amiga.

That's the interesting bit: The PS had enough people willing to buy games even with a lot of piracy around. It's similar on PC. Also the C64 did fine with a lot of piracy. Just on Amiga it didn't work out.

[Turrican_3]

Yeah that's how I believe it (did not) work, unfortunately. Something similar happened with the Dreamcast too I think.

You might argue this ended up actually killing the Amiga as per the original claim, since it ultimately meant your platform wasn't attractive enough not only for publishers but for end users too. Less Amiga games sold --> less new interesting games produced --> less hardware sold --> less profit for Commodore --> less resources to properly run the company, basically the perfect storm.

Of course Commodore management did its part far too well, too.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Turrican_3

You might argue this ended up actually killing the Amiga as per the original claim, since it ultimately meant your platform wasn't attractive enough not only for publishers but for end users too. Less Amiga games sold --> less new interesting games produced --> less hardware sold --> less profit for Commodore --> less resources to properly run the company, basically the perfect storm.

Yep. In 1991 the Amiga was the system that people wanted to have and in 1992/1993 that started to change quickly. I don't have exact numbers, but I think it's safe to say that the piracy situation didn't drastically changed on the Amiga between those 3 years

[sokolovic]

I will say what I've said before. If the piracy was such a problem on the Amiga, the system would'nt have been supported by publishers up until two years after Commodore demise.

The A1200 woudn't have been supported like it was supported (compare it to the Atari Falcon for instance).

I'd even add that some publishers like Infogrames or Sierra WENT BACK on the Amiga after having announced in 1992 that they will leave the machine. Even Acclaim entered the Amiga market to publish Mortal Kombat 2 by themselves.

Publishers were making money on the Amiga. But of course you couldn't support a system without any commercial support and not even a mother company for a long time. So eventually this support dried up.

On a side note, the most acclaimed Day of the Tentacle sold only 80 000 copies worldwide on both PC and Mac. So it wasn't just an Amiga problem. I would go even further by saying that an Amiga version (even just an AGA one) would have increased sales number significantly.

I'm not saying that piracy didn't had an impact on the Amiga. Just that this impact wasn't as strong and definitive than it is generally presented.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

I'd even add that some publishers like Infogrames or Sierra WENT BACK on the Amiga after having announced in 1992 that they will leave the machine. Even Acclaim entered the Amiga market to publish Mortal Kombat 2 by themselves.

When looking through Amiga magazines there's an interesting thing happening between 1993 and 1995. The game advertisements go down from 1993 until Commodore went under and then afterwards they increase in number again (slightly) for some time. It's almost as if some publishers regained hope that the Amiga will do better without Commodore

[Turrican_3]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

So it wasn't just an Amiga problem

Never claimed otherwise.

But piracy on the Amiga was definitely an issue, especially combined with a relatively low install base: basic math suggests if you managed to get the exact same percentage of owners go and purchase games, you would likely end up selling an order of magnitude more units elsewhere. An awful, awful vicious-cycle unfortunately.

The ever increasing technical gap (gaming PCs becoming more and more popular; A500 which was basically a cost-reduced A1000 having to compete with that *and* more advanced consoles like SNES and Megadrive; A1200 was better, but installed base was negligible to say the least) of course further complicated things by making multiplatform releases/portings more difficult, when they were planned that is.

The A1200 woudn't have been supported like it was supported

Last but not least, "support" is a way too generic term. While there were companies (especially here in Europe) that highly regarded the Amiga, leveraging on its unique capabilities and doing their best to release highly polished stuff, that wasn't always the case and this very likely happened due to development budgets limited by sales projections, in turn clearly affected by rampant piracy.

Perhaps my memory is failing me but as far as I remember there were very few AGA-only releases, most of the time you got a slightly more colorful version of the equivalent A500 version.

Yes Commodore - as stated before - did its part to ruin the platform, but let's not pretend to picture the A1200 as a worthy successor of the A500 with tons of must-haves, shall we? (I swear I wish it ended up being so! but that's not the point)

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Turrican_3

Yes Commodore - as stated before - did its part to ruin the platform, but let's not pretend to picture the A1200 as a worthy successor of the A500 with tons of must-haves, shall we? (I swear I wish it ended up being so! but that's not the point)

I don't pretend that, but for a machine that had 1 year and a half of true commercial life, the library of the A1200 is far from being anecdotal.

If the Amiga was plagued by piracy, why would some developpers support the A1200 with no installed user base ? Why would they even make enhanced version of OCS games if it wasn't in a sort of way profitable ?

They would have done what they did to the Atari Falcon and not supported it at all.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Turrican_3

Yes Commodore - as stated before - did its part to ruin the platform, but let's not pretend to picture the A1200 as a worthy successor of the A500 with tons of must-haves, shall we? (I swear I wish it ended up being so! but that's not the point)

I think the main problem is that it was too late (and that some people got 'burned' by buying A500+/A600 which didn't improve much over the A500). In early 1993 people might have waited to get an A1200 when there are games that made it worthwhile and publishers for enough people to buy the machine before making said games. But hey, at least we got Slam Tilt and Alien Breed 3D

[Turrican_3]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

If the Amiga was plagued by piracy, why would some developpers support the A1200 with no installed user base ? Why would they even make enhanced version of OCS games if it wasn't in a sort of way profitable ?

They would have done what they did to the Atari Falcon and not supported it at all.

Oh well it could have been worse, can't deny that. :-\

But back your question: I guess that happened because it was "easy" money adding colors to an already finished/released A500 game. After all, "rampant piracy" doesn't mean "no sales at all".

But improving an existing game is likely way cheaper than doing it from scratch. Again, unless my memory is utterly failing me (I'm getting old...) there weren't a lot of AGA-only games, so we're likely talking about two very different kinds of potential return of investment.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Turrican_3

Oh well it could have been worse, can't deny that. :-\

But back your question: I guess that happened because it was "easy" money adding colors to an already finished/released A500 game. After all, "rampant piracy" doesn't mean "no sales at all".

But improving an existing game is likely way cheaper than doing it from scratch. Again, unless my memory is utterly failing me (I'm getting old...) there weren't a lot of AGA-only games, so we're likely talking about two very different kinds of potential return of investment.

Well multi platform games were the norm even on the OCS Amiga, since the beginning, first with ST, C64 etc than with PC, consoles etc.
I'm not sure that there is that much major Amiga only games anyway.

AGA commercial lifespan was much shorter than OCS one. That's pure logic that there is less AGA only titles (and that's also pure logic that's first AGA games were enhanced OCS ones).

[Turrican_3]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Well multi platform games were the norm even on the OCS Amiga, since the beginning, first with ST, C64 etc than with PC, consoles etc.

Very different times though in terms of Amiga development.

As far as I understand your best case scenario was sharing code/assets with the ST (which often led to some, err, less than stellar stuff ) but 8bits were basically an almost totally different game from a developer perspective.

AGA commercial lifespan was much shorter than OCS one. That's pure logic that there is less AGA only titles

Absolutely, but my point was basically that we got even fewer than what one could reasonably expect. Installed base clearly affected this (publishers needed to take that into account) but I'm afraid they got burned by what had happened with OCS/ECS. So we're back at the piracy issue I guess.

After all it was mostly a fraction of the very same people, who could expect a sudden, explosive rise in absolute (or even relative, I'll concede that) terms of legit software sales, hence justifying a solid software support when there were already more proven, healthy markets around? In other words, I can't really blame that much publishers during that very specific time.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Turrican_3

As far as I understand your best case scenario was sharing code/assets with the ST (which often led to some, err, less than stellar stuff ) but 8bits were basically an almost totally different game from a developer perspective.

I was so shocked when I discovered that all the Bitmap Brothers games up to Chaos Engine were made on an ST and then ported to the Amiga I always thought of them as Amiga games first. It certainly was the exception until 1992 that the Amiga was the target platform and then things got 'toned down' for the ST.

[sokolovic]

My point being just, if the Amiga market was such devastated by piracy, and considering that there was consoles and PC rising, they wouldn't ever had considered to make games for the A1200 which had absolutely no user base before november 1992 and they would have just go to these so called piracy proof market.
Yet they went on the AGA market.
On the contrary, they didn't considered at all, except for Silmaris, doing any game for the Falcon. That alone shows that the Amiga game market wasn't as plagued and considered as a dead end before Commodore bankrupcy like it is generally presented on this very board.
Because if it was considered like that, then we wouldn't had any AGA games at all.
Aladdin for instance was pretty much an AAA release and it was AGA only and released in december 1994, more than six month after Commodore collapsed.
There is many reason why the Amiga died at the end. Piracy surely didn't helped at all but it wasn't the key factor.

[Megalomaniac]

The flipside to that is, if the Amiga was doing so well, why did Commodore collapse? And, why did it take over a year for anyone to buy the Amiga brand and hardware?

Primarily because Amigas (and CD32s, which actually sold well during its short life) were only selling in Europe, and by 1993 America gave us almost no Amiga games (MicroProse's UK department was still converting some of their American PC games, but that's about it, and that pretty much stopped when the UK brand got scaled down in late 1993 - just a few externally-developed things after that). Was Europe a big enough market on its own, when the Playstation on one side and Windows 95 on the other were encroaching? I'm not sure piracy can be blamed for the US decline?

Still, the A1200 did okay in its short lifespan. SlamTilt, Banshee, Aladdin, Alien Beed 3D, Gloom, Super Stardust, Subwar 2050, Worms Director's Cut [though that was a bit later], Guardian, Roadkill - not to mention lots of enhanced versions, and lots of non-AGA games which used the extra memory and quicker processor - and even more if you add a hard drive or extra memory. Compare that to what the Amiga saw in its first 3 years - even the A500's first 3 years probably weren't that impressive.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

The flipside to that is, if the Amiga was doing so well, why did Commodore collapse? And, why did it take over a year for anyone to buy the Amiga brand and hardware?

I havent said that the Amiga was doing well. Just that piracy wasn't the key reason why the system died ultimately.
Evidence shows that is was quite well supported in comparison or other system at that time, and even after Commodore collapse. Surely there was some money to grab there.
There isn't any reason why publishers would go on the newborn AGA market (and carry on at least a year after the commercial death of the machine) if the market wasn't profitable. And that could also be said for OCS Amigas. If the piracy was so strong why a big company like Acclaim choosed to enter for the first time on the Amiga market to publish MK2 ? Sales or the Megadrive and SNES were not sufficient enough to publish a game on a piracy infested dead system without any parent company ?

I agree with rest of your post that said.

Edit : just a point about US publishers, there was still Sierra, Interplay, Maxis and Electronic Arts alongside Microprose that were publishing on the Amiga up until 1994/95.
LucasArts and Activision are the only big American publishers that had an Amiga history that left the boat before 1993. Even Take 2/GameTek and Time Warner made some Amiga games.

[Megalomaniac]

Really I meant to use those questions as a lead-in to the wider "success without America means less" viewpoint, but it's true that in mid-1994 Amiga games were outselling anything else in the UK (in volume, if not total spend) and CD32 was doing the same against other CD systems, including PC CDs (at that very early stage of the market). European developers were still making great stuff, but some like Delphine and US Gold had already switched focus to the PC and consoles, even if it wasn't as big in their respective homelands it make it easier to take on the world.

Commodore's demise, and the lack of Amigas to buy for Christmas 1994 especially, definitely accelerated the decline, but sadly I think it would have happened anyway, even with an amazing value updated model available for Christmas 1994. The age of the 'home computer' as opposed to PC was coming to an end, the Amiga was the last of its kind. Piracy's biggest impact might have been limiting how high Amiga games sales reached, and perhaps accelerating the decline when it did set in.