09 November 2022, 22:13 | #241 |
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Its also worth noting that CD ROMs were viewed by the software industry as being very difficult / impossible to copy while floppy disk piracy was epidemic.
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10 November 2022, 09:04 | #242 |
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Doom maybe had a little part but I'm convinced that Commodore management was the only responsible.
Think about it : between 1985/1990 only 4 models of Amiga were released, with a certain logic (A500, A1000, A2000, A3000). Between 1991 and 1994, they released A500+, A600, A1200, A3000T, A4000/030, A4000 040, A4000T, CDTV and CD32... And at the time they were released, the olders machines weren't discontinued (except for the A1000). Not even the C64 ! They clearly had no long term plan at all for their brand. Last edited by sokolovic; 10 November 2022 at 09:10. |
10 November 2022, 15:58 | #243 |
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Ha ha Luckily the industry itself made it cheap and remarkably easy to copy cds not long after. Quite an astonishing development really.
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10 November 2022, 16:07 | #244 |
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I think my second PC in 1999 had a writable CD drive, probably rewritable but possibly WORM (write once, read many). Think they were still a custom addon rather than a standard inclusion much before that? I assume they were available for Amigas if you knew where to look?
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10 November 2022, 16:09 | #245 |
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And then they put copy protection on CDs and then we got CloneCD and then they made online DRM and then... yeah, it sure feels like all this is totally worth it
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10 November 2022, 16:15 | #246 | |
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In any case the industry had like five years before CDs started to get copied just as much as floppy-based games had before. That was more or less the expected product life of a console generation. |
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10 November 2022, 17:01 | #247 |
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Yeah I remember that time when everyone moved (every Amiga dedicated UK developpers) to the PlayStation because piracy wasn't sustainable on the Amiga and then people buying PlayStation because it was so easy to have pirated games. The piracy argument to drop the Amiga was the worst, no doubt about that. Most developpers went to the most easily piratable machine after the Amiga
(And I don't know the PC market at that time but I guess it was as easy to pirate games on this machine, maybe easier because games could'nt be non DOS as in the Amiga.) Dont know elsewhere but in Marseille, which is not exactly France , you could have pirated PSX games in shop around 1995, just by asking the shop seller. |
10 November 2022, 18:00 | #248 |
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Let's put it this way: I got my first games as backup copies on PC and they didn't have a manual protection either. Doom 2 was probably the most pirated game of 1994, but I don't think id or GT Interactive worried about it too much.
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10 November 2022, 19:00 | #249 |
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That's why you went to computer clubs. To copy.
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10 November 2022, 19:23 | #250 |
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10 Years of PC DOS Gaming Part 4: 1991
[ Show youtube player ]
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11 November 2022, 07:17 | #251 | ||
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Once you got over a half dozen or so disks a CD was cheaper to produce. PC games were were already being limited to fit on a reasonable number of floppy disks. For example Monkey Island 2 (released in 1991) had five planned scenes cut in order to fit on 6 disks (the Amiga version came on 11 disks, partly because it had to run from floppies on a 1MB machine). On the Amiga it was not quite such a boon because most Amiga owners were too miserly get a CDROM drive, and when a game came on 11 floppies would-be pirates might think twice about copying it. Nevertheless forward-thinking Amiga developers were keen on it for the same reasons. Quote:
When I got my ZX Spectrum I heard that there was a local 'Sinclair' computer club. I went along expecting to gain knowledge and share experiences with other users, to find that it was basically just a pirate software distribution network. An old guy who smoked like a train would import tape games from the UK and make copies for a fee. I didn't bother joining that club. Instead I offered my technical services to a local electronics shop and got friendly with the owner. He didn't know much about home computers so I got the job of evaluating, ordering and promoting them. I would take demo models home and invite groups of people around to play with them - strictly no piracy of course. Around 1985 another guy started a 'user group' with meetings in his garage once a month - again no piracy. Later on when the Amiga became popular an Amiga club was formed which was active for many years. Piracy was strictly forbidden there too. We were (mostly) adults who knew what damage it would do to our relationships with local retailers and their willingness to stock Amiga products. |
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11 November 2022, 07:51 | #252 | |||
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Quote:
Quote:
Piracy: The kiss of Death Quote:
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11 November 2022, 07:54 | #253 |
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Piracy will always be an issue, but selling crap games at high cost won't help. And it even happened with Amiga: too much trash selled as gold...
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11 November 2022, 08:58 | #254 |
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offtopic, just to share something different than just black or white
personally, i have always tried to grab the originals of all the games that i 'presumed' were perfect for my tastes, back in the day; sadly here in South Italy the spreading of the Amiga games was not great at all, with the lack of many big titles; here, 40KM to reach the lone computer & software shop, and most of the time i needed to take more than the third choice; ok, i got something also by mail, but with normally a month of waiting each time at least here, it was not easy at the time |
11 November 2022, 09:10 | #255 | |
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Edit: Here's an article from 2010 about piracy on PC https://www.destructoid.com/epic-bla...-the-pc-scene/ The funny/interesting bit about that article is this: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/b...ic-games-store Last edited by TCD; 11 November 2022 at 09:43. |
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11 November 2022, 09:57 | #256 | |
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Exactly. I'm not convinced that piracy killed the Amiga, but competition of other platforms in terms of distribution, quality and games library.
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Pirating on PC was EXACTLY the same. No less, not a little. Still, you always had fresh and new quality releases on the PC. Why is that ? The example above of Peter Molyneux: Populous and Syndicate were also pirated on the PC. That didn't stop Bullfrog producing more games on the PC, though. It was feasible to keep on developing for the PC. Why not for the Amiga ? People started to shift to other platforms. Other platforms (especially PC in comparison to Amiga) opened them more possibilities and more customers. Most Amigas were bought for gaming. But PCs were bought for work AND gaming. Which spread it widely in households. There the software companies focused their money+energy. Again, on the PC there was the SAME pirating going on. But still there were more potential buyers, and just increasing. Even if no one would've pirated games on the Amiga, you would still have earned more money on the PC including pirating. Last edited by Konrad; 11 November 2022 at 10:02. |
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11 November 2022, 10:15 | #257 |
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Software houses will forever and ever claim that software pirates are the cause of all problems. It's to begin with a really nice way to not have to take any responsibility themselves.
I think that the reality is more that the piracy triggered a minor exodus. But for every software house that called it quits a new one was already in the starting blocks to replace them. Unfortunately the Amiga platform was already on its last legs, so those starters didn't have a whole lot of output. |
11 November 2022, 10:33 | #258 | |
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11 November 2022, 10:34 | #259 |
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As late as mid-1994 Amiga games were the biggest seller in the UK, outselling PC CD games, and outselling Megadrive or SNES in quantity though not in value, despite there supposedly being 9 pirate copies for every original game by then. The problem was that Amiga games only sold in parts of Europe (and maybe Australia and New Zealand), whereas PC games dominated the US market (more people than the whole of the EU at that time) and consoles had Japan too. Amiga original games could potentially become console hits if they were good enough, but a game designed around the Amiga had little hope of breaking through on the PC because they were used to bigger games designed around hard drives. I think the Settlers did well on the PC, and Worms, but by 1993 they were rarities.
Piracy definitely hurt, but was it really the biggest cause? Many Amiga gamers at that time weren't old enough to have jobs, maybe paper rounds but nothing else. People who paid £1 a disk for a pirated game would not have magically been able to spend 10 times as much as that on the originals of all those games if pirated copies suddenly stopped existing. That said, I generally bought originals, but not usually as soon as they came out, I'd get them a year later for half the price via sales or mail order or sometimes on budget so it could be done. Last edited by Megalomaniac; 31 May 2023 at 23:25. |
11 November 2022, 10:38 | #260 |
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Indeed, the larger market gave the PC market more immunity to piracy. The small size of the Amiga market meant that the same proportion of piracy wasn't sustainable. While it wasn't the single factor involved, it drove software houses away quicker than they might otherwise have done. 80% piracy in a market of 100,000 sales is very different to 80% piracy in a market of 1,000,000 sales.
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